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.
E. O. WILSONEvery kid has a bug period… I never grew out of mine.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
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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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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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Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
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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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I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
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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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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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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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If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.
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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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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
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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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There is no better high than discovery.
E. O. WILSON