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.
E. O. WILSONBlind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
-
-
If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months.
E. O. WILSON -
Persist! The world needs all you can give.
E. O. WILSON -
Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
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 -
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.
E. O. WILSON -
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.
E. O. WILSON -
One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.
E. O. WILSON -
Because the living environment is what really sustains us.
E. O. WILSON -
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. WILSON -
The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
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 -
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 -
By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
E. O. WILSON -
We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It’s about conflicts between creation stories.
E. O. WILSON -
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.
E. O. WILSON