Quotes from E. O. Wilson

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

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

Every kid has a bug period... I never grew out of mine.

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

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

But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.

Look closely at nature. Every species is a masterpiece, exquisitely adapted to the particular environment in which it has survived. Who are we to destroy or even diminish biodiversity?

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

Biophilia: the innate pleasure from living abundance and diversity as manifested by the human impulse to imitate Nature with gardens.

Each species is a masterpiece, a creation assembled with extreme care and genius.

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?

Only in the last moment in history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.

Humanity, in the desperate attempt to fit 8 billion or more people on the planet and give them a higher standard of living, is at risk of pushing the rest of life off the globe.

So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months.

To search for unasked questions, plus questions to put to already acquired but unsought answers, it is vital to give full play to the imagination. That is the way to create truly original science.

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 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.

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.

The search for knowledge is in our genes. It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it's never going to be quenched.

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

Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.

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

The closer the genetic relationship of the family members, as for example father-to-son, as opposed to uncle-to-nephew, the higher the degree of cooperation.