E. O. Wilson Quotes
-
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.
-
Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
-
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.
-
Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
-
Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.
-
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.
-
Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
-
To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.
-
It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.
-
In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
-
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?
-
Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.
-
Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.
-
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.
-
We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom and dignity.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.
-
Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.
-
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.
-
In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.
-
It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.
-
The borderline between normal and schizophrenic people is broad and nearly imperceptible.
-
Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.