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

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" 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. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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? "

" I'm very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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