It’s obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life – for 8 billion or more people – without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.
E. O. WILSONI’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.
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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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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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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The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
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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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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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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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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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This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
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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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Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.
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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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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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Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
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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?
E. O. WILSON