Species Comparison Quotes

We're the only species who follow unstable leaders. This is true - it has little to do with America - around the world, pack leaders are unstable. Animals don't follow that.

The male has more teeth than the female in mankind, and sheep and goats, and swine. This has not been observed in other animals. Those persons which have the greatest number of teeth are the longest lived; those which have them widely separated, smaller, and more scattered, are generally more short lived.

I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so-called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

There are several ways we can know what a dog, a bird or, indeed, any other organism can see, for example either by looking at the structure of the eye and comparing it with other species, or by behavioural tests.

Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above or below him are serious.

We have the same genetic code for all living creatures. We have a large number of genes that are manifestly the same, but with detail differences - they look like different drafts of the same book. In extreme cases, like a human and a beetroot, it's like the difference between Matthew and Luke's Gospel - clearly they tell the same story, but with different words. Whereas with a human and a chimp, it's like two different printings of Matthew, with a few typos in one.

In fact, humans have less variation genetically than chimpanzees.

I do not see why men sheould be so proud insects have the more ancient lineage according to the scientists insects were insects when man was only a burbling whatisit.

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the eleventh story of a building, a man is broken, a horse splashes.

They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?

There isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. All the time, we find animals doing things that, in our arrogance, we thought were just human.

As our closest relatives, they (chimpanzees) tell us special things about what it means to be a primate and, ultimately, what it means to be a human at the DNA level.

Zoologists have reckoned there are up to at least 750 species of animal that have been observed exhibiting same-sex behaviour, or gender role transformation (which is very common in a wide range of fauna). There is only one species on earth, however, which has exhibited homophobia or transphobia. And that is the species homo sapiens sapiens. Us. So let's not allow the foolish, ignorant or bigoted ever to use words like "natural."

Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans.

The Librarian considered matters for a while. So…a dwarf and a troll. He preferred both species to humans. For one thing, neither of them were great readers. The Librarian was, of course, very much in favor of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. He liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in the Librarian’s opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature intended them to be.

I think it indisputable that the distance between the intellectual faculties of different men is greater than that between the same faculties in some men and some other animals.

Homosexuality is found in over 450 species. Homophobia is found in only 1. Which one seems unnatural now?

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.

The whale is endangered, while the ant continues to do just fine.

PIG, n. An animal ("Porcus omnivorus") closely allied to the human race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is inferior in scope, for it sticks at pig.

Once we ask why it should be that all human beings - including infants, the intellectually disabled, criminal psychopaths, Hitler, Stalin, and the rest - have some kind of dignity or worth that no elephant, pig, or chimpanzee can ever achieve, we see that this question is as difficult to answer as our original request for some relevant fact that justifies the inequality of humans and other animals.

We observe closely related species in sympatry and infer how they evolved from a common ancestor.

Humans are more dependent on learning for survival than other species,We have no instincts that automatically find us food and shelter !

...the program of scientific experimentation that leads you to conclude that animals are imbeciles is profoundly anthropocentric. It values being able to find your way out of a sterile maze, ignoring the fact that if the researcher who designed the maze were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he or she would be dead of starvation in a week...If I as a human being were told that the standards by which animals are being measured in these experiments are human standards, I would be insulted.