Primate Intelligence Quotes

Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language - sign language - and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.

How like us is that filthy beast the ape.

Chimps are far too much human to be my favorite animal.

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

I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don't have what we call intelligence, and they're surviving just fine.

It's as if we're higher apes who had a language faculty inserted.

That penetrating gaze, that intelligence; it's hard not to be anthropomorphic when you're looking at a great ape - at any primate - but especially with gorillas. They're just so magnificent.

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

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.

When you think of intelligence, don't think of a college professor; think of human beings as opposed to chimpanzees. If you don't have human intelligence, you're not even in the game.

...chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans are thinking, self-aware beings, capable of planning ahead, who form lasting social bonds with others and have a rich social and emotional life. The great apes are therefore an ideal case for showing the arbitrariness of the species boundary. If we think that all human beings, irrespective of age or mental capacity, have some basic rights, how can we deny that the great apes, who surpass some humans in their capacities, also have these rights?

We are the naked monkey that went to the moon. People seem to forget that.

One of the things we found out as we filmed with people who dealt with chimps, and with all animals, and it's really incredible, is their levels of intelligence that we don't recognize right away.

ASTONISHING, said Death. REALLY ASTONISHING. LET ME PUT FORWARD ANOTHER SUGGESTION: THAT YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS.

I think we give human beings too much credit. We're primates, you know.

He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.

No distinction in kind rather than degree between ourselves and the chimps? No distinction? Seriously, folks? Here is a simple operational test: the chimpanzees invariably are the one behind the bars of their cages.

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.

I have shown that Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees.

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.

As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent, to brains little lower than that of Man.

Certain gorillas are more evolved than certain human beings I know.

I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out.

If you're a gazelle, you don't have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression.