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Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they've had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.

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
Great
Insects
Years
Dominant
World
Surface
Impact
Million
Millions
Habitats
Land
Habitat
Almost
Ants

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It may be argued that to know one kind of beetle is to know them all. But a species is not like a molecule in a cloud of molecules-it is a unique population.
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In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.
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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.
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The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names.
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Sstudying ants just quickly became part of me because I was allowed to wander, explore and find things and figure things out myself. And I saw how much was there and what could be done and how I could make a life of it.
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The love of complexity without reductionism makes art the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.
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We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology.
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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.
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Humanity is part of nature, a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the sources of human sensibility and acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built.
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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.
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The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.
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America in particular imposes an horrendous burden on the world. We have this wonderful standard of living but it comes at enormous cost.
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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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And pigs may fly. And we may be able to terraform and send surface populations to Mars. And Jesus may come next week anyway, so it doesn't matter one way or the other. All these crazy things run through people's minds.
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Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.
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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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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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Mating Strategy is influenced by the cardinal fact that women have more at stake in sexual activity than men, because of the limited age span in which they can reproduce and the heavy investment required of them with each child conceived. In courtship women consistently emphasize commitment of resources and material security.
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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.
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I think we will make it. Because one quality people have - certainly Americans have it - is that they can adapt when they see necessity staring them in the face. What to avoid is what someone once called the definition of hell: truth realized too late.
E. O. Wilson