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. WILSONThere doesn’t seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
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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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Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
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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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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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This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
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If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way.
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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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It’s obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life – for 8 billion or more people – without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.
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Every kid has a bug period… I never grew out of mine.
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Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure.
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If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago.
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We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.
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Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
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Persist! The world needs all you can give.
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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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In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
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Because the living environment is what really sustains us.
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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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Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?
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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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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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The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
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Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.
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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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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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