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" Understanding the need for religion is a far superior goal to bashing it. "

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" Many economists are great believers in the idea that everything in nature is competitive and that we should set up a society which is competitive to reflect that. Anyone who cannot keep up, well, too bad. "

" I think we need to start thinking about grounding our moral systems in our biology. "

" The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma. "

" Closeness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated. "

" I think the sense of fairness in humans is very strongly developed, and that's why we react so strongly to all the bonuses received by Wall Street executives. We want to know why they deserve these benefits. "

" We need to separate the process of evolution - which is, indeed, a self-serving process - and the actual motivations of animals. "

" Future benefits rarely figure in the minds of animals. "

" It is hard to get animals which normally pay little attention to each other to do things together. One can teach dolphins to jump simultaneously out of the water precisely because they show similar behavior spontaneously, but try to make two domestic cats jump together and you will fail. "

" Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners. "

" Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These 'mini-brains' are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food. "

" The whole reason people fill their homes with furry carnivores and not with, say, iguanas and turtles, is because mammals offer something no reptile ever will. They give affection, they want affection, and respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs. "

" The role of inequity in society is grossly underestimated. Inequity is not good for your health, basically. "

" You should know as much as you can about the human species if you have a hand in designing human society. "

" There are beautiful examples of art done by chimpanzees in human care. "

" There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves. "

" Unlike the primate hand, the elephant's grasping organ is also its nose. Elephants use their trunks not only to reach food but also to sniff and touch it. With their unparalleled sense of smell, the animals know exactly what they are going for. Vision is secondary. "

" Exclusive homosexuality is not very common in nature. "

" Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it. "

" A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn't waste time with gestures but just goes ahead and attacks. "

" Bonobo studies started in the '70s and came to fruition in the '80s. Then in the '90s, all of a sudden, boom, they ended because of the warfare in the Congo. It was really bad for the bonobo and ironic that people with their warfare were preventing us from studying the hippies of the primate world. "

" Female bonobos form a strong sisterhood. They rule through female solidarity. "

" The fact that the apes exist and that we can study them is extremely important and makes us reflect on ourselves and our human nature. In that sense alone, you need to protect the apes. "

" The sturdiest pillars of human morality are compassion and a sense of justice. "

" It is well known that apes in the wild offer spontaneous assistance to each other, defending against leopards, say, or consoling distressed companions with tender embraces. "

" After World War II it was decided that, in order to prevent the Germans and the French from having another war, it would be better to tie them together into one economic pact so they would invest in each other and have mutual stakes. Until now, that has worked to prevent warfare between the two. "

" There's a long tradition in Western thought that humans are not shackled by biology, whereas animals are pure instinct machines. "

" The term 'alpha female' originated in my field of animal behavior, but has acquired new meaning. It refers to women who are in charge, for example, by flirting and dating on their own terms. It is also used maliciously for a loud-mouthed, controlling woman who has no patience with deviating opinions. "

" Chimpanzees have very strong preferences and aversions that are completely personality-linked. The people who are unsuccessful in working with chimpanzees are those who take this personally. "

" In Africa, we have the bush meat trade, which means that, on a very large scale, animals are being killed in the forests and sold in the cities as a luxury food. "

" Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities. "