E. O. Wilson - Human Quotes

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If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.

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
The channels of human mental development... are circuitous and variable. Rather than specify a single trait, human genes prescribe the capacity to develop a certain array of traits.

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

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
"Will we solve the crises of next hundred years?" asked Krulwich. "Yes, if we are honest and smart," said Wilson. The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall. Until we understand ourselves, concluded the Pulitzer-prize winning author of On Human Nature, until we answer those huge questions of philosophy that the philosophers abandoned a couple of generations ago—Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?—rationally, we're on very thin ground.

E. O. Wilson