E. O. Wilson - Behavior Quotes

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Few will doubt that humankind has created a planet-sized problem for itself. No one wished it so, but we are the first species to become a geophysical force, altering Earth's climate, a role previously reserved for tectonics, sun flares, and glacial cycles. We are also the greatest destroyer of life since the ten-kilometer-wide meteorite that landed near Yucatan and ended the Age of Reptiles sixty-five million years ago. Through overpopulation we have put ourselves in danger of running out of food and water. So 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
Pure knowledge is the ultimate emancipator. It equalizes people and sovereign states, erodes the archaic barriers of superstition and promises to lift the trajectory of cultural evolution. But I do not believe that it can change the ground rules of human behavior or alter the main course of history's predictable trajectory.

E. O. Wilson
The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior-like the deepest capacities for emotional respone which drive and guide it-is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact.

E. O. Wilson
Animals use aggression as a technique for gaining control over necessities... that are scarce or are likely to become so... They intensify their threats and attack with increasing frequency as the population around them grow. As a result the behavior itself induces members of the population to spread out in space, raises the death rate, and lowers the birth rate. In such cases aggression is said to be a "density-dependent factor" in controlling population growth.

E. O. Wilson
I interpret contemporary human social behavior to comprise hypertrophic outgrowths of the simpler features of human nature joined together into an irregular mosaic.

E. O. Wilson
Intertribal aggression, escalating in some cultures to limited warfare, is common enough to be regarded as a general characteristic of hunter-gatherer social behavior.

E. O. Wilson
We can search among the unconscious, emotion-laden learning rules for the kind of behavior most directly influenced by genetic evolution.

E. O. Wilson
The central idea of the philosophy of behaviorism, that behavior and the mind have an entirely materialist basis subject to experimental analysis, is fundamentally sound.

E. O. Wilson
Most kinds of aggressive behavior among members of the same species are responsive to crowding in the environment.

E. O. Wilson