E. O. Wilson - Evolution Quotes

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At the apogee of the state's evolution, architecture was monumental, and the ruling class were exalted as a pseudospecies. The sacred rites of statehood became the central focus of religion.

E. O. Wilson
The selection pressures of hunter-gatherer existence have persisted for over 99 percent of human evolution.

E. O. Wilson
Cultural evolution is Lamarckian and very fast, whereas biological evolution is Darwinian and usually very slow.

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
Because it is... far slower than Lamarckian evolution, biological evolution is always quickly outrun by cultural change.

E. O. Wilson
Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?

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
[Biology has] become the paramount science, exceeding other disciplines, including physics and chemistry at least, in the creative tumult of its disciplines and disputations. [...] I'll also be so bold at this point to suggest that we are now at the edge of establishing the two fundamental laws of biology: The first law is that all of the phenomena of biology, the entities and the processes, are ultimately obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry. Not immediately reducible to them, but ultimately consistent and in consilience with them, by a cause and effect explanation. The second law is that all biological phenomena, these entities and processes that define life itself, have arisen by evolution through natural selection.

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
That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.

E. O. Wilson
Evolution on a large scale unfolds, like much of human history, as a succession of dynasties.

E. O. Wilson
Leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, malignant tertian malaria, filariasis, echinococcosis, onchocerciasis, yellow fever, amoebic dysentery, bleeding bot-fly cysts... evolution has devised a hundred ways to macerate livers and turn blood into a parasite's broth.

E. O. Wilson
Progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard.... let us not pretend to deny in our philosophy what we know in our hearts to be true.

E. O. Wilson