Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.
E. O. WILSONAn 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.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
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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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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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Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.
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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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Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice.
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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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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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Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
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The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.
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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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Because the living environment is what really sustains us.
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I’m very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching.
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The education of women is the best way to save the environment.
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The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
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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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If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
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The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats.
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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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There doesn’t seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
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We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.
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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 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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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.
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Willing to try to get a better atmosphere through a demonstration of democratic principles, fairness and cooperation, a better product, those will win in the end.
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