Top 274 Quotes & Sayings by E. O. Wilson

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American scientist E. O. Wilson.

Last updated on September 20, 2024.

Edward Osborne Wilson was an American biologist, naturalist, and writer. His specialty was myrmecology, the study of ants. According to David Attenborough he was the world's leading expert. He was nicknamed the "ant man".

American - Scientist | Born: June 10, 1929

Source: Wikipedia

The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.

E. O. Wilson

In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

E. O. Wilson

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.

E. O. Wilson

Every kid has a bug period... I never grew out of mine.

E. O. Wilson

One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.

E. O. Wilson

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.

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.

E. O. Wilson

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.

E. O. Wilson

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.

E. O. Wilson

Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.

E. O. Wilson

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.

E. O. Wilson

There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.

E. O. Wilson

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.

E. O. Wilson

It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

E. O. Wilson

Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds... is not productive.

E. O. Wilson

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

E. O. Wilson

In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.

E. O. Wilson

The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.

E. O. Wilson

Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.

E. O. Wilson

Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

E. O. Wilson

Well, 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. Wilson

The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago.

E. O. Wilson

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.

E. O. Wilson

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

E. O. Wilson

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.

E. O. Wilson

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.

E. O. Wilson

Once I feel I'm right, I have enjoyed provoking.

E. O. Wilson

There is no better high than discovery.

E. O. Wilson

The education of women is the best way to save the environment.

E. O. Wilson

Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.

E. O. Wilson

We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

E. O. Wilson

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. Wilson

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.

E. O. Wilson

It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.

E. O. Wilson

Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.

E. O. Wilson

Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.

E. O. Wilson

I've found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they're communicating but it tells you a great deal - by dialect and tone, content and circumstance - about the quality of the character.

E. O. Wilson

I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.

E. O. Wilson

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.

E. O. Wilson

I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.

E. O. Wilson

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.

E. O. Wilson

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.

E. O. Wilson

Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.

E. O. Wilson

We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.

E. O. Wilson

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.

E. O. Wilson

Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.

E. O. Wilson

The 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. Wilson

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

E. O. Wilson

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

E. O. Wilson

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?

E. O. Wilson

I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.

E. O. Wilson

But 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. Wilson

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

E. O. Wilson

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.

E. O. Wilson

We don't need to clear the 4 to 6 percent of the Earth's surface remaining in tropical rain forests, with most of the animal and plant species living there.

E. O. Wilson

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.

E. O. Wilson

The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.

E. O. Wilson

All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments.

E. O. Wilson

Competing 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. Wilson

Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.

E. O. Wilson

Top 274 Quotes & Sayings by E. O. Wilson

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