Quotes By E. O. Wilson

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

Every kid has a bug period.

True character arises from a deeper well than religion.

The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.

I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.

When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.

I grew up as a Southern Baptist with strict adherence to the Bible, which I read as a youngster.

The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.

The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago.

'The Creation' presents an argument for saving biological diversity on Earth. Most of the book is for as broad an audience as possible.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.

Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

There is no better high than discovery.

Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn't stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass.

Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.

Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.

Companies that are willing to share, to withhold in order to further the growth of the company, willing to try to get a better atmosphere through a demonstration of democratic principles, fairness and cooperation, a better product, those will win in the end.

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.

We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories.

All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments.

But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.

Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.

In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the "environmentalist" view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.

Every kid has a bug period... I never grew out of mine.

Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.