E. O. Wilson Quotes
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Stable climates with muted seasons allow more kinds of organisms to specialize on narrower pieces of the environment, to outcompete the generalists around them, and so persist for longer periods of time. Species are packed more tightly. No niche, it seems goes unfilled. Specialization is likely to be pushed to bizarre, beautiful extremes.
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Genetic determinism... On its interpretation depends the entire relation between biology and the social sciences.
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In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.
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It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.
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The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper.
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The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.
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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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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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We can search among the unconscious, emotion-laden learning rules for the kind of behavior most directly influenced by genetic evolution.
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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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If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.
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We use pandas and eagles and things. I'd love to see a wilderness society with an angry-looking wolverine as their logo.
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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 evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have.
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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 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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In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism-beetle, moss, and so forth, is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Mozart symphony, or any other great work of art.
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The search for knowledge is in our genes. It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it's never going to be quenched.
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I believe that traditional religious belief and scientific knowledge depict the universe in radically different ways. At the bedrock they are incompatible and mutually exclusive.
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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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We seem to be able to be fully comfortable only when the remainder of humanity can be labeled as members versus nonmembers.
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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 real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
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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.