E. O. Wilson

"I had in mind a message, although I hope it doesn't intrude too badly, persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, of the critical importance of land and our vanishing natural environment and wildlife."

E. O. Wilson

"The race to make discoveries of the greatest generality, to solve the major problems in the 'mainstream of biology,' does not strike me as the best research strategy to teach to students. It results in an implosive convergence of effort on a few subjects, in a sharp decline in the number of discoveries per man per unit time, and in frustration on the part of young scientists who realize too late that their own professors have picked up the best pebbles on the beach."

E. O. Wilson

"[Biology has] become the paramount science, exceeding other disciplines, including physics and chemistry at least, in the creative tumult of its disciplines and disputations. [...] I'll also be so bold at this point to suggest that we are now at the edge of establishing the two fundamental laws of biology: The first law is that all of the phenomena of biology, the entities and the processes, are ultimately obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry. Not immediately reducible to them, but ultimately consistent and in consilience with them, by a cause and effect explanation. The second law is that all biological phenomena, these entities and processes that define life itself, have arisen by evolution through natural selection."

E. O. Wilson

"This planet can be a paradise in the 22nd century."

E. O. Wilson

"My definition of a scientist is that you can complete the following sentence: ‘he or she has shown that…’,”"

E. O. Wilson

"Wonderful theory, wrong species. (On Marxism, which he considered more suited to ants than to humans.)"

E. O. Wilson

"The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us."

E. O. Wilson

"Will we solve the crises of next hundred years? asked Krulwich. “Yes, if we are honest and smart,” said Wilson. “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.” Until we understand ourselves, concluded the Pulitzer-prize winning author of On Human Nature, “until we answer those huge questions of philosophy that the philosophers abandoned a couple of generations ago—Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?—rationally,” we’re on very thin ground."

E. O. Wilson

"The pattern of human population growth in the 20th century was more bacterial than primate. When Homo sapiens passed the six billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that had ever existed on the land. We and the rest of life cannot afford another 100 years like that."

E. O. Wilson

"We have stone age emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology."

E. O. Wilson

"In the process of natural selection, then. any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species."

E. O. Wilson

"Samuel Butler's famous aphorism that the chicken is only an egg's way of making another egg has been modernized: the organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA."

E. O. Wilson

"The key to the sociobiology of mammals is milk."

E. O. Wilson

"The evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have."

E. O. Wilson

"God remains a viable hypothesis as the prime mover, however undefinable and untestable that conception may be."

E. O. Wilson

"We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom and dignity."

E. O. Wilson

"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

"Genetic determinism... On its interpretation depends the entire relation between biology and the social sciences."

E. O. Wilson

"The mosquito is an automaton. It can afford to be nothing else."

E. O. Wilson

"The channels of human mental development... are circuitous and variable. Rather than specify a single trait, human genes prescribe the capacity to develop a certain array of traits."

E. O. Wilson

"The borderline between normal and schizophrenic people is broad and nearly imperceptible."

E. O. Wilson

"The three extreme kinds of schizophrenia are unmistakable: the haunted paranoid surrounded by his imaginary community of spies and assassins, the clownish, sometimes incontinent hebephrenic, and the frozen catatonic."

E. O. Wilson

"Although the capacity to become schizophrenic may well be within all of us, there is no question that certain persons have distinctive genes predisposing them to the condition."

E. O. Wilson

"Evidence has... been adduced that schizophrenia is widespread in other kinds of human societies. ...and they form a substantial fraction of the clientele of the tribal shamans and healers."

E. O. Wilson

"There is no such thing as a typically "schizophrenogenic" (schizophrenia-producing) family arrangement, one most likely to produce a mentally ill adult from a child with the potential for the disease."

E. O. Wilson