Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
E. O. WILSONAnts have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
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Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.
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The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.
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Every kid has a bug period… I never grew out of mine.
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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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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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Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
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Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.
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This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
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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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In some ways, I had a traditional ‘old South’ upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an
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We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.
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True character arises from a deeper well than religion.
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Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure.
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There is no better high than discovery.
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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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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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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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Persist! The world needs all you can give.
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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.
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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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Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.
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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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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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