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We don't need to clear the 4 to 6 percent of the Earth's surface remaining in tropical rain forests, with most of the animal and plant species living there.
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
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Tropical
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Forests
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Earth
Plant
More quotes by E. O. Wilson
Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.
E. O. Wilson
Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. Four out of five animals on Earth are nematode worms — if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
Genius is the summed production of the many with the names of the few attached for easy recall.
E. O. Wilson
No one knows the diversity in the world, not even to the nearest order of magnitude. ... We don't know for sure how many species there are, where they can be found or how fast they're disappearing. It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.
E. O. Wilson
Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others. It is not obedience to authority, and while it is often consistent with and reinforced by religious belief, it is not piety.
E. O. Wilson
If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months.
E. O. Wilson
The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
E. O. Wilson
From the freedom to explore comes the joy of learning. From knowledge acquired by personal initiative arises the desire for more knowledge. And from mastery of the novel and beautiful world awaiting every child comes self-confidence.
E. O. Wilson
We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.
E. O. Wilson
Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.
E. O. Wilson
Human nature is deeper and broader than the artificial contrivance of any existing culture.
E. O. Wilson
When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
E. O. Wilson
Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
The closer the genetic relationship of the family members, as for example father-to-son, as opposed to uncle-to-nephew, the higher the degree of cooperation.
E. O. Wilson
