America in particular imposes an horrendous burden on the world. We have this wonderful standard of living but it comes at enormous cost.
E. O. WilsonThe cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding. Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.
E. O. WilsonI think we will make it. Because one quality people have - certainly Americans have it - is that they can adapt when they see necessity staring them in the face. What to avoid is what someone once called the definition of hell: truth realized too late.
E. O. WilsonHumanity, 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.
E. O. WilsonWell, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers.
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. WilsonOur brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.
E. O. WilsonPeople must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obligated by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here.
E. O. WilsonBiodiversity is the totality of all inherited variation in the life forms of Earth, of which we are one species. We study and save it to our great benefit. We ignore and degrade it to our great peril.
E. O. WilsonHuman nature is deeper and broader than the artificial contrivance of any existing culture.
E. O. WilsonCharacter is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others. It is not obedience to authority, and while it is often consistent with and reinforced by religious belief, it is not piety.
E. O. WilsonI will argue that every scrap of biological diversity is priceless, to be learned and cherished, and never to be surrendered without a struggle.
E. O. WilsonEach 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.
E. O. WilsonThe commitment must be much deeper - to let no species knowingly die; to take all reasonable action to protect every species and race in perpetuity.
E. O. WilsonThe 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.
E. O. WilsonPeople yearn to be in one of the best--a combat marine regiment, an elite college, the executive committee of a company, a religious sect, a fraternity, a garden club--any collectivity that can be compared favorably with other, competing groups.
E. O. WilsonBut once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.
E. O. WilsonSo, the ant way of life is very ancient and very successful. As far as human beings are concerned, we've been around for only one million years--too soon be sure.
E. O. WilsonAll three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments.
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. WilsonCompeting is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.
E. O. WilsonHands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend stretches of time just searching and dreaming.
E. O. WilsonNo one knows the diversity in the world, not even to the nearest order of magnitude. ... We don't know for sure how many species there are, where they can be found or how fast they're disappearing. It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.
E. O. WilsonThe solutions like freezing zygotes, fertilized eggs, of all kinds of animals and so on, or keeping them in zoos and having arboreta where we have trees, all these things have been promoted. Even getting the complete genetic code of various fishes so we can let them pass away and then we'll pull them back. That is science fiction run amok.
E. O. WilsonI think history has shown that the worst way to [try to] bring people over and actually change public opinion is by insult and applied degradation of them.
E. O. WilsonWe are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
E. O. WilsonIt often occurs to me that if, against all odds, there is a judgmental God and heaven, it will come to pass that when the pearly gates open, those who had the valor to think for themselves will be escorted to the head of the line, garlanded, and given their own personal audience.
E. O. WilsonIn fact, nothing in science as a whole has been more firmly established by interwoven factual information, or more illuminating than the universal occurrence of biological evolution. Further, few natural processes have been more convincingly explained than evolution by the theory of natural selection, or as it has been popularly called, Darwinism.
E. O. WilsonWhat we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.
E. O. WilsonPeople need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.
E. O. WilsonI believe that traditional religious belief and scientific knowledge depict the universe in radically different ways. At the bedrock they are incompatible and mutually exclusive.
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. WilsonThe global conservation organisations are doing everything they can on modest budgets. They essentially promote setting aside reserves and parks around the world.
E. O. WilsonConsider 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.
E. O. WilsonOverall, the human brain is the most complex object known in the universe - known, that is, to itself.
E. O. WilsonCommon 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.
E. O. WilsonAnd pigs may fly. And we may be able to terraform and send surface populations to Mars. And Jesus may come next week anyway, so it doesn't matter one way or the other. All these crazy things run through people's minds.
E. O. WilsonIn the early stages of creation of both art and science, everything in the mind is a story.
E. O. WilsonIndividual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
E. O. WilsonI had in mind a message, although I hope it doesn't intrude too badly, persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, of the critical importance of land and our vanishing natural environment and wildlife.
E. O. WilsonNature first, then theory. Or, better, Nature and theory closely intertwined while you throw all your intellectual capital at the subject. Love the organisms for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and, with good fortune, discoveries will follow. If they don't, the love and the pleasure will have been enough.
E. O. Wilson