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.
E. O. WILSONScience for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
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You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path.
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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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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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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 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 have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
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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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Every kid has a bug period… I never grew out of mine.
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Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.
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Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
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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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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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The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
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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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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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People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
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Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.
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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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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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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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We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.
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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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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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