E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Genetic determinism... On its interpretation depends the entire relation between biology and the social sciences.
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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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In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.
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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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The fraction of Americans working in occupations concerned primarily with information has increased from 20 to nearly 50 percent of the work force.
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The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.
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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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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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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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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 can search among the unconscious, emotion-laden learning rules for the kind of behavior most directly influenced by genetic evolution.
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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 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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The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper.
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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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The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.