Willing to try to get a better atmosphere through a demonstration of democratic principles, fairness and cooperation, a better product, those will win in the end.
E. O. WILSONIf all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
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The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.
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It’s always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That’s just in human relationships.
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By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
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Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.
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What’s been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.
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The essence of humanity’s spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?
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People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
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Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the ‘environmentalist’ view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.
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Persist! The world needs all you can give.
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In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.
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Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They’re the cemetery workers.
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Because the living environment is what really sustains us.
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Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
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In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
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We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It’s about conflicts between creation stories.
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Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
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Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they’ve had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.
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Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
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I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.
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There doesn’t seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
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Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
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You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path.
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An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being’s, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.
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If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago.
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Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice.
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