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" Because the living environment is what really sustains us. "

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" The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere. "

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

" It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can. "

" 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. "

" In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" True character arises from a deeper well than religion. "

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

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