E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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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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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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Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
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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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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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Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
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There is no better high than discovery.
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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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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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Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.
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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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The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.
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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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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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Wonderful theory, wrong species. (On Marxism, which he considered more suited to ants than to humans.)
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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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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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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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The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.
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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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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.