Chimpanzee Intelligence Quotes

The difference between a chimpanzee and a human brain is that the brain of a chimpanzee is largely unfurnished. Whereas we fill our brains with memes. We download hundreds of thousands of memes, and that's where we get our power from. Your computer or your phone isn't a very powerful device until you download some apps to it. Those are like memes.

Chimpanzees are incredibly intelligent. They can learn more than 400 signs of American Sign Language. They have memories for spatial distribution, like numbers on a TV screen, way better than ours. You come onto the emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and despair - all the things for which I was accused of being anthropomorphic when I ascribed them to chimpanzees.

When you meet chimps you meet individual personalities. When a baby chimp looks at you it's just like a human baby. We have a responsibility to them.

I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker - yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

It is not only visitors to the zoo who are fascinated but uneasy in the presence of chimpanzees; the same is true of scientists. The more they learn about these great apes, the deeper our identity crisis seems to become. The resemblance between humans and chimpanzees is not only external. If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee’s eyes, an intelligent, self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?

I was even accused of teaching the chimps how to fish for termites which I mean that would have been such a brilliant coup.

People say maybe we have a soul and chimpanzees don't. I feel that it's quite possible that if we have souls, chimpanzees have souls as well.

When it was time to meet a chimpanzee, I got very, very anxious because they have the strength of ten men, so I hear.

The seed for my novel 'Half Brother' was planted in my mind over twenty years ago, but didn't germinate until late 2007 when I came across the obituary for Washoe, an extraordinary chimpanzee who had learned over 250 words of American Sign Language.

When it comes to social interaction, the chimpanzees appear to be just as intelligent as we are.

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.