E. O. Wilson
Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.Collection: Faith
The education of women is the best way to save the environment.Collection: Women
We 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.Collection: Time
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.Collection: Environmental
Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds... is not productive.Collection: Science
You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.Collection: Alone
A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.Collection: Environmental
Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.Collection: Nature
When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.Collection: Nature
The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it's Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity.Collection: Religion
Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.Collection: Change
Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.Collection: Science
So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.Collection: Learning
True character arises from a deeper well than religion.Collection: Religion
Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.Collection: Society
If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.Collection: Failure
If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months.Collection: Alone
Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.Collection: Environmental
We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.
Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.
Every kid has a bug period... I never grew out of mine.
The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.
An 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.
Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they've had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.
I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.
It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.
The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.
The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.
Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.
People 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.
The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
But 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.
I'm very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching.
All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments.
The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?
When 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.
We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories.
There is no better high than discovery.
It's obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life - for 8 billion or more people - without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.
I 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.
Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.
Jehovah 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.
Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.
'The Creation' presents an argument for saving biological diversity on Earth. Most of the book is for as broad an audience as possible.
I was a senior in high school when I decided I wanted to work on ants as a career. I just fell in love with them, and have never regretted it.
What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.
The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.