Quotes from Edward O. Wilson

What drove the hominins on through to larger brains, higher intelligence, and thence language-based culture? That, of course, is the question of questions.

The agent causing the most immediate damage to species in fresh water are dams, great boosters of local economies but unfortunately chief demons of aquatic habitat destruction. Their

except for behaving like apes much of the time and suffering genetically limited life spans, we are godlike.

successful research doesn't depend on mathematical skill, or even the deep understanding of theory. It depends on large degree on choosing an important problem and finding a way to solve it, even if imperfectly at first. Very often ambition and entrepreneurial drive, in combination, beat brilliance.

Annie Dillard was a pioneer in her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Among other notable examples are David M. Carroll's Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook (2009); David George Haskell's The Forest Unseen (2012); and Dave Goulson's A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm (2015).

But history shows that logic launched from introspection alone lacks thrust, can travel only so far, and usually heads in the wrong direction.

Thinking about thinking is the core process of the creative arts, but it tells us very little about how we think the way we do, and nothing of why the creative arts originated in the first place.

The human species is, in a word, an environmental hazard. It is possible that intelligence in the wrong kind of species was foreordained to be a fatal combination for the biosphere.

If science depended on rhetoric and polls, we would still be burning objects with phlogiston and navigating with geocentric maps. [Criticizing Richard Dawkins]

A] new idea will, like mother earth, take some serious hits. If good it will survive, probably in modified form. If bad it will die, usually at the time of death or retirement of the last original proponent. As Paul Samuelson once said of the science of economics: funeral by funeral, theory advances.

The ongoing mass extinction of species, and with it the extinction of genes and ecosystems, ranks with pandemics, world war, and climate change as among the deadliest threats that humanity has imposed on itself.

S]elfish members win within groups, but groups of altruists best groups of selfish members. (63)

A cheerful faith in human destiny dismisses the rest of life through successive denials.

The original level of biodiversity is not likely to be regained in any period of time that has meaning for the human mind.

I am now convinced that it is better to work from science into literature than to try the reverse, though many have done so with distinction. To understand the scientific culture deeply and, even more, to express the emotions that attend scientific exploration require that the writer inhabit science for a substantial part of his life, intent upon making important discoveries and placing them within the canon.

Ethical philosophers intuit the deontological canons of morality by consulting the emotive centers of their own hypothalamic-limbic system... Only by interpreting the activity of the emotive centers as a biological adaptation can the meaning of the ethical canons be deciphered.

What happened, what we think happened, in distant memory, is built around a small collection of dominating images. In one of my own from the age of seven, I stand in the shallows off Paradise Beach, staring down at a huge jellyfish in water so still and clear that its every detail is revealed as though it were trapped in glass. The creature is astonishing. It existed outside my previous imagination.

One of its most distinguished practitioners, Alexander Rosenberg, has recently argued that philosophy in fact addresses just two issues: the questions that the sciences—physical, biological, and social—cannot answer, and the reasons for that incapacity.

ALMOST ALL MY LIFE I HAVE DREAMED OF THE TROPICS. MY fantasies drifted far beyond the benign temperate zone of Thoreau and Muir.

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 very 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.)

For the contender religion is a sword, for the defender it is a shield.

Not least for those who are called foreigners, for they are not foreigners. For, while the various segments of the Earth give different people a different country, the whole compass of this world gives all people a single country, the entire Earth, and a single home, the world.

Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals.

individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.