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.
E. O. WilsonThe true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic.
E. O. WilsonI think that's my nature, to want to bring people together rather than to try to bombard them into agreement.
E. O. WilsonNow when you cut a forest, an ancient forest in particular, you are not just removing a lot of big trees and a few birds fluttering around in the canopy. You are drastically imperiling a vast array of species within a few square miles of you. The number of these species may go to tens of thousands. Many of them are still unknown to science, and science has not yet discovered the key role undoubtedly played in the maintenance of that ecosystem, as in the case of fungi, microorganisms, and many of the insects.
E. O. WilsonThe 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. WilsonThe second half of the 20th century was a golden age of molecular biology, and it was one of the golden ages of the history of science. Molecular biology was so successful and made such a powerful alliance with the medical scientists that the two together just flourished. And they continue to flourish.
E. O. Wilson