E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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Once I feel I'm right, I have enjoyed provoking.
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I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.
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Every kid has a bug period... I never grew out of mine.
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We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
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Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
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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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There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
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People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.
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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 ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.
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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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For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.
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I've found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they're communicating but it tells you a great deal - by dialect and tone, content and circumstance - about the quality of the character.
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Companies that are willing to share, to withhold in order to further the growth of the company, willing to try to get a better atmosphere through a demonstration of democratic principles, fairness and cooperation, a better product, those will win in the end.
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If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months.
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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 education of women is the best way to save the environment.
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Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.
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Piaget, who was originally trained as a biologist, views intellectual development as an interaction of an inherited genetic program with the environment. It is no coincidence that he calls this conception 'genetic epistemology,' in effect the study of the hereditary unfolding of understanding.
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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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Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.
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The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.
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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.