E. O. Wilson Quotes
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The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago.
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Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
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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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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 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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'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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True character arises from a deeper well than religion.
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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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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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By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
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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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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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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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A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.
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In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.
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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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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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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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There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
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Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers.
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I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.