Quotes About Primate

Most primates mark their territories with excretions; domesticated primates mark their territories with ink excretions on paper (treaties, land titles, etc.). From the biological perspective, every national border in Europe, for instance, marks a place where two rival gangs of domesticated primates fought until exhausted and then left a territorial mark.

Domesticated primates battle not only over physical territories but over these mental or neurosemantic territories: York versus Lancaster becomes the Red Rose versus the White. Communism versus Free

And any domesticated primate alpha male, however cruel or crooked, can rally the primate tribe behind him by howling that a rival alpha male is about to lead his gang in an attack on this habitat. These two mammalian reflexes are known, respectively, as Religion and Patriotism. They work for domesticated primates, as for the wild primates, because they are Evolutionary Relative Successes. (So far.)

Pornographic novels were novels about the things primates enjoy most, namely sexual acrobatics. They were taught to feel ashamed of these natural primate impulses so that they would be guilty-furtive-submissive types and easy for the alpha males to manipulate. Those caught reading such novels were called no-good shits, of course.

It appears that some domesticated primates, over the aeons, have not precisely evolved but have learned how to criticize and examine their own neurological programs. Members of this group cannot be mechanically predicted. They exhibit, at times at least, what looks like growth or creativity, although it is possible for Fundamentalist Materialists to insist that this "is really random behavior or behavior whose determinants had not yet been understood.

Leaving aside these experiences or hallucinations of creativity and growth or self-criticism and self-overcoming — we shall return to them — it appears that most of what I have been calling Idolatry and Fundamentalism can be biologically described as normal primate behavior — mechanical imprinting and conditioning combined with normal territorial pugnacity.

I also feel strongly, as a libertarian philosopher, that burning Sheldrake's book is not the best way to seek an answer to such questions; and as a psychologist, I think I detect the familiar odor of primate panic behavior in the suggestion that it should be burned.

Mammalian sociobiology, rooted in the antique neural circuits of the old brain, contains many factors opposing the evolution of domesticated primates into true freedom and objective intelligence.

green monkey, for example, has been observed calling 'Careful! A lion!' when there was no lion around. This alarm conveniently frightened away a fellow monkey who had just found a banana, leaving the liar all alone to steal the prize for itself.

Love isn't a steadfast dog at all; love is more like a pygmy mouse lemur. Yes, that's exactly what love is: a tiny, jittery primate with eyes that are permanently peeled open in fear. For those of you who cannot quite picture a pygmy mouse lemur, imagine a miniature Don Knotts or Steve Buscemi wearing a fur coat.

As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past, those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce.

So what does correlate with brain size? The answer, Dunbar argues, is group size. If you look at any species of primate-at every variety of monkey and ape-the larger their neocortex is, the larger the average size of the groups they live with.

To be sure, ASPM isn't the gene responsible for building big brains - there's no such single gene. But it's critical to the process, and the primate line has almost certainly benefited from distinct changes in ASPM.

Arboreal, a fine word. Our arboreal ancestors, Crake used to say. Used to shit on their enemies from above while perched in trees. All planes and rockets and bombs are simply elaborations on that primate instinct.

Two of the behaviors that set early humans apart were the systematic sharing of food and altruistic group defense. Other primates did very little of either but, increasingly, hominids did, and those behaviors helped set them on an evolutionary path that produced the modern world.

You know, there are just some things you never expect to face even on this job. A flying primate that shoots fire out its nose is one of them.

Impatience and cutting corners: it's the primate way. It got us down out of the trees and up to the top of the evolutionary heap as a species, which is a lot more like a slippery, mud-slick game of King of the Hill with stabbing encouraged than any kind of tidy Victorian great chain of being or ladder of creation.

If we are here for any good purpose at all (other than collating texts, running rivers, and learning the stars), I suppose it is to entertain the rest of nature. A gang of sexy primate clowns. All the little critters creep in close to listen when the human beings are in a good mood and willing to play some tunes.

Other primate penises are pencil-thin, whereas the erect human penis averages over one inch in diameter. Also, most other primates have a penis bone called the baculum, and achieve erections mostly through muscular control, like a winch raising a rigid strut. The penis bone is typical of most mammals. By contrast, the male human relies on an unusual system of vasocongestion. The penis fills with blood before copulation, like a blimp inflating before flight.

Single mothers may have been the norm during most of human evolution, as they were during the previous 50 million years of primate evolution.

We humans have a dual nature—we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.93 If you take that claim metaphorically, then the groupish and hivish things that people do will make a lot more sense. It's almost as though there's a switch in our heads that activates our hivish potential when conditions are just right.

human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary

Once you see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole new perspective on morality, politics, and religion.

If genetic evolution was able to fine-tune our bones, teeth, skin, and metabolism in just a few thousand years as our diets and climates changed, how could genetic evolution not have tinkered with our brains and behaviors as our social environments underwent the most radical transformation in primate history?