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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Empathy probably started out as a mechanism to improve maternal care. Mammalian mothers who were attentive to their young's needs were more likely to rear successful offspring. "

" There has been so much underestimating of animal cognition that to perhaps overestimate it, as I probably do, is probably a healthy reaction. "

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

" One thing bothered me as a student. In the 1960s, human behavior was totally off limits for the biologist. There was animal behavior, then there was a long time nothing, after which came human behavior as a totally separate category best left to a different group of scientists. "

" Exclusive homosexuality is not very common in nature. "

" Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies. "

" People want to work with somebody who feels shame, who worries about the perceptions of others. Dishonesty is something we don't like in others. "

" Deep down, creationists realize they will never win factual arguments with science. This is why they have construed their own science-like universe, known as Intelligent Design, and eagerly jump on every tidbit of information that seems to go their way. "

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

" 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. "

" Our brains have been designed to blur the line between self and other. It is an ancient neural circuitry that marks every mammal, from mouse to elephant. "

" 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. "

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

" If you look at national economies today, for example, the American economy, the European economy, the Indians, the Chinese, we're all tied together. If one of them sinks, the rest are going to sink with them and if one floats, the rest are lifted up. I find that very interesting. "

" If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation. "

" Most exotic animals are not particularly interested in people, which makes it hard to provoke them. Human-rearing gets them used to and sometimes imprinted on humans, which makes them potentially dangerous. "

" War is evitable if conditions are such that the costs of making war are higher than the benefits. "

" 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. "

" Science is not inherently good. "

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

" 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. "

" Male chimpanzees have an extraordinarily strong drive for dominance. They're constantly jockeying for position. "

" The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species. "

" Religions have a strong binding function and a cohesive element. They emphasize the primacy of the community as opposed to the individual, and they also help set one community apart from another that doesn't share their beliefs. "

" Personally, I think it is possible to build a society that is moral on a nonreligious basis, but the jury is still out on that. "

" The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be. "