Look closely at nature. Every species is a masterpiece, exquisitely adapted to the particular environment in which it has survived. Who are we to destroy or even diminish biodiversity?
E. O. WilsonThe vast majority of species that are vanishing, we haven't even discovered yet. How can you possibly put them back in nature if the ecosystem is gone?
E. O. WilsonJehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.
E. O. WilsonJungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmland the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind.
E. O. WilsonWe exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology.
E. O. WilsonTrue character arises from a deeper well than religion. It is the internalization of moral principles of a society, augmented by those tenets personally chosen by the individual, strong enough to endure through trials of solitude and adversity. The principles are fitted together into what we call integrity, literally the integrated self, wherein personal decisions feel good and true. Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others.
E. O. WilsonWhen you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.
E. O. WilsonWithout the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences... humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish born in a deep shallowed pool. Wondering and restless, longing to reach out, they think about the world outside. They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above , and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong because the world is too remote from ordinary experience to be merely imagined.
E. O. WilsonBut I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.
E. O. WilsonOne difference between ants and humans is that while ants send their old women off to war, humans send their young men.
E. O. WilsonAn individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.
E. O. WilsonBy any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
E. O. WilsonIf you go from the USA - which, relative to the rest of the world, is in pretty good shape in terms of biodiversity and sustainability - to the tropics, everything gets worse. You have Indonesia, which is destroying its own forest. In West Africa there's no control whatsoever. It's a global situation. For that reason it ties in clearly with the needs and relationships of low-income countries.
E. O. Wilson[P]rescientific people... could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe in the unknown, has yielded zero.
E. O. Wilson