I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
E. O. WILSONA 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.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
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I’m very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching.
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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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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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Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
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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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Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.
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Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
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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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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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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 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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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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Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
E. O. WILSON