Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it’s a map with constant immediate sensory input.
E. O. WILSONI’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.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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There is no better high than discovery.
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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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By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
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This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
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Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.
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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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I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.
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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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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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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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One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.
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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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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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There doesn’t seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
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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.
E. O. WILSON