The newborn infant is now seen to be wired with awesome precision... This marvelous robot will be launched into the world under the care of its parents... But to what extent does the wiring of the neurons, so undeniably encoded in the genes, preordain the directions that social development will follow?
E. O. WilsonWe use pandas and eagles and things. I'd love to see a wilderness society with an angry-looking wolverine as their logo.
E. O. WilsonThat's what the best global conservation organisations and the American government (and other environmentally inclined governments, such as Sweden and the Netherlands) are doing: protecting the remaining wild environment. This is the equivalent of getting a patient to the emergency room - keep them alive and then figure out how to save them.
E. O. WilsonThe history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.
E. O. WilsonThe 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.
E. O. WilsonThe variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.
E. O. WilsonIf insemination were the sole biological function of sex, it could be achieved far more economically in a few seconds of mounting and insertion. Indeed, the least social of mammals mate with scarcely more ceremony. The species that have evolved long-term bonds are also, by and large, the ones that rely on elaborate courtship rituals. . . . Love and sex do indeed go together.
E. O. Wilson