E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
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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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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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Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
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The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.
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To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively.
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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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Wonderful theory, wrong species. (On Marxism, which he considered more suited to ants than to humans.)
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Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
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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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Pure knowledge is the ultimate emancipator. It equalizes people and sovereign states, erodes the archaic barriers of superstition and promises to lift the trajectory of cultural evolution. But I do not believe that it can change the ground rules of human behavior or alter the main course of history's predictable trajectory.
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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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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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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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In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
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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 toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.
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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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The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.
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When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.
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Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.
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There is no better high than discovery.