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.
E. O. WILSONThere is no better high than discovery.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.
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True character arises from a deeper well than religion.
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I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
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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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One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.
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We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.
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Every kid has a bug period… I never grew out of mine.
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If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months.
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Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice.
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If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
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The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.
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Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
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People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
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Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we’re hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.
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Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
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Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.
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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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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 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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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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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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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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Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.
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Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it’s a map with constant immediate sensory input.
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Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds… is not productive.
E. O. WILSON