It’s always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That’s just in human relationships.
E. O. WILSONPersist! The world needs all you can give.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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There doesn’t seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
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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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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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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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I’m very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching.
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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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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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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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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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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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A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.
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We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
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Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?
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Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
E. O. WILSON






