E. O. Wilson - Nature Quotes

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"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
Because of mathematical indeterminancy and the uncertainty principle, it may be a law of nature that no nervous system is capable of acquiring enough knowledge to significantly predict the future of any other intelligent system in detail. Nor can intelligent minds gain enough self-knowledge to know their own future, capture fate, and in this sense eliminate free will.

E. O. Wilson
The rules followed are tight enough to produce a broad overlap in the decisions taken by all individuals and hence a convergence powerful enough to be labelled human nature.

E. O. Wilson
Self-knowledge will reveal the elements of biological human nature from which modern social life proliferated in all its strange forms.

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
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
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
Like the old god Proteus it [Darwinism] is endless in the form it takes and is therefore filled with the information of realized Nature.

E. O. Wilson
Ecologists, like the organisms they study, cannot make nature conform to their perfect liking.

E. O. Wilson