Zoologist Quotes
I am a zoologist and the naked ape is an animal. He is therefore fair game for my pen and I refuse to avoid him any longer simply because some of his behaviour patterns are rather complex and impressive. My excuse is that, in becoming so erudite, Homo sapiens has remained a naked ape nevertheless; in acquiring lofty new motives, he has lost none of the early old ones. This is frequently a cause of some embarrassment to him, but his old impulses have been with him for millions of years, his new ones only a few thousand at the most - and there is no hope of quickly shrugging off the accumulated genetic legacy of his whole evolutionary past. He would be a far less worried and more fulfilled animal if only he would face up to this fact. Perhaps this is where the zoologist can help.
Desmond Morris
The materialist theory of knowledge amounts, then, to this statement, that the human organ of cognition radiates no metaphysical light, but is a piece of Nature which pictures other pieces of Nature whose essence is explained when we describe it and bring it in connection with the whole Universe as the one Reality and the real Unity. Such a description demands from the epistemologist or philosopher that he should treat his subject in the same precise way as the animal world is treated by the zoologist. Should I be reproached with not following this precept immediately, I would point to Rome which, too, was not built in one day.
Joseph Dietzgen
Imagine that a zoologist from Mars was sent to Earth to study elephants, and that it had never seen one before. Its initial observation upon seeing a herd of elephants for the first time would presumably not be: "Wow! On average, the males are somewhat larger than the females!” It would be: "Wow! Those are large animals!” A follow-up observation would be the average sex difference in size. However, this would be a qualification to the initial observation - a peripheral rather than a central claim about the morphology of elephants. If, in its subsequent report, the Martian zoologist began by highlighting the sex difference and barely mentioned that elephants are, first and foremost, large animals, we should not be surprised if other Martians got the wrong idea.
Steve Stewart-Williams
If the resident zoologist of Galaxy X had visited the earth 5 million years ago while making his inventory of inhabited planets in the universe, he would surely have corrected his earlier report that apes showed more promise than Old World monkeys and noted that monkeys had overcome an original disadvantage to gain domination among primates.
Stephen Jay Gould
