Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.
E. O. WILSONJehovah 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.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
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Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we’re hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.
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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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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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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.
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Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
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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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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.
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Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds… is not productive.
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Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
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There is no better high than discovery.
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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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If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
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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.
E. O. WILSON