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.
E. O. WILSONNature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.
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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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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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There doesn’t seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
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Because the living environment is what really sustains us.
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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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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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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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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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Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
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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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We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.
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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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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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People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
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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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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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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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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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I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
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Every kid has a bug period… I never grew out of mine.
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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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Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice.
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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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True character arises from a deeper well than religion.
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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
E. O. WILSON