E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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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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Because the living environment is what really sustains us.
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Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.
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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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We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
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In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.
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There can be no purpose more enspiriting than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.
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By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
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I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
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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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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 grew up as a Southern Baptist with strict adherence to the Bible, which I read as a youngster.
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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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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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True character arises from a deeper well than religion.
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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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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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The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.
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An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.
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Every kid has a bug period... I never grew out of mine.
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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.