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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.

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
Humanity
Fit
Globes
Living
Planet
Billion
Give
Standards
Standard
Giving
Planets
Desperate
Life
Higher
Pushing
People
Rest
Attempt
Risk
Billions
Environment
Environmental
Globe

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Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.
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Companies that are willing to share, to withhold in order to further the growth of the company, willing to try to get a better atmosphere through a demonstration of democratic principles, fairness and cooperation, a better product, those will win in the end.
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These slender little people (Homo Habilis), the size of modern 12 year olds, were devoid of fangs and claws and almost certainly slower on foot than the four legged animals around them. They could have succeeded in their new way of life only by relying on tools and sophisticated cooperative behavior
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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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[T]he true natural sciences lock together in theory and evidence to form the ineradicable technical base of modern civilization. The pseudosciences satisfy personal psychological needs... but lack the ideas or the means to contribute to the technical base.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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Overall, the human brain is the most complex object known in the universe - known, that is, to itself.
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In the early stages of creation of both art and science, everything in the mind is a story.
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What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.
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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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In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.
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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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All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments.
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We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
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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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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.
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I turned to the teeming small creatures that can be held between the thumb and forefinger: the little things that compose the foundation of our ecosystems, the little things, as I like to say, who run the world.
E. O. Wilson