Thomas Huxley Quotes

Chimpanzees, more than any other living creature, have helped us to understand that there is no sharp line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. It's a very blurry line, and it's getting more blurry all the time.

The difference between humans and Neanderthals is .004 percent of gene code. That's how big the difference is, one species to another.

Millions of years ago, our brains became wired to remember about 150 people as 'close friends.'

Amongst the minds of animals that of man leads, not as a demigod from another planet, but as a king from the same race.

The fact that we can't easily foresee clues that would betray an intelligence a million millennia farther down the road suggests that we're like ants trying to discover humans. Ask yourself: Would ants ever recognize houses, cars, or fire hydrants as the work of advanced biology?

The proposition that humans have mental characteristics wholly absent in non-humans is inconsistent with the theory of evolution.

Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.

How like us is that filthy beast the ape.

I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

Today, there are over 7,000 languages spoken throughout the world. They may sound different, but in every case, they're drawing on the same regions of the brain. If you had told me that stone-tool-making had something to do with our ability to speak, I would have said you've got rocks in your head, but the latest studies indicate that once Homo erectus got creative with stone, our brains were on the way to inventing the most powerful tool of all: language.

Remember that feelings or emotions emanate from the more ancient, less evolved, lower part of the human brain, while thoughts are a product of our highly evolved, uniquely human, outer part of the brain.

History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.

[E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry the supposed atheoretical particularism of their anthropological colleagues and argue that all would be well if only the students of humanity regarded their subject as yet another animal and therefore yielded explanatory control to evolutionary biologists.

Who are we? That is the big question. And essentially we are just an upright-walking, big-brained, super-intelligent ape.

It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today.

I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so-called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

Basically we are chimpanzees with about two percent more intelligence and a little less hair.

Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.

I consider the differences between man and animals in propensities, feelings, and intellectual faculties, to be the result of the same cause as that which we assign for the variations in other functions, viz. difference of organization; and that the superiority of man in rational endowments is not greater than the more exquisite, complicated, and perfectly developed structure of his brain, and particularly of his ample cerebral hemispheres, to which the rest of the animal kingdom offers no parallel, nor even any near approximation, is sufficient to account for.

The young of human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency with the young of many of the lower animals, that even the powers needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with respect to all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral achievements of humanity!

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties...The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

We are less justified in saying that the thinking life of humanity is a miraculous perfectioning of animal and physical life than that it is an imperfection in the organization of spiritual life as rudimentary as the communal existence of protozoa in colonies.

One can truly say that the irresistible progress of natural science since the time of Galileo has made its first halt before the study of the higher parts of the brain, the organ of the most complicated relations of the animal to the external world. And it seems, and not without reason, that now is the really critical moment for natural science; for the brain, in its highest complexity-the human brain-which created and creates natural science, itself becomes the object of this science.

There isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. All the time, we find animals doing things that, in our arrogance, we thought were just human.