E. O. Wilson Quotes - Page 7

Quotes about:

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

Strong, Emotional, Broken

"On Human Nature". Book by E. O. Wilson, 1978.

6 Copy quote
I turned to the teeming small creatures that can be held between the thumb and forefinger: the little things that compose the foundation of our ecosystems, the little things, as I like to say, who run the world.

E. O. Wilson

Running, Ecosystems, Foundation

6 Copy quote
[T]he true natural sciences lock together in theory and evidence to form the ineradicable technical base of modern civilization. The pseudosciences satisfy personal psychological needs... but lack the ideas or the means to contribute to the technical base.

E. O. Wilson

Mean, Civilization, Ideas

7 Copy quote
Evolution by natural selection is not an idle hypothesis. The genetic variation on which selection acts is well understood in principle all the way down to the molecular level.

E. O. Wilson

Principles, Variation, Levels

7 Copy quote
The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.

E. O. Wilson

Believe, Mind, Religion

13 Copy quote
Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.

E. O. Wilson

Political, Mind, Ideology

18 Copy quote
The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.

E. O. Wilson

Player, Cycling, Energy

"An Interview With E.O. Wilson, the Father of the Encyclopedia of Life". Interview with David Pogue, www.nytimes.com. October 23, 2008.

46 Copy quote
The price of these failures has been a loss of moral consensus, a greater sense of helplessness about the human condition. ... The intellectual solution to the first dilemma can be achieved by a deeper and more courageous examination of human nature that combines the findings of biology with those of the social sciences.

E. O. Wilson

Loss, Science, Intellectual

7 Copy quote
Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend stretches of time just searching and dreaming.

E. O. Wilson

Dream, Hands, Names

4 Copy quote
The closer the genetic relationship of the family members, as for example father-to-son, as opposed to uncle-to-nephew, the higher the degree of cooperation.

E. O. Wilson

Uncles, Father, Son

4 Copy quote
To be anthropocentric is to remain unaware of the limits of human nature, the significance of biological processes underlying human behavior, and the deeper meaning of long-term genetic evolution.

E. O. Wilson

Science, Long, Limits

4 Copy quote
Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.

E. O. Wilson

Real, Looks, Research

"E.O. Wilson Is on Top of the World". Interview with Jill Neimark, www.psychologytoday.com. September 1, 1998.

6 Copy quote
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

Play, Giving, Imagination

"Letters to a Young Scientist". Book by E. O. Wilson, 2013.

4 Copy quote
What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.

E. O. Wilson

Needs, Pages, Given

Interview with Richard Conniff, discovermagazine.com. June 25, 2006.

4 Copy quote
Every kid has a bug period... I never grew out of mine.

E. O. Wilson

Kids, Bugs, Grew

"E.O. Wilson's Advice for Future Scientists". Interview with Ira Flatow, www.npr.org. June 21, 2013.

7 Copy quote
Every native species, however humble in appearance...has its place in the nation's heritage. It is a masterpiece of evolution, an ancient, multifaceted entity that shares the land with us.

E. O. Wilson

Humble, Land, Heritage

4 Copy quote
Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmland the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind.

E. O. Wilson

Past, People, Labyrinth

21 Copy quote
Yes, the natural sciences are telling us a great deal about human origins, the origins of our species the origins of our minds; we're on our way to explaining a large part of it. I'll accept an answer provided only by such means as obtaining and exploring, analyzing and arguing over the evidence - not because of a scribe's myopic view of the subject written 500 years before the birth of Christ!

E. O. Wilson

Mean, Views, Years

4 Copy quote
Ninety-nine percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct.

E. O. Wilson

Nature, Animal, Ninety Nine

5 Copy quote
The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.

E. O. Wilson

Earth, History Of Life, Surroundings

5 Copy quote
The evolutionary epic is ... the best myth we will ever have.

E. O. Wilson

Epic, Myth

4 Copy quote
Not all ants use violence to dominate their world, some use more subtle methods.

E. O. Wilson

Use, World, Ants

"Bill Moyers Journal", www.pbs.org. July 6, 2007.

4 Copy quote
Man's destiny is to know, if only because societies with knowledge culturally dominate societies that lack it. Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness. They stay in thatched huts and die young.

E. O. Wilson

Destiny, Men, Illness

5 Copy quote
To genetic evolution, the human lineage has added the parallel track of cultural evolution.

E. O. Wilson

Track, Lineage, Evolution

E. O. Wilson (2014). “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge”, p.190, Vintage

16 Copy quote
In fact, nothing in science as a whole has been more firmly established by interwoven factual information, or more illuminating than the universal occurrence of biological evolution. Further, few natural processes have been more convincingly explained than evolution by the theory of natural selection, or as it has been popularly called, Darwinism.

E. O. Wilson

Religion, Atheism, Information

4 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Bert Holldobler

Robert MacArthur

Richard Dawkins

Stephen Jay Gould

Paul R. Ehrlich

James D. Watson

Latest quotes from interviews

"We have to create a sustainable environment, worldwide, and we're not doing it. The best thing we can do with the rest of this century is aggressively acquire - and put aside - the richest natural reserves that we can, and then do our best to manage the needs and desires of the 11 billion people we expect to have by the end of the century. This is where biology is headed. For that reason, the sooner we get on with mapping biodiversity on Earth, the better off biology will be - not to mention the whole subject of saving it before we carelessly throw it away."

- E. O. Wilson,

www.businessinsider.com, added Dec 13, 2017

More (25)

E. O. Wilson

Follow

Born: June 10, 1929
Occupation: Biologist
Cite this Page: Citation

Popular Topics