E. O. Wilson

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“My definition of a scientist is that you can complete the following sentence: ‘he or she has shown that…’,””

“Wonderful theory, wrong species. (On Marxism, which he considered more suited to ants than to humans.)”

“The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.”

“The evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have.”

“God remains a viable hypothesis as the prime mover, however undefinable and untestable that conception may be.”

“We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom and dignity.”

“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.”

“Genetic determinism... On its interpretation depends the entire relation between biology and the social sciences.”

“The mosquito is an automaton. It can afford to be nothing else.”

“The channels of human mental development... are circuitous and variable. Rather than specify a single trait, human genes prescribe the capacity to develop a certain array of traits.”

“The borderline between normal and schizophrenic people is broad and nearly imperceptible.”

“The three extreme kinds of schizophrenia are unmistakable: the haunted paranoid surrounded by his imaginary community of spies and assassins, the clownish, sometimes incontinent hebephrenic, and the frozen catatonic.”

“Although the capacity to become schizophrenic may well be within all of us, there is no question that certain persons have distinctive genes predisposing them to the condition.”

“Evidence has... been adduced that schizophrenia is widespread in other kinds of human societies. ...and they form a substantial fraction of the clientele of the tribal shamans and healers.”

“There is no such thing as a typically "schizophrenogenic" (schizophrenia-producing) family arrangement, one most likely to produce a mentally ill adult from a child with the potential for the disease.”

“The central idea of the philosophy of behaviorism, that behavior and the mind have an entirely materialist basis subject to experimental analysis, is fundamentally sound.”

“Piaget, who was originally trained as a biologist, views intellectual development as an interaction of an inherited genetic program with the environment. It is no coincidence that he calls this conception "genetic epistemology," in effect the study of the hereditary unfolding of understanding.”

“The rules followed are tight enough to produce a broad overlap in the decisions taken by all individuals and hence a convergence powerful enough to be labelled human nature.”

“Because the brain can be guided by rational calculation only in a limited degree, it must fall back on the nuances of pleasure and pain mediated by the limbic system and other lower centers of the brain.”

“We can search among the unconscious, emotion-laden learning rules for the kind of behavior most directly influenced by genetic evolution.”

“In early history phobias might have provided the extra margin needed to insure survival...”

“The incest taboo is another major category of primed learning.”

“We seem to be able to be fully comfortable only when the remainder of humanity can be labeled as members versus nonmembers.”

“Because of mathematical indeterminancy and the uncertainty principle, it may be a law of nature that no nervous system is capable of acquiring enough knowledge to significantly predict the future of any other intelligent system in detail. Nor can intelligent minds gain enough self-knowledge to know their own future, capture fate, and in this sense eliminate free will.”

“The cardinal mystery of neurobiology is not self-love or dreams of immortality but intentionality. What is the prime mover, the weaver who guides the flashing shuttles?”

“A schema is a configuration within the brain, either inborn or learned, against which the input of the nerve cells is compared. ...the conscious mind ...can fill in details that are missing from the actual sensory input and create a pattern in the mind which is not necessarily present in reality. In this way, the gestalt of objects—the impression...—is aided by the taxonomic powers of the schemata.”

“Cultural change is the statistical product of the separate behavioral responses of large numbers of human beings who cope as best they can with social existence.”

“Cultural evolution is Lamarckian and very fast, whereas biological evolution is Darwinian and usually very slow.”

“Because it is... far slower than Lamarckian evolution, biological evolution is always quickly outrun by cultural change.”

“Intertribal aggression, escalating in some cultures to limited warfare, is common enough to be regarded as a general characteristic of hunter-gatherer social behavior.”

“The only other mammalian carnivores that take outsized prey are lions, hyenas, wolves, and African wild dogs. Each... has an exceptionally advanced social life, prominently featuring the pursuit of prey in coordinated packs.”

“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.”

“The selection pressures of hunter-gatherer existence have persisted for over 99 percent of human evolution.”

“The increase in brain size and refinement of stone artifacts point to an unbroken advance in mental ability over the last two or three million years. ...No organ in the history of life has grown faster.”

“The theory of population genetics and experiments on other organisms show that substantial changes can occur in the span of less than 100 generations, which for man reaches back to the time of the Roman Empire.”

“The emergence of civilization has everywhere followed a definable sequence.”

“At the apogee of the state's evolution, architecture was monumental, and the ruling class were exalted as a pseudospecies. The sacred rites of statehood became the central focus of religion.”

“Nationalism and racism, to take two examples, are the culturally nurtured outgrowths of simple tribalism.”

“Daily life is a comprimised blend of posturing for the sake of role-playing and of varying degrees of self-revelation. Under stressful conditions even the "true" self cannot be precisely defined, as Erving Goffman observes. ...Little wonder that the identity crisis is a major source of modern neuroticism, and that the urban middle class aches for a return to a simpler existence.”

“Early human beings... filled a special ecological niche: they were carnivorous primates of the African plains. ...When agriculture permitted the increase of population density, game was no longer abundant... carnivorism remained a basic dietary impulse, with cultural aftereffects that varied according to the special conditions of the environment in which the society evolved.”

“Ancient Mexico, like most forest-invested New World tropics, was deficient in the kind of large game that flourished on the plains of Africa and Asia. ...The situation was partially relieved by cannibalizing the victims of human sacrifice. ...The [ Aztec ] priesthood... sanctified it... immediately after their hearts had been cut out, the victims were systematically butchered like animals and their parts distributed and eaten.”

“I interpret contemporary human social behavior to comprise hypertrophic outgrowths of the simpler features of human nature joined together into an irregular mosaic.”

“The fraction of Americans working in occupations concerned primarily with information has increased from 20 to nearly 50 percent of the work force.”

“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.”

“Self-knowledge will reveal the elements of biological human nature from which modern social life proliferated in all its strange forms.”

“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.”

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

“The most peaceable tribes of today were often ravagers of yesteryear and will probably again produce soldiers and murderers in the future.”

“Most kinds of aggressive behavior among members of the same species are responsive to crowding in the environment.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.”

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

“The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another.”

“Nothing fundamental separates the course of human history from the course of physical history.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Be prepared mentally for some amount of chaos and failure. Waste and frustration often attend the earliest stages.”

“Much of good science — and perhaps all of great science — has its roots in fantasy.”

“The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”