“We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes — the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans.”

— Richard Dawkins , book A Devil's Chaplain

"Gaps in the Mind"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
Source: A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love

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Richard Dawkins 322

English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author 1941

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“The big toe is the most human part of the human body, in the sense that no other element of this body is as differentiated from the corresponding element of the anthropoid ape (chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan or gibbon).”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939

“There has been little morphological evidence offered since Darwin in support of the relatedness of humans and one or both of the African apes, but that, when the relationships among the extant humanoids are investigated cladistically in an evaluation of more than 200 morphological features, there are well over twice as many morphological synapomorphies in support of uniting humans with the orang-utan as with the African ape clad and very few in support of uniting the chimpanzee more closely with humans than with the gorilla.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

Orang-utan Biology (1988)

“Regarded anatomically, the resemblances between the foot of Man and the foot of the Gorilla are far more striking and important than the differences. …be the differences between the hand and foot of Man and those of the Gorilla what they may—the differences between those of the Gorilla and those of the lower Apes are much greater.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 110

“Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.”

Jared Diamond book The Third Chimpanzee

The Third Chimpanzee (1991)
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991)

“Molecular evidence suggests that our common ancestor with chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between five and seven million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards … in your left hand you hold the right hand of your mother. In turn she holds the hand of her mother, your grandmother. Your grandmother holds her mother's hand, and so on … How far do we have to go until we reach our common ancestor with the chimpanzees? It is a surprisingly short way. Allowing one yard per person, we arrive at the ancestor we share with chimpanzees in under 300 miles.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Gaps in the Mind"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

“Whatever part of the animal fabric—whatever series of muscles, whatever viscera might be selected for comparison—the result would be the same—the lower Apes and the Gorilla would differ more than the Gorilla and the Man.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 101

“Whether we take these characters then, or such minor ones as those which are derivable from the proportional length of the spines in the cervical vertebrae, and the like, there is no doubt whatsoever as to the marked difference between Man and the Gorilla; but there is as little, that equally marked differences, of the very same order, obtain between the Gorilla and the lower apes.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 92

“Well, in some ways we’re not successful at all. We’re destroying our home. That’s not a bit successful. Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest, living fantastic lives, never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. I would say that they have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment.”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

In response to: "If chimps are so much like us, why are they endangered while humans dominate the globe?" Discover Magazine interview with Virginia Morell (28 March 2007)

“These examples… show that, in whatever proportion of its limbs the Gorilla differs from Man, the other Apes depart still more widely from the Gorilla and that, consequently, such differences of proportion can have no ordinal value.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 89

“The missing link between an ape and a human are we.”

Rolf Arnkil (1923–1964)

Original: (fi) Puuttuva rengas ihmisen ja apinan välillä olemme me.

Suuri Sitaattisanakirja. Toimittanut Jarkko Laine. Helsinki: Otava, 1989. ISBN 951-1-10961-8

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Richard Dawkins 322

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