Quotes About Primates

brachiating hominids.

No existing form of anthropoid ape is even remotely related to the stock which has given rise to man.

The sclera—the white of the eye—affects attraction. No other primates have white scleras. Their scleras are dark, hiding their direction of gaze from predators, and from members of their own species—for whom a stare can be a threat.40 The white sclera of the human eye advertises gaze direction, making it a tool for social communication. It also advertises emotion and health.

These are, in sum, the two great uniquenesses of human life—regularized food-sharing and cooperation with others—and they are unknown among the subhuman primates.

or in the same time frame. The trouble is we expect the emote part of emotion. Humans are social primates, and our experiences have to be externalized to be acknowledged by others.

Chimps cannot tell us anything about peaceful relations, because chimps have only different degrees of hostility between communities. Whereas bonobos do tell us something; they tell us about the possibility of having peaceful relationships.

Darwin wasn't just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes - he didn't go far enough. We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament.

The quantity and quality of consciousness, one may say, have always been growing throughout geological times. In this respect man, in whom nervous organisation and therefore psychological powers have attained an undisputed maximum, may be considered, scientifically, as a natural centre of evolution of the primates.

it seems profoundly unlikely that our universe has been designed to reward individual primates for killing one another while believing in the divine origin of a specific book.

Primates feel pure, flat immobility as boredom. But dogs feel it as peace.

I'm obsessed with insects, particularly insect flight. I think the evolution of insect flight is perhaps one of the most important events in the history of life. Without insects, there'd be no flowering plants. Without flowering plants, there would be no clever, fruit-eating primates giving TED Talks.

Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.

Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.

Most primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are very few instances of lone primates surviving in the wild.

Both are profound acts of selflessness that distinguish us from all other mammals, including the higher primates that we are so closely related to.

I've never met anyone who had a monkey for a friend before. (Maggie) I don't know. I think those two guys you were with would qualify as primates, but then, that's an insult to the primate and I don't want Marvin to get pissed at me. He has higher sensibilities, you know? (Wren)

Earth could have learned a long time ago that securing initial and ongoing consent, rather than attempting to assert hierarchy, is key to a nonconfrontational relationship. Because we're basically primates, we had to wait for a bunch of aliens to come teach us.

Earth could have learned a long time ago that securing initial and ongoing consent, rather than attempting to assert hierarchy, is key to a nonconfrontational relationship. Because we're basically primates, we had to wait for a bunch of aliens to come teach us. We'd at least, by then, developed the tech to fix our brains so we could accept emotionally what logic should have showed us.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

Among primates, the intensity of sperm competition correlates much more strongly with testicle size than with penis size.

We fill the woods with invasive primates camouflaged to look like piles of leaves who sneak around, sprinkling estrus doe urine and manipulating gadgets that sound like antlers clashing.

I think we were colonized by aliens 250,000 years ago, and they genetically altered our DNA to be primates into homo erectus and humans. I'm very interested in how we evolved so suddenly, which obviously ties in with the alien thing.

Chickens have a twenty-minute memory. We primates cope through booze and denial. Dial up more of that denial part, you'll last longer.

Q: Why do gorillas have big nostrils? A: Because they have big fingers.