We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
E. O. WILSONIf insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
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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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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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By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
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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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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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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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Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
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People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
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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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One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.
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Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.
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Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds… is not productive.
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Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they’ve had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.
E. O. WILSON