Quotes About Primates

Se considera que el mandril de África central es el más vistoso de todos los primates -dijo-. Pero yo creo que la aprendiz de geisha es tal vez el más vistoso de todos los primates.

People, as curious primates, dote on concrete objects that can be seen and fondled. God dwells among the details, not in the realm of pure generality. We must tackle and grasp the larger, encompassing themes of our universe, but we make our best approach through small curiosities that rivet our attention - all those pretty pebbles on the shoreline of knowledge. For the ocean of truth washes over the pebbles with every wave, and they rattle and clink with the most wondrous din.

human cognition veered away from that of other primates when our ancestors developed shared intentionality

This is where the whole ape-descended thing reveals its worth, I thought madly. Sucks to be you, quadruped. Opposable thumbs - don't leave home without them.

I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

It is the human condition to ask questions like Anne's last night and to receive no plain answers, he said. Perhaps this is because we can't understand the answers, because we are incapable of knowing God's ways and God's thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable.

To eat liver, knowing that you, too, have a liver, brushes up against the cannibalism taboo. The closer we are to a species, emotionally or phylogenetically, the more potent our horror at the prospect of tucking in, the more butchery feels like murder. Pets and primates, wrote Mead, come under the category "unthinkable to eat." The same cultures that eat monkey meat have traditionally drawn the line at apes.

Far from being choosy, female primates seemed to be initiators of much promiscuity. Hrdy began to suggest that there was something wrong with the theory rather than the females.

As a result, whereas other primates have guts weighing four times their brains, the human brain weighs more than the human intestine. Cooking enabled hominids to trade gut size for brain size. Erectus

The story of a briefly abundant hairless primate originating in Africa is but a footnote in the history of life, but in the history of the hairless primate it is central.

We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from "I think I understand" to "I understand," we need to see the sights and feel the motions.

Don't fall in love with a bonobo, because it's gonna die.

In the last chapter, I discussed how other animals might have domain-specific forms of consciousness, and in the case of nonhuman primates, domain-independent forms of nonverbal consciousness, but how only humans have verbal working memory, and thus language-based consciousness and the mental frills that language makes possible.

Primates will continue to play social games without the least insight into what is killing them.

We do some experiments in humans, some in mice, and there are some questions that can only be answered in nonhuman primates. It's true that you can't immediately say that those experiments will translate into human health, but nevertheless, it is obvious that having an understanding of human memory is going to be important for human health.

Así comenzó todo: unos simios corrientes asomándose sobre la hierba.

For the first 99.99999 per cent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees.

There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors.

So, don't believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also to our closest relatives, the primates.

Emotions evolved, in short, for their capacity to induce adaptive reactions to danger, competition, mating opportunities, and so on. Emotions are action-prone. Our species shares many emotions with the other primates because we rely on approximately the same behavioral repertoire.

At the time, science had declared humans unique, since we were so much better at identifying faces than any other primate. No one seemed bothered by the fact that other primates had been tested mostly on human faces rather than those of their own kind.

If people laugh at primates at the zoo, they do so, I suspect, precisely because they're unsettled by the mirror held up to them.

In a world divided by chimpophiles and bonobophiles, we all had a good laugh when Stephen peeled his banana. (62)

Harry Harlow, a well-known American primatologist, was an early critic of the hunger reduction model. He argued that intelligent animals learn mostly through curiosity and free exploration, both of which are likely killed by a narrow fixation on food. He poked fun at the Skinner box, seeing it as a splendid instrument to demonstrate the effectiveness of food rewards but not to study complex behavior.