Quote

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers.

E. O. Wilson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Workers
Predator
Tell
Cemetery
Wells
Ants
Well
Quarter
Much
Insects
Make
Quarters
World
Dominant
Biomass
Principal
Predators

More quotes by E. O. Wilson

Image
The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names.
E. O. Wilson
Image
I would say that for the sake of human progress, the best thing we could possibly do would be to diminish, to the point of eliminating, religious faiths. But certainly not eliminating the natural yearnings of our species or the asking of these great questions.
E. O. Wilson
Image
Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.
E. O. Wilson
Image
I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
E. O. Wilson
Image
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
Image
[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?
E. O. Wilson
Image
I will argue that every scrap of biological diversity is priceless, to be learned and cherished, and never to be surrendered without a struggle.
E. O. Wilson
Image
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.
E. O. Wilson
Image
Biophilia: the innate pleasure from living abundance and diversity as manifested by the human impulse to imitate Nature with gardens.
E. O. Wilson
Image
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
Image
It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.
E. O. Wilson
Image
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
Image
An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.
E. O. Wilson
Image
In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.
E. O. Wilson
Image
By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified. Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as is widely believed, between the literate and illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from prescientific cultures.
E. O. Wilson
Image
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.
E. O. Wilson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The search for knowledge is in our genes. It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it's never going to be quenched.
E. O. Wilson
Image
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions medieval institutions and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
E. O. Wilson