Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.
E. O. WILSONScience for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
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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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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Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
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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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Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.
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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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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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In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
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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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Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
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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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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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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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If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way.
E. O. WILSON






