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. 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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Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.
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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.
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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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Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
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Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it’s a map with constant immediate sensory input.
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The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.
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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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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.
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Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.
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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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Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
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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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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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Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
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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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