E. O. Wilson Quotes
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I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.
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I was a senior in high school when I decided I wanted to work on ants as a career. I just fell in love with them, and have never regretted it.
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I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
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I grew up as a Southern Baptist with strict adherence to the Bible, which I read as a youngster.
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We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
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True character arises from a deeper well than religion.
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Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
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What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.
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Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.
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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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I thought perhaps it should be recognized that religious people, including fundamentalists, are quite intelligent, many of them are highly educated, and they should be treated with complete respect.
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The genius of human society is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken, and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute.
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In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.
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By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
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Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
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The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.
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The commitment must be much deeper - to let no species knowingly die; to take all reasonable action to protect every species and race in perpetuity.
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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 inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.
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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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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.
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'The Creation' presents an argument for saving biological diversity on Earth. Most of the book is for as broad an audience as possible.
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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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It's obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life - for 8 billion or more people - without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.
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The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.