Primate Cognition 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.

I'm a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, and I'm kind of half-neurobiologist, half-primatologist.

The mass are animal, in pupilage, and near chimpanzee.

I don't even think of chimps as animals. I think of them as beings.

Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

I actually liked Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I remember just watching it and being pleasantly surprised with that movie. I didn't think it would be as good as it was, so I love that movie.

Chimps don't have language. Humans actively instruct others about how things should be done. Chimpanzees probably pick up cultural traditions by observation.

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

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

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