E. O. Wilson

Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.

If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.

Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they've had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.

Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds... is not productive.

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

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

True character arises from a deeper well than religion.

It's obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life - for 8 billion or more people - without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.

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

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.

The education of women is the best way to save the environment.

The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.

An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.

I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.

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.

Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

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

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the "environmentalist" view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.

When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.

Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

I've found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they're communicating but it tells you a great deal - by dialect and tone, content and circumstance - about the quality of the character.

Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.

Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.

Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.

I'm very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching.

What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories.

The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago.

Look closely at nature. Every species is a masterpiece exquisitely adapted to the particular environment in which it has survived. Who are we to destroy or even diminish biodiversity

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?

Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.

It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

I had in mind a message, although I hope it doesn't intrude too badly, persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, of the critical importance of land and our vanishing natural environment and wildlife.

The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it's Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity.

We don't need to clear the 4 to 6 percent of the Earth's surface remaining in tropical rain forests, with most of the animal and plant species living there.

We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

Only in the last moment in history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.

In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.

One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.

Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.

The true evolutionary epic retold as poetry is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic.

Companies that are willing to share, to withhold in order to further the growth of the company, willing to try to get a better atmosphere through a demonstration of democratic principles, fairness and cooperation, a better product, those will win in the end.

Once I feel I'm right, I have enjoyed provoking.

Because the living environment is what really sustains us.

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.

The one process now going on 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 our descendants are least likely to forgive us.

If all mankind were to disappear the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish the environment would collapse into chaos.

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.

If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months.

You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.

To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.

Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers.

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

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.

For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.

Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn't stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass.

Old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

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

We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.

There is no better high than discovery.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.

I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.

It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.

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

This planet can be a paradise in the 22nd century.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.

To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively.

Biodiversity is the totality of all inherited variation in the life forms of Earth of which we are one species. We study and save it to our great benefit. We ignore and degrade it to our great peril.

The search for knowledge is in our genes. It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it's never going to be quenched.

Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.

Competing is intense among humans and within a group selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.

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.

But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.

Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.

People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.

America in particular imposes an horrendous burden on the world. We have this wonderful standard of living but it comes at enormous cost.

One planet, one experiment.

Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.

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

Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?

Theology made no provision for evolution.