When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
E. O. WILSONTheology 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?
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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Companies that are willing to share, to withhold in order to further the growth of the company.
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One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.
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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.
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We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.
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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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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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I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
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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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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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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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We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
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Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
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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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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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Because the living environment is what really sustains us.
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Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
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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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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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Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
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Jehovah 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.
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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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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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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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Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice.
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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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