E. O. Wilson - Science Quotes

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The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

E. O. Wilson
The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.

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

E. O. Wilson
Science and technology are what we can do; morality is what we agree we should or should not do.

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

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
Much of good science — and perhaps all of great science — has its roots in fantasy.

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
Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

E. O. Wilson
Scientists, I believe, are divided into two categories: those who do science in order to be a success in life, and those who become a success in life in order to do science.

E. O. Wilson
To a considerable degree science consists in originating the maximum amount of information with the minimum expenditure of energy. Beauty is the cleanness of line in such formulations along with symmetry, surprise, and congruence with other prevailing beliefs.

E. O. Wilson
Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth's surface, but they do...

E. O. Wilson
Today, thanks to the relentless advance of the science which Newton pioneered, God's immanence has been pushed to somewhere below the subatomic particles or beyond the farthest visible galaxy.

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
New knowledge is not science until it is made social. The scientific culture can be defined as new verifiable knowledge secured and distributed with fair credit meticulously given.

E. O. Wilson