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E. O. Wilson

79 quotes

“The fraction of Americans working in occupations concerned primarily with information has increased from 20 to nearly 50 percent of the work force.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Self-knowledge will reveal the elements of biological human nature from which modern social life proliferated in all its strange forms.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Are human beings innately aggressive? ...The answer to it is yes. ...Only by redefining the words "innateness" and "aggression" to the point of uselessness might we correctly say that human aggressiveness is not innate.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most peaceable tribes of today were often ravagers of yesteryear and will probably again produce soldiers and murderers in the future.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most kinds of aggressive behavior among members of the same species are responsive to crowding in the environment.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Animals use aggression as a technique for gaining control over necessities... that are scarce or are likely to become so... They intensify their threats and attack with increasing frequency as the population around them grow. As a result the behavior itself induces members of the population to spread out in space, raises the death rate, and lowers the birth rate. In such cases aggression is said to be a "density-dependent factor" in controlling population growth.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we were to vanish today, the land environment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion. Only a dozen or so species, among which are the crab louse and a mite that lives in the oil glands of our foreheads, depend on us entirely. But if ants were to disappear, tens of thousands of other plant and animal species would perish also, simplifying and weakening land ecosystems almost everywhere.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most dangerous of devotions, in my opinion, is the one endemic to Christianity: I was not born to be of this world. With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured- especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up. Enemies of the faith can be savaged and suicidal martyrdom praised.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing fundamental separates the course of human history from the course of physical history.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Be prepared mentally for some amount of chaos and failure. Waste and frustration often attend the earliest stages.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Much of good science — and perhaps all of great science — has its roots in fantasy.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the first time in history a conviction has developed among those who can actually think more than a decade ahead that we are playing a global endgame. Humanity's grasp on the planet is not strong. It is growing weaker. Our population is too large for safety and comfort. Fresh water is growing short, the atmosphere and the seas are increasingly polluted as a result of what has transpired on the land. The climate is changing in ways unfavorable to life, except for microbes, jellyfish and fungi. For many species it is already fatal.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we choose the path of destruction, the planet will continue to descend irreversibly into the Anthropocene Epoch, the biologically final age in which the planet exists almost exclusively by, for, and of ourselves.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The biology of extinction is not a pleasant subject. The death of a species is especially disheartening to the scientists who study endangered and newly extinct species. Together these vanishing remnants of Earth's biodiversity test the reach and quality of human morality. Species brought low by our hand now deserve our constant attention and care.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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 (1929–2021) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Talk at the 50th anniversary of New Scientist magazine (2006).
“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 (1929–2021) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Harvard Magazine from a public discussion between Wilson and James Watson moderated by NPR correspondent Robert Krulwich, September 10, 2009.
“True character arises from a deeper well than religion. It is the internalization of moral principles of a society, augmented by those tenets personally chosen by the individual, strong enough to endure through trials of solitude and adversity. The principles are fitted together into what we call integrity, literally the integrated self, wherein personal decisions feel good and true. Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others. It is not obedience to authority, and while it is often consistent with and reinforced by religious belief, it is not piety.”
E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1929–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source