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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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Remaining
Clear
Forests
Living
Surface
Earth
Plant
More quotes by E. O. Wilson
A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.
E. O. Wilson
In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.
E. O. Wilson
Destroying a tropical rainforest for profit is like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner.
E. O. Wilson
Because the living environment is what really sustains us.
E. O. Wilson
We are compelled to drive toward total knowledge, right down to the levels of the neuron and the gene. When we have progressed enough to explain ourselves in these mechanistic terms...the result might be hard to accept.
E. O. Wilson
The newborn infant is now seen to be wired with awesome precision... This marvelous robot will be launched into the world under the care of its parents... But to what extent does the wiring of the neurons, so undeniably encoded in the genes, preordain the directions that social development will follow?
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
The living environment is the biosphere, the thin layer around the world of living organisms. We're part of that. Our existence is dependent on it in ways that people haven't even begun to appreciate. Our existence depends not just on its existence, but its stability and its richness.
E. O. Wilson
Each of these [bacterial] species are masterpieces of evolution. Each has persisted for thousands to millions of years. Each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine.
E. O. Wilson
Humanity needs a vision of an expanding and unending future.
E. O. Wilson
In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.
E. O. Wilson
No species ... possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history ... The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.
E. O. Wilson
We've got paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies.
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
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.
E. O. Wilson
Human beings function better if they are deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a disinterested objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey.
E. O. Wilson
Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmland the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind.
E. O. Wilson
Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.
E. O. Wilson
[Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].
E. O. Wilson
The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.
E. O. Wilson
