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.
E. O. WILSONBlind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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.
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Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
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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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Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.
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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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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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Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
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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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This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
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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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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
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Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
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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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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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Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure.
E. O. WILSON