People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
E. O. WILSONPeople respect nonfiction but they read novels.
E. O. WILSONIn many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
E. O. WILSONAnts 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. WILSONThe 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. WILSONEvery kid has a bug period… I never grew out of mine.
E. O. WILSONBecause the living environment is what really sustains us.
E. O. WILSONA 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. WILSONIn 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.
E. O. WILSONWithout 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.
E. O. WILSONBlind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice.
E. O. WILSONAn 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.
E. O. WILSONCompanies that are willing to share, to withhold in order to further the growth of the company.
E. O. WILSONIf insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
E. O. WILSONIt’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 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.
E. O. WILSONThe 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.
E. O. WILSON