Edward Wilson Quotes (21 Quotes)

When the martyr's righteous forebrain is exploded by the executioner's bullet and his mind disintegrates, what then Can we safely assume that all those millions of neural circuits will be reconstituted in an immaterial state, so the conscious mind carries on.

In the end ... success or failure will come down to an ethical decision, one on which those now living will be judged for generations to come.

Humanity is part of nature, a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the sources of human sensibility and acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built.

I am an optimist by nature. But I have to admit, it's getting kind of scary.

Each species is a masterpiece, a creation assembled with extreme care and genius.

Here we are at the rheas. That's now known as Darwin's rhea, and it lived about 1,000 kilometers south of the larger variety.

Science is not marginal. Like art, it is a universal possession of humanity, and scientific knowledge has become a vital part of our species' repertory. It comprises what we know of the material world with reasonable certainty. . . . Thanks to science and technology, access to factual information of all kinds is rising exponentially.

We propose this with great caution, ... The evidence, after all, only applies strongly to insects. Human altruism and tight-knit societies may well have evolved differently. But if it is true, it would help us understand the group aggression and warfare so widespread today. Those who study human biology and behavior should take a new look at this possibility.

I saw it as a splendid opportunity to trace his intellectual development, starting with the voyage aboard the Beagle, ... He hit upon natural selection at a fairly early stage and his life was really one long argument about the questions it raised.

It doesn't matter whether you believe Darwin got it right or that the Genesis story is literally true. We can all agree that, however it got here, the living creation on which we all depend for our existence is something we don't want to see destroyed.

Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.

Colonies with lower relatedness among the workers often have higher growth and reproduction rates than those with higher relatedness,

The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbor a nonphysical mind.

There is a hereditary selective advantage to membership in a powerful group united by devout belief and purpose. Even when individuals subordinate themselves and risk death in common cause, their genes are more likely to be transmitted to the next generation than are those of competing groups who lack equivalent resolve.

Most children have a bug period, and I never grew out of mine.

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

The larger the pie, the greater number of possible slices big enough to sustain the lives of individual species.

It is surpassingly strange, ... put their common sense on hold.

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.

Human beings live -- literally live, as if life is equated with the mind -- by symbols, particularly words, because the brain is constructed to process information almost exclusively in their terms.

Earth is a little-known planet. We have little appreciation for what we're doing. ... We are flying blind,