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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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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
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Evolution
Molecular
Understood
Genetic
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Variation
Levels
Hypothesis
Principles
Selection
Natural
Idle
Wells
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Well
Principle
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Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. Four out of five animals on Earth are nematode worms — if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms.
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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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That's what the best global conservation organisations and the American government (and other environmentally inclined governments, such as Sweden and the Netherlands) are doing: protecting the remaining wild environment. This is the equivalent of getting a patient to the emergency room - keep them alive and then figure out how to save them.
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The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding. Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.
E. O. Wilson
Science is not marginal. Like art, it is a universal possession of humanity, and scientific knowledge has become a vital part of our species' repertory. It comprises what we know of the material world with reasonable certainty. . . . Thanks to science and technology, access to factual information of all kinds is rising exponentially.
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Humanity needs a vision of an expanding and unending future.
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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.
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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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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
The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.
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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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One difference between ants and humans is that while ants send their old women off to war, humans send their young men.
E. O. Wilson
Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.
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Thirty trillion dollars worth of services, scot-free to humanity, every year.
E. O. Wilson
Once I feel I'm right, I have enjoyed provoking.
E. O. Wilson
One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.
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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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The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names.
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In science, obsessiveness under psychological control can be a virtue.
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We are compelled to drive toward total knowledge, right down to the levels of the neuron and the gene. When we have progressed enough to explain ourselves in these mechanistic terms...the result might be hard to accept.
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