Quotes from Edward O. Wilson

From the freedom to explore comes the joy of learning. From knowledge acquired by personal initiative arises the desire for more knowledge. And from mastery of the novel and beautiful world awaiting every child comes self-confidence. The growth of a naturalist is like the growth of a musician or athlete: excellence for the talented, lifelong enjoyment for the rest, benefit for humanity.

Science has become the most democratic of all human endeavors. It is neither religion nor ideology. It makes no claims beyond what can be sensed in the real world. It generates knowledge in the most productive and unifying manner contrived in history, and it serves humanity without obeisance to any particular tribal deity.

primary mental abilities and perceptual and motor skills are the most influenced by heredity, while personality traits are the least influenced. If

Much of culture, including especially the content of the creative arts, has arisen from the inevitable clash of individual selection and group selection.

Science owns the warrant to explore everything deemed factual and possible, but the humanities, borne aloft by both fact and fantasy, have the power of everything not only possible but also conceivable.

What counts in science is the importance of the discovery. What matters in literature is the originality and power of the metaphor.

To express this increasingly complex subject as succinctly as possible, the ancestors of our species developed the brain power to connect with other minds and to conceive unlimited time, distance, and potential outcomes. This infinite reach of imagination, put quite simply, is what made us great.

eusociality, the most advanced state of social behavior

Someone has defined insanity as an inability to choose among false alternatives. In dreams we are insane. We wander across our limitless dreamscapes as madmen.

And as to the wonders of modern technology, bear in mind that a sidewalk weed and a protozoan are each more complex than any device yet invented by humanity.

phenotypic plasticity

Learning to play a musical instrument even alters the structure of the brain, from subcortical circuits that encode sound patterns to neural fibers that connect the two cerebral hemispheres and patterns of gray matter density in certain regions of the cerebral cortex.

The International Energy Agency insists that somehow humanity must plan to leave most of the world's proven oil and gas reserves in the ground to blunt otherwise ruinous climate change, adding that "no more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050.

Like most other mammals, human beings display a behavioral scale, a spectrum of responses that appear or disappear according to particular circumstances.

it is easy to forget that religious art is dedicated to the regnant creation story, that deviation from the story is not permitted, and that brutal wars have been fought to replace one story over another. The secular humanities, to put the matter plainly, must compete with organized religions and religion-like ideologies for attention and volunteer public funding. The first is free to explore and innovate; the other is not.

The creation myth is a Darwinian device for survival. Tribal conflict, where believers on the inside were pitted against infidels on the outside, was a principal driving force that shaped biological human nature.

Also, human groups are formed of highly flexible alliances, not just among family members but between families, genders, classes, and tribes. The bonding is based on cooperation among individuals or groups who know one another and are capable of distributing ownership and status on a personal basis.

Si nuestra especie tiene un alma, ésta reside en las humanidades.

Traditional religious beliefs have been eroded, not so much by humiliating disproofs of their mythologies as by the growing awareness that beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival. Religions

if we save the living world, we will also automatically save the physical world, because in order to achieve the first we must also achieve the second. But if we save only the physical world, which appears our present inclination, we will ultimately lose them both.

Somos la única especie que ha comprendido la realidad del mundo viviente, que ha visto la belleza de la naturaleza y que le ha dado valor al individuo. Sólo nosotros hemos valorado la cualidad de la misericordia entre los de nuestra clase. Ahora, ¿podríamos preocuparnos también por el mundo viviente que nos dio a luz?

The origin of modern humanity was a stroke of luck—good for our species for a while, bad for most of the rest of life forever. All

It follows that most people would very much like science to prove the existence of God but not to take the measure of His capacity.

People around the world today, growing cautious of war and fearful of its consequences, have turned increasingly to its moral equivalent in team sports.