In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
E. O. WILSONOur brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it’s a map with constant immediate sensory input.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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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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People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
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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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Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice.
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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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Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
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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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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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Every kid has a bug period… I never grew out of mine.
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True character arises from a deeper well than religion.
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Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
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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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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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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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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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Companies that are willing to share, to withhold in order to further the growth of the company.
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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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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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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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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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This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
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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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The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
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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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Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
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