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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" There is no better high than discovery. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "