Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.
E. O. WILSONPerhaps 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.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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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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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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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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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
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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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The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.
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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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If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
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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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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 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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The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
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This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
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