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
land dwelling humanity
So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months.
believe thinking ideas
Most people believe they know how they themselves think, how others think too, and even how institutions evolve. But they are wrong. Their understanding is based on folk psychology, the grasp of human nature by common sense ¾ defined (by Einstein) as everything learned to the age of 18 ¾ shot through with misconceptions, and only slightly advanced over ideas employed by the Greek philosophers
butterfly eight orchids
Somewhere close I knew spear-nosed bats flew through the tree crowns in search of fruit, palm vipers coiled in ambush in the roots of orchids, jaguars walked the river's edge; around them eight hundred species of trees stood, more than are native to all of North America; and a thousand species of butterflies, 6 percent of the entire world fauna, waited for the dawn.
mind religion hens
[W]hen the martyr's righteous forebrain is exploded by the executioner's bullet and his mind disintegrates, what then? Can we safely assume that all those millions of neural circuits will be reconstituted in an immaterial state, so the conscious mind carries on?
prayer religion world
No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system; if it were otherwise the whole world would pray continuously.
faith dream age
Science offers the boldest metaphysics of the age. It is a thoroughly human construct, driven by the faith that if we dream, press to discover, explain, and dream again, thereby plunging repeatedly into new terrain, the world will somehow come clearer and we will grasp the true strangeness of the universe. And the strangeness will all prove to be connected, and make sense.
play imagination giving
To search for unasked questions, plus questions to put to already acquired but unsought answers, it is vital to give full play to the imagination. That is the way to create truly original science.
mind hunters tasks
The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry
mean views years
Yes, the natural sciences are telling us a great deal about human origins, the origins of our species the origins of our minds; we're on our way to explaining a large part of it. I'll accept an answer provided only by such means as obtaining and exploring, analyzing and arguing over the evidence - not because of a scribe's myopic view of the subject written 500 years before the birth of Christ!
art blood intuition
Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science ... Interpretation is the logical channel of consilient explanation between science and the arts. The arts ... also nourish our craving for the mystical.
struggle diversity arguing
I will argue that every scrap of biological diversity is priceless, to be learned and cherished, and never to be surrendered without a struggle.
frustration waste chaos
Be prepared mentally for some amount of chaos and failure. Waste and frustration often attend the earliest stages.
self class identity
Daily life is a comprimised blend of posturing for the sake of role-playing and of varying degrees of self-revelation. Under stressful conditions even the "true" self cannot be precisely defined, as Erving Goffman observes. ...Little wonder that the identity crisis is a major source of modern neuroticism , and that the urban middle class aches for a return to a simpler existence.
religious belief adaptation
Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.