E. O. Wilson Quotes

146 Sourced Quotes

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another.

E. O. Wilson
The 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. Wilson
The genius of human society is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken, and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute.

E. O. Wilson
Most people believe they know how they themselves think, how others think too, and even how institutions evolve. But they are wrong. Their understanding is based on folk psychology, the grasp of human nature by common sense ¾ defined (by Einstein) as everything learned to the age of 18 ¾ shot through with misconceptions, and only slightly advanced over ideas employed by the Greek philosophers

E. O. Wilson
By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.

E. O. Wilson
To search for unasked questions, plus questions to put to already acquired but unsought answers, it is vital to give full play to the imagination. That is the way to create truly original science.

E. O. Wilson
Genetic determinism... On its interpretation depends the entire relation between biology and the social sciences.

E. O. Wilson
Important science is not just any similarity glimpsed for the first time. It offers analogues that map the gateways to unexplored terrain.

E. O. Wilson
Nature 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
For the naturalist every entrance into a wild environment rekindles an excitement that is childlike in spontaneity, often tinged with apprehension — in short, the way life ought to be lived, all the time.

E. O. Wilson
The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.

E. O. Wilson
The fraction of Americans working in occupations concerned primarily with information has increased from 20 to nearly 50 percent of the work force.

E. O. Wilson
If enough species are extinguished, will the ecosystems collapse, and will the extinction of most other species follow soon afterward? The only answer anyone can give is: possibly. By the time we find out, however, it might be too late. One planet, one experiment.

E. O. Wilson
Whether fully aware of it or not, we human beings are immersed in a world of insects.

E. O. Wilson
The theory of population genetics and experiments on other organisms show that substantial changes can occur in the span of less than 100 generations, which for man reaches back to the time of the Roman Empire.

E. O. Wilson
We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom and dignity.

E. O. Wilson
This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms-folded them into its genes-and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady.

E. O. Wilson
Cultural change is the statistical product of the separate behavioral responses of large numbers of human beings who cope as best they can with social existence.

E. O. Wilson
Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.

E. O. Wilson
Early human beings... filled a special ecological niche: they were carnivorous primates of the African plains.... When agriculture permitted the increase of population density, game was no longer abundant... carnivorism remained a basic dietary impulse, with cultural aftereffects that varied according to the special conditions of the environment in which the society evolved.

E. O. Wilson
Why do we study insects? Because, together with man, hummingbirds and the bristlecone pine, they are among the great achievements of organic evolution.

E. O. Wilson