It’s always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That’s just in human relationships.
E. O. WILSONScience for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.
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I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
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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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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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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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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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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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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
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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 education of women is the best way to save the environment.
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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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We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
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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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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.
E. O. WILSON