Quotes from Edward O. Wilson

The conflict between scientific knowledge and the teachings of organized religions is irreconcilable. The chasm will continue to widen and cause no end of trouble as long as religious leaders go on making unsupportable claims about supernatural causes of reality.

The greater problems of history are not solved; they are merely forgotten.

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.

religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

TO FORM GROUPS, drawing visceral comfort and pride from familiar fellowship, and to defend the group enthusiastically against rival groups—these are among the absolute universals of human nature and hence of culture.

HISTORY IS A bath of blood," wrote William James

The power of organized religions is based upon their contribution to social order and personal security, not to the search for truth. The goal of religions is submission to the will and common good of the tribe. The illogic of religions is not a weakness in them, but their essential strength. Acceptance of the bizarre creation myths binds the members together. Among

We are all genetic chimeras, at once saints and sinners, champions of the truth and hypocrites – not because humanity has failed to reach some foreordained religious or ideological ideal, but because of the way our species originated across millions of years of biological evolution.

Human beings were made for music. Its thrill and rapture are picked up almost immediately by little children

religious faith is better interpreted as an unseen trap unavoidable during the biological history of our species. And if this is correct, surely there exist ways to find spiritual fulfillment without surrender and enslavement. Humankind deserves better.

if our genes are inherited and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment.

Original discoveries, to remind you, are what count the most. Let me put that more strongly: they are all that counts. They are the silver and gold of science.

For most of history, organized religions have claimed sovereignty over the meaning of human existence. For their founders and leaders the enigma has been relatively easy to solve. The gods put us on Earth, then they told us how to behave. Why should people around the world continue to believe one fantasy over another out of the more than four thousand that exist on Earth? The answer is tribalism

When an individual is cooperative and altruistic, this reduces his advantage in competition to a comparable degree with other members but increases the survival and reproduction rate of the group as a whole. In a nutshell, individual selection favors what we call sin and group selection favors virtue. The result is the internal conflict of conscience that afflicts all but psychopaths, estimated fortunately to make up only 1 to 4 percent of the population.

Perhaps the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized - made part of the new synthesis.

For every problem in a given discipline of science, there exists a species or other entity or phenomenon ideal for its solution. (Example: a kind of mollusk, Aplysia, proved ideal for exploring the cellular base of memory.) Conversely, for every species or other entity or phenomenon, there exist important problems for the solution of which it is ideally suited. (Example: bats were logical for the discovery of sonar.)

Out of the warlike peoples arose civilization, while the peaceful collectors and hunters were driven to the ends of the earth, where they are gradually being exterminated or absorbed, with only the dubious satisfaction of observing the nations which had wielded war so effectively to destroy them and to become great, now victimized by their own instrument.

Natural selection, the driving force of biological evolution in both individual and group selection, is captured in a single phrase: mutation proposes, the environment disposes.

if our conception of human nature is to be altered, it must be by means of truths conforming to the canons of scientific evidence and not a new dogma however devoutly wished for.

we are chemosensory idiots. By comparison most other organisms are geniuses.

no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history. Species may have vast potential for material and mental progress but they lack any immanent purpose or guidance from agents beyond their immediate environment or even an evolutionary goal toward which their molecular architecture automatically steers them.

People are prone to ethnocentrism. It is an uncomfortable fact that even when given a guilt-free choice, individuals prefer the company of others of the same race, nation, clan, and religion. They

We are a biological species arising from Earth's biosphere as one adapted species among many; and however splendid our languages and cultures, however rich and subtle our minds, however vast our creative powers, the mental process is the product of a brain shaped by the hammer of natural selection upon the anvil of nature.

the biological mind is the essence and the very meaning of the human condition.