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No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system if it were otherwise the whole world would pray continuously.

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
Perhaps
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Prayer
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Religion
Pray
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Immune

More quotes by E. O. Wilson

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There are millions and millions of species, including organisms most people have never heard of. There is so much that waits to be told. We don't know the functions of most of them, but they may be more vital for the planet's future sustainability than we can even dream. And we have to find out we need to be doing this sort of study.
E. O. Wilson
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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.
E. O. Wilson
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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
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In science, obsessiveness under psychological control can be a virtue.
E. O. Wilson
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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.
E. O. Wilson
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The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.
E. O. Wilson
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The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names.
E. O. Wilson
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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.
E. O. Wilson
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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.
E. O. Wilson
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People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
E. O. Wilson
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But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.
E. O. Wilson
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Wonderful theory, wrong species.
E. O. Wilson
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We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.
E. O. Wilson
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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
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Evolution by natural selection is not an idle hypothesis. The genetic variation on which selection acts is well understood in principle all the way down to the molecular level.
E. O. Wilson
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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
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The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper
E. O. Wilson
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We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories.
E. O. Wilson
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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.
E. O. Wilson
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Overall, the human brain is the most complex object known in the universe - known, that is, to itself.
E. O. Wilson