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

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

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

" In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty. "

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

" 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. "

" In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner. "

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

" There is no better high than discovery. "

" 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. "

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

" I thought perhaps it should be recognized that religious people, including fundamentalists, are quite intelligent, many of them are highly educated, and they should be treated with complete respect. "

" 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. "

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

" Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

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

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

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

" 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? "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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