1,070 Quotes by E. O. Wilson

Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn’t prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.

Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they’ve had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.

It’s obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life – for 8 billion or more people – without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

We use pandas and eagles and things. I’d love to see a wilderness society with an angry-looking wolverine as their logo.

In my heart, I’m an Alabaman who went up north to work.

The vast majority of species that are vanishing, we haven’t even discovered yet. How can you possibly put them back in nature if the ecosystem is gone?

The essence of humanity’s spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?

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.