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Evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans experienced evolutionary benefits from brain developments that included aversion to loss and risk and from instincts for cooperation that helped strengthen communities.

Kids leave us and go off on their own lives. Family members tell us what they think of us. Animals can't do that. They really are blank canvases, and we can project anything we want onto them. So the relationship is very pure and simple.

We're not just social animals in the conventional way that people think. It's not just a bunch of us who hang out together. We have a very specific pattern of ties, and they have a particular shape and structure that is encoded in our genes. It means that human beings have evolved to live their lives embedded in social networks.

Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.

I grew up with lots of animals and I related more to them than I did to people. I feel a lot of empathy for them.

For origin and development of human faculty we must look to these processes of association in lower animals.

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment.

Learning from wolves to interact with pet dogs makes about as much sense as, 'I want to improve my parenting - let's see how the chimps do it!'

Child psychology and animal psychology are of relatively slight importance, as compared with the sciences which deal with the corresponding physiological problems of ontogeny and phylogeny.