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" 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. "

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

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

" The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" People respect nonfiction but they read novels. "

" Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view. "

" 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. "

" America in particular imposes an horrendous burden on the world. We have this wonderful standard of living but it comes at enormous cost. "

" Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans. "

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

" 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 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? "

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

" Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species. "

" 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. "