The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.
E. O. WILSONAnts are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.
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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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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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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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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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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Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we’re hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.
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If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way.
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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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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 for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
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People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
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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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I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
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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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Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.
E. O. WILSON