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" 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. "

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" 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. "

E. O. Wilson

Back

Chaos

Environmental

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I was a senior in high school when I decided I wanted to work on ants as a career. I just fell in love with them, and have never regretted it. "

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

" I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I grew up as a Southern Baptist with strict adherence to the Bible, which I read as a youngster. "

E. O. Wilson

Bible

Strict

" 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. "

" All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

E. O. Wilson

Behavior

Growth

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