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.
E. O. WILSONIn some ways, I had a traditional ‘old South’ upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
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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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True character arises from a deeper well than religion.
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Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
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Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
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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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Persist! The world needs all you can give.
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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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We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
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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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Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
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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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There doesn’t seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
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