E. O. Wilson
E. O. Wilson
Edward Osborne Wilson, usually cited as E. O. Wilson, is an American biologist, researcher, theorist, naturalistand author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants, on which he is considered to be the world's leading expert...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth10 June 1929
CountryUnited States of America
animal land ecosystems
While ants exist in just the right numbers for the rest of the living world, humans have become too numerous. If we were to vanish today, the land environment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion. Only a dozen or so species, among which are the crab louse and a mite that lives in the oil glands of our foreheads, depend on us entirely. But if ants were to disappear, tens of thousands of other plants and animal species would perish also, simplifying and weakening land ecosystems almost everywhere.
years storm world
This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms-folded them into its genes-and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady.
garden diversity abundance
Biophilia: the innate pleasure from living abundance and diversity as manifested by the human impulse to imitate Nature with gardens.
mystery evolution calculus
That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.
philosophy heart progress
Progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard.... let us not pretend to deny in our philosophy what we know in our hearts to be true.
epic myth
The evolutionary epic is ... the best myth we will ever have.
variation levels way
Evolution by natural selection is not an idle hypothesis. The genetic variation on which selection acts is well understood in principle all the way down to the molecular level.
spiritual views essence
The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?
political mind ideology
Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
humanity vision needs
Humanity needs a vision of an expanding and unending future.
dust people purpose
People must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obligated by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here.
virtue psychological
In science, obsessiveness under psychological control can be a virtue.
destiny men illness
Man's destiny is to know, if only because societies with knowledge culturally dominate societies that lack it. Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness. They stay in thatched huts and die young.
religious believe different
I believe that traditional religious belief and scientific knowledge depict the universe in radically different ways. At the bedrock they are incompatible and mutually exclusive.