E. O. Wilson Quotes
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The mosquito is an automaton. It can afford to be nothing else.
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All my life I have placed great store in civility and good manners, practices I find scarce among the often hard-edged, badly socialized scientists with whom I associate. Tone of voice means a great deal to me in the course of debate. I despise the arrogance and doting self-regard so frequently found among the very bright.
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The most peaceable tribes of today were often ravagers of yesteryear and will probably again produce soldiers and murderers in the future.
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The extinctions ongoing worldwide promise to be at least as great as the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the age of dinosaurs.
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The borderline between normal and schizophrenic people is broad and nearly imperceptible.
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The increase in brain size and refinement of stone artifacts point to an unbroken advance in mental ability over the last two or three million years. ...No organ in the history of life has grown faster.
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Nationalism and racism, to take two examples, are the culturally nurtured outgrowths of simple tribalism.
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We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories.
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Known as the biosphere to scientists and as the creation to theologians, all of life together consists of a membrane around earth so thin that it cannot be seen edgewise from a satellite yet so prodigiously diverse that only a tiny fraction of species have been discovered and named.
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Genetic determinism... On its interpretation depends the entire relation between biology and the social sciences.
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There is no such thing as a typically 'schizophrenogenic' (schizophrenia-producing) family arrangement, one most likely to produce a mentally ill adult from a child with the potential for the disease.
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One difference between ants and humans is that while ants send their old women off to war, humans send their young men.
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Biology has finally opened up to achieve a unifying embrace of all its disciplines. We're seeing the renaissance of what could be called scientific natural history, which makes available the groundwork - the foundation work - of what is actually on the Earth.
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In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.
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The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.
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I'm very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching.
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Most kinds of aggressive behavior among members of the same species are responsive to crowding in the environment.
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Cultural change is the statistical product of the separate behavioral responses of large numbers of human beings who cope as best they can with social existence.
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The three extreme kinds of schizophrenia are unmistakable: the haunted paranoid surrounded by his imaginary community of spies and assassins, the clownish, sometimes incontinent hebephrenic, and the frozen catatonic.
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Evidence has... been adduced that schizophrenia is widespread in other kinds of human societies. ...and they form a substantial fraction of the clientele of the tribal shamans and healers.
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The evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have.
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The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper.
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Because the brain can be guided by rational calculation only in a limited degree, it must fall back on the nuances of pleasure and pain mediated by the limbic system and other lower centers of the brain.
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Nothing fundamental separates the course of human history from the course of physical history.