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.
E. O. WILSONThe variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
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The education of women is the best way to save the environment.
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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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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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Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice.
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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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Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
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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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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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Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we’re hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.
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The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats.
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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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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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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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There doesn’t seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
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Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?
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Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure.
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Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they’ve had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.
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This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
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Persist! The world needs all you can give.
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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.
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