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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Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
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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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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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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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Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.
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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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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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By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
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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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In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.