"The chimpanzee and the human share about 99.5 per cent 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. To an evolutionist this cannot be so. There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another. Chimp and human, lizard and fungus, we have all evolved over some three billion years by a process known as natural selection."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Robert Trivers, Foreword to the first edition of The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Speciesism
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Robert Trivers
Robert L. Trivers (February 19, 1943 – March 12, 2026) was an American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist, most noted for proposing the theories of reciprocal altruism (1971), parental investment (1972), and parent-offspring conflict (1974).
3 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Robert Trivers →
Related Quotes
"People are often unconscious of some of the mechanisms that naturally occur in them in a biased way. For example, if …"
"Darwinian social theory gives us a glimpse of an underlying symmetry and logic in social relationships which, when mo…"
"Whether or not the artistic quality of the bullfight outweighs the moral question of the animals’ suffering is someth…"
"There is an image I will never lose, much as I wish I could. It is of a man standing with half his face held in his r…"
"The crowd are on their feet, stamping and cheering, but El Cid just stands and stares at the bull in grave silence, h…"
"What you are interested in is the art whereby a man using no tricks reduces a raging bull to his dimensions, and this…"
"At the first bullfight I ever went to I expected to be horrified and perhaps sickened by what I had been told would h…"
"Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the p…"
"The Roman public's thirst for blood and pleasure in witnessing pain seems to have been unquenchable and without limit…"
"He was an admirer of the bullfight, and had once drawn my attention to the fact that only cricket and bullfighting ha…"