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The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.

E. O. Wilson

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E. O. Wilson
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: June 10
Autobiographer
Biologist
Ecologist
Entomologist
Ethologist
Evolutionary Biologist
Myrmecologist
Naturalist
Novelist
Science Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
E. O. Wilson
Edward Osborne
EO Wilson
E O Wilson
Edward Osborne Wilson
Wilson
Edward Wilson
Junior
Millions
Folly
Least
Forgive
Natural
Forgiving
Habitats
Process
Diversity
Habitat
Take
Likely
Descendants
Going
Destruction
Genetic
Years
Species
Conservation
Loss
Correct

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But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.
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The education of women is the best way to save the environment.
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In science, obsessiveness under psychological control can be a virtue.
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Humanity, in the desperate attempt to fit 8 billion or more people on the planet and give them a higher standard of living, is at risk of pushing the rest of life off the globe.
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Because the living environment is what really sustains us.
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Every kid has a bug period, I like to say, and I just got so fascinated and I had that experience, that wonderful life of being able to go out on my own without really any supervision at all. I just lucked out that way. I was trusted as a kid.
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In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
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But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.
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I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.
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Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.
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Thirty trillion dollars worth of services, scot-free to humanity, every year.
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It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.
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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.
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So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.
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The extinctions ongoing worldwide promise to be at least as great as the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the age of dinosaurs.
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The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding. Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.
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People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
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The price of these failures has been a loss of moral consensus, a greater sense of helplessness about the human condition. ... The intellectual solution to the first dilemma can be achieved by a deeper and more courageous examination of human nature that combines the findings of biology with those of the social sciences.
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For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.
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It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.
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