15 Quotes by Jennifer Ackerman

A narrow-minded man can lead one to devalue others, and in the end, to desperately dangerous hates of outsiders, ranging in expression from discrimination against minorities to world conflagrations,' Tolman wrote. The solution? Create broader cognitive maps in the mind that encompass bigger geographical boundaries and a wider social scope, embracing those we might consider others, and in this way encourage empathy and understanding.

I love this idea, that nature dreamed up the same kind of sleep in both humans and birds, fostering the growth of big brains in creatures so far apart on life’s tree.

Every forest has its own character, its own whispered rumors and smells.

It seemed to Whish that any potential crack was worth trying to open,” wrote the scientists. “Even a person’s face was not sacrosanct. He would fly to the face and clutch hole on the nose arch. He would then hang upside down and peer into the nostrils.

We dig up dinosaurs to try and figure out what happened to them. Perhaps someday dinosaurs, in the form of corvids, will dig us up to figure out what happened to us.

If one of the species you’re using in your experiment fails every test you give it, the problem may be you, the researcher, not the animal. You may have failed to understand what is relevant to the way a bird sees the world.

They circle; now dense like a polished roof, now disseminated like the meshes of some vast all-heaven-sweeping net, now darkening, now flashing out a million rays of light . . . a madness in the sky

AS A HUMAN BEING,” Einstein once wrote, “one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.

Tempting as it may be to interpret the behavior of other animals in terms of human mental processes, it’s perhaps even more tempting to reject the possibility of kinship. It’s what primatologist Frans de Waal calls “anthropodenial,” blindness to humankind characteristics of other species,“Those who are in anthropodenial,” says de Waal, “try to build a brick wall to separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.