“Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.”

It’s always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That’s just in human relationships.

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.

Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

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?

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

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.

Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds… is not productive.

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.

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.

Companies that are willing to share, to withhold in order to further the growth of the company.

In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

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.

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?

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.

Persist! The world needs all you can give.

I’ve always been a massive Beastie Boys fan, so if you look at their style aesthetic on Check Your Head, that was the headspace I was in for a minute. Whatever that was, that was me.

And, in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity.

There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.

And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.

While the aesthetics of consumption (photographic or otherwise) requires a heroicized myth of the artist, the exemplary practice of the player-off codes requires only an operator, a producer, a scriptor, or a pasticheur.

In the art world, creativity involves aesthetic sensibility, emotional resonance and a gift for expression.

The highest aim of the aesthetic being is to find the Divine through beauty; the highest Art is that which by an inspired use of significant and interpretative form unseals the door of the spirit.

Aesthetic matters are fundamental for the harmonious development of both society and the individual.