I don't think I'm a celebrity. A chimpanzee could have done what I did.
The suffix 'naut' comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests 'a sailor in space. ' Chimponaut suggests 'a chimpanzee in sailor pants'.
Some folks seem to have descended from the chimpanzee much later than others.
One cannot watch chimpanzee infants for long without realizing that they have the same emotional need for affection and reassurance as human children.
The chimpanzee and the human share about 99. 5 percent of their evolutionary history, yet most human thinkers regard the chimp as a malformed, irrelevant oddity, while seeing themselves as stepping stones to the Almighty.
I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later—or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!
With regard to the alternatives, we already have them. The cellular and genetic lines of research in humans are the most promising. AIDS is caused by a virus, so it makes sense to study the virus, not chimpanzees. We have learned virtually nothing about AIDS from the chimpanzee. Every major advance in AIDS research. . . has come from human studies.
I don't like explosions. I don't mind progress. But digital photography has made every man, woman, child and chimpanzee a photographer of sorts and consequently has numbed down the general quality of photographs.
The mass are animal, in pupilage, and near chimpanzee.
I’ll give you a theory: Man’s closest relative is not the chimpanzee, as the TV people believe, but is, in fact, the dog.
I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms that we can't conceive. And there could, of course, be forms of intelligence beyond human capacity-beyond as much as we are beyond a chimpanzee.
Certainly the first true humans were unique by virtue of their large brains. It was because the human brain is so large when compared with that of a chimpanzee that paleontologists for years hunted for a half-ape, half-human skeleton that would provide a fossil link between the human and the ape.
Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write this book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom. . . Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce's imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.
