Theories
As a young adult, Prince-Hughes was employed at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. She watched how silverback male gorillas cared for their families and paternally intervened to resolve conflicts, thereby setting the tone for community behavior. She came to conclude anger often stems from embarrassment, and humor is a natural response to fear.
Prince-Hughes challenges the predominant scientific paradigm, which says the nature of mankind's cognitive processes is clearly distinct from that of primates. In most scientific circles, ascribing human characteristics to animal minds is anathema. From her observations, Prince-Hughes has formulated several contrarian scientific conclusions, perhaps most notably that Bonobos (Pygmy Chimpanzees) can actually speak English if one just learns to understand the accent.
Read more about this topic: Dawn Prince-Hughes
Famous quotes containing the word theories:
“Whatever practical people may say, this world is, after all, absolutely governed by ideas, and very often by the wildest and most hypothetical ideas. It is a matter of the very greatest importance that our theories of things that seem a long way apart from our daily lives, should be as far as possible true, and as far as possible removed from error.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“Generalisation is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularly is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)