Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice.
E. O. WILSONIndividual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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True character arises from a deeper well than religion.
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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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Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They’re the cemetery workers.
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Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
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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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Companies that are willing to share, to withhold in order to further the growth of the company.
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Because the living environment is what really sustains us.
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If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
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Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
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In some ways, I had a traditional ‘old South’ upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an
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We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.
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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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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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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?
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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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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
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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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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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We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
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I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
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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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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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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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If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago.
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Every kid has a bug period… I never grew out of mine.
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