E. O. Wilson - Species 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
No species... possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history.... The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.

E. O. Wilson
Now to the heart of wonder. Because species diversity was created prior to humanity, and because we evolved within it, we have never fathomed its limits. As a consequence, the living world is the natural domain of the most restless and paradoxical part of the human spirit.

E. O. Wilson
Every species lives a life unique to itself, and every species dies a different way.

E. O. Wilson
If enough species are extinguished, will the ecosystems collapse, and will the extinction of most other species follow soon afterward? The only answer anyone can give is: possibly. By the time we find out, however, it might be too late. One planet, one experiment.

E. O. Wilson
In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism-beetle, moss, and so forth, is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Mozart symphony, or any other great work of art.

E. O. Wilson
It's [the loss of species] like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

E. O. Wilson
An enduring environmental ethic will aim to preserve not only the health and freedom of our species, but access to the world in which the human spirit was born.

E. O. Wilson
Somewhere close I knew spear-nosed bats flew through the tree crowns in search of fruit, palm vipers coiled in ambush in the roots of orchids, jaguars walked the river's edge; around them eight hundred species of trees stood, more than are native to all of North America; and a thousand species of butterflies, 6 percent of the entire world fauna, waited for the dawn.

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

E. O. Wilson
The worst thing that can happen during the 1980s is not energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly that our descendents are least likely to forgive us.

E. O. Wilson
If insemination were the sole biological function of sex, it could be achieved far more economically in a few seconds of mounting and insertion. Indeed, the least social of mammals mate with scarcely more ceremony. The species that have evolved long-term bonds are also, by and large, the ones that rely on elaborate courtship rituals.... Love and sex do indeed go together.

E. O. Wilson
The truth is that we need invertebrates but they don't need us. If human beings were to disappear tomorrow, the world would go on with little change.... But if invertebrates were to disappear, I doubt that the human species could last more than a few months.

E. O. Wilson
Stable climates with muted seasons allow more kinds of organisms to specialize on narrower pieces of the environment, to outcompete the generalists around them, and so persist for longer periods of time. Species are packed more tightly. No niche, it seems goes unfilled. Specialization is likely to be pushed to bizarre, beautiful extremes.

E. O. Wilson
It may be argued that to know one kind of beetle is to know them all. But a species is not like a molecule in a cloud of molecules — it is a unique population.

E. O. Wilson
True spite is a commonplace in human societies, undoubtedly because human beings are keenly aware of their own blood lines and have the intelligence to plot intrigue. Human beings are unique in the degree of their capacity to lie to other members of their own species.

E. O. Wilson
On Marxism, which he considered more suited to ants than to humans:
Wonderful theory, wrong species.

E. O. Wilson
Primitive men are ecological analogs of lions, wolves, and hyenas... they have adopted pack hunting in the pursuit of big game.... habitually slaughtering surplus prey, storing food, feeding solid food to their young, dividing labor, practicing cannibalism, and interacting aggressively with competing species.... this way of life persisted for millions of years or longer and was abandoned in most societies only during the last few thousand years.

E. O. Wilson
Known as the biosphere to scientists and as the creation to theologians, all of life together consists of a membrane around earth so thin that it cannot be seen edgewise from a satellite yet so prodigiously diverse that only a tiny fraction of species have been discovered and named.

E. O. Wilson
Women are extraordinary in lacking the estrus, or period of heat. The females of most other primate species become sexually active, to the point of aggression, only at the time of ovulation. Why has sexual responsiveness become nearly continuous? Unusually frequent sexual activity between males and females served as the principle device for cementing the pair bond.

E. O. Wilson
In the process of natural selection, then, any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species.

E. O. Wilson