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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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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
Knowledge
Mutually
Universe
Radically
Different
Exclusive
Believe
Scientific
Way
Traditional
Ways
Depict
Belief
Bedrock
Religious
Incompatible

More quotes by E. O. Wilson

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One difference between ants and humans is that while ants send their old women off to war, humans send their young men.
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You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.
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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.
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People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.
E. O. Wilson
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Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?
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Genius is the summed production of the many with the names of the few attached for easy recall.
E. O. Wilson
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In the end ... success or failure will come down to an ethical decision, one on which those now living will be judged for generations to come.
E. O. Wilson
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We use pandas and eagles and things. I'd love to see a wilderness society with an angry-looking wolverine as their logo.
E. O. Wilson
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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.
E. O. Wilson
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If enough species are extinguished, will the ecosystems collapse, and will the extinction of most other species follow soon afterward? The only answer anyone can give is: possibly. By the time we find out, however, it might be too late. One planet, one experiment.
E. O. Wilson
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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.
E. O. Wilson
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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
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Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.
E. O. Wilson
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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
E. O. Wilson
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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
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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
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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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In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
E. O. Wilson
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No one knows the diversity in the world, not even to the nearest order of magnitude. ... We don't know for sure how many species there are, where they can be found or how fast they're disappearing. It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.
E. O. Wilson
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The genius of human society is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken, and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute.
E. O. Wilson