Jeff Becerra

“If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as "human rights"? How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder? What further properties must he show before religious missionaries must
consider him worthy of attempts at conversion?”
― Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

“Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted.”
― Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

“All the explanations proposed seem to be
only partly satisfactory. They range from massive climatic change to mammalian predation to the extinction of a plant with apparent laxative properties, in which case the dinosaurs died of constipation.”
― Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

“Washburn has reported that infant baboons and other young primates appear to be born with only three inborn fears -of falling, snakes, and the dark-corresponding respectively to the dangers posed by
Newtonian gravitation to tree-dwellers, by our ancient enemies the reptiles, and by mammalian nocturnal predators, which must have been particularly terrifying for the visually oriented primates.”
― Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence