We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.
E. O. WILSONBy any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
-
-
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.
E. O. WILSON -
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.
E. O. WILSON -
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. WILSON -
Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
E. O. WILSON -
In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
E. O. WILSON -
If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.
E. O. WILSON -
Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
E. O. WILSON -
Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice.
E. O. WILSON -
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?
E. O. WILSON -
What’s been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.
E. O. WILSON -
Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
E. O. WILSON -
The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.
E. O. WILSON -
Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
E. O. WILSON -
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. WILSON -
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