E. O. Wilson Quotes
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Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
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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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Look closely at nature. Every species is a masterpiece, exquisitely adapted to the particular environment in which it has survived. Who are we to destroy or even diminish biodiversity?
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Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
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But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.
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Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.
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The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding. Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.
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Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
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To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.
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If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
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There is no better high than discovery.
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To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively.
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I think that's my nature, to want to bring people together rather than to try to bombard them into agreement.
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Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
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Wonderful theory, wrong species. (On Marxism, which he considered more suited to ants than to humans.)
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It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.
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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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But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.
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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?
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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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The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.
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At the apogee of the state's evolution, architecture was monumental, and the ruling class were exalted as a pseudospecies. The sacred rites of statehood became the central focus of religion.
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Although the capacity to become schizophrenic may well be within all of us, there is no question that certain persons have distinctive genes predisposing them to the condition.
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I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.