Quotes from Edward O. Wilson

Timothy Beatley in Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning (2011)

The integrative powers of the brain for the sensations that come from handling objects spills out into all other domains of intelligence.

Who are we to destroy the planet's Creation? Each species around us is a masterpiece of evolution, exquisitely adapted to its environment. Species existing today are thousands to millions of years old. Their genes, having been tested by adversity over countless generations, engineer a staggeringly complex mix of biochemical devices that promote the survival and reproduction of the organisms carrying them.

these species have evolved only rarely in evolution.

biophilia, which I will be so bold as to define as the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.

Meat yields higher energy per gram eaten than does vegetation.

While our species continues to manufacture its radically different and untested all-human world, the rest of life should be allowed to endure, for our own safety. While preserving our own deep history, it will, if we choose to let it, continue on its own trajectory through evolutionary time. By thus maintaining two parallel worlds on the planet, humanity will ensure the survival and continued advanced of the rest of life, and of ourselves.

The best of science doesn't consist of mathematical models and experiments, as textbooks make it seem. Those come later. It springs fresh from a more primitive mode of thought, wherein the hunter's mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen. To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought, which in turn dictate the design of the models and experiments. Easy to say, difficult to achieve.

selfish members win within groups, but groups of altruists best groups of selfish members.

Our lives are restrained by two laws of biology: all of life's entities and processes are obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry; and all of life's entities and processes have arisen through evolution and natural selection.

Art is the lie that helps us to see the truth.

Some psychiatrists even see a kind of twisted rationale in the mind of the schizophrenic: the individual tries to escape from his intolerable social environment by creating a private inner world. But the fact remains that certain genes predispose individuals toward schizophrenia. Individuals possessing them can develop the pathology while growing up in the midst of normal, supportive families.

A great deal remains to be learned about the genetic control of brain development

The reason is simply the extreme improbability of the preadaptations necessary for it to occur at all. Each of these evolutionary steps has been a full-blown adaptation in its own right.

pseudospeciation, the reduction of alien societies to the status of inferior species, not fully human, who can be degraded without conscience. Even

the origin of eusociality requires the preadaptation of a constructed and guarded nest site.

People would rather believe than know.

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

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.

Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species

Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.

You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand.

One planet, one experiment.

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.