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

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

" 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. "

" If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" There is no better high than discovery. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world. "

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

" In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work. "

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

" People respect nonfiction but they read novels. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "