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Quotes by Edward O. Wilson

A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.
– Edward O. Wilson
Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
– Edward O. Wilson
By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified. Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as is widely believed, between the literate and illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from prescientific cultures.
– Edward O. Wilson
Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.
– Edward O. Wilson
Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
– Edward O. Wilson
Each species is a masterpiece, a creation assembled with extreme care and genius.
– Edward O. Wilson
Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.
– Edward O. Wilson
Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
– Edward O. Wilson
Humanity is part of nature, a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the sources of human sensibility and acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built.
– Edward O. Wilson
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.
– Edward O. Wilson
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.
– Edward O. Wilson
It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.
– Edward O. Wilson
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.
– Edward O. Wilson
Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
– Edward O. Wilson
No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system; if it were otherwise the whole world would pray continuously.
– Edward O. Wilson
Old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
– Edward O. Wilson
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.
– Edward O. Wilson
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.
– Edward O. Wilson
Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
– Edward O. Wilson
Prescientific people... could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe in the unknown, has yielded zero.
– Edward O. Wilson
Science is not marginal. Like art, it is a universal possession of humanity, and scientific knowledge has become a vital part of our species' repertory. It comprises what we know of the material world with reasonable certainty. Thanks to science and technology, access to factual information of all kinds is rising exponentially.
– Edward O. Wilson
Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.
– Edward O. Wilson
Stable climates with muted seasons allow more kinds of organisms to specialize on narrower pieces of the environment, to outcompete the generalists around them, and so persist for longer periods of time. Species are packed more tightly. No niche, it seems goes unfilled. Specialization is likely to be pushed to bizarre, beautiful extremes.
– Edward O. Wilson
The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbor a nonphysical mind.
– Edward O. Wilson
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?
– Edward O. Wilson
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.
– Edward O. Wilson
The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.
– Edward O. Wilson
The larger the pie, the greater number of possible slices big enough to sustain the lives of individual species.
– Edward O. Wilson
The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly that our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
– Edward O. Wilson
The true natural sciences lock together in theory and evidence to form the ineradicable technical base of modern civilization. The pseudosciences satisfy personal psychological needs... but lack the ideas or the means to contribute to the technical base.
– Edward O. Wilson
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?
– Edward O. Wilson
There is a hereditary selective advantage to membership in a powerful group united by devout belief and purpose. Even when individuals subordinate themselves and risk death in common cause, their genes are more likely to be transmitted to the next generation than are those of competing groups who lack equivalent resolve.
– Edward O. Wilson
There is no better high than discovery.
– Edward O. Wilson
True character arises from a deeper well than religion.
– Edward O. Wilson
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.
– Edward O. Wilson
We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.
– Edward O. Wilson
When the martyr's righteous forebrain is exploded by the executioner's bullet and his mind disintegrates, what then? Can we safely assume that all those millions of neural circuits will be reconstituted in an immaterial state, so the conscious mind carries on?
– Edward O. Wilson
When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
– Edward O. Wilson
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.
– Edward O. Wilson
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.
– Edward O. Wilson