E. O. Wilson Quotes
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Evolution by natural selection is not an idle hypothesis. The genetic variation on which selection acts is well understood in principle all the way down to the molecular level.
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From the freedom to explore comes the joy of learning. From knowledge acquired by personal initiative arises the desire for more knowledge. And from mastery of the novel and beautiful world awaiting every child comes self-confidence.
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If enough species are extinguished, will the ecosystems collapse, and will the extinction of most other species follow soon afterward? The only answer anyone can give is: possibly. By the time we find out, however, it might be too late. One planet, one experiment.
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Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. Four out of five animals on Earth are nematode worms — if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms.
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Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth's surface, but they do.
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In the attempt to make scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity — and the more difficult the problem, the greater will be the importance of its solution.
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The incest taboo is another major category of primed learning.
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The price of these failures has been a loss of moral consensus, a greater sense of helplessness about the human condition. ... The intellectual solution to the first dilemma can be achieved by a deeper and more courageous examination of human nature that combines the findings of biology with those of the social sciences.
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Science is not marginal. Like art, it is a universal possession of humanity, and scientific knowledge has become a vital part of our species' repertory. It comprises what we know of the material world with reasonable certainty. . . . Thanks to science and technology, access to factual information of all kinds is rising exponentially.
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The emergence of civilization has everywhere followed a definable sequence.
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Intertribal aggression, escalating in some cultures to limited warfare, is common enough to be regarded as a general characteristic of hunter-gatherer social behavior.
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This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms - folded them into its genes - and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady.
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Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.
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Humanity, in the desperate attempt to fit 8 billion or more people on the planet and give them a higher standard of living, is at risk of pushing the rest of life off the globe.
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Because it is... far slower than Lamarckian evolution, biological evolution is always quickly outrun by cultural change.
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Overall, the human brain is the most complex object known in the universe - known, that is, to itself.
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To be anthropocentric is to remain unaware of the limits of human nature, the significance of biological processes underlying human behavior, and the deeper meaning of long-term genetic evolution.
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Each of these [bacterial] species are masterpieces of evolution. Each has persisted for thousands to millions of years. Each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine.
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In science, you really do need to have a purpose-driven life. You will succeed to the extent that you get the most out of your career so that you can give the most back. Try to be an addict, driven to achieve discoveries, learning new things, and then writing about them.
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Are human beings innately aggressive? ...The answer to it is yes. ...Only by redefining the words 'innateness' and 'aggression' to the point of uselessness might we correctly say that human aggressiveness is not innate.
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Self-knowledge will reveal the elements of biological human nature from which modern social life proliferated in all its strange forms.
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The selection pressures of hunter-gatherer existence have persisted for over 99 percent of human evolution.
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Only in the last moment in history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.
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These slender little people (Homo Habilis), the size of modern 12 year olds, were devoid of fangs and claws and almost certainly slower on foot than the four legged animals around them. They could have succeeded in their new way of life only by relying on tools and sophisticated cooperative behavior