Edward O. Wilson: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Animals use aggression as a technique for gaining control over necessities… that are scarce or are likely to become so… They intensify their threats and attack with increasing frequency as the population around them grow. As a result the behavior itself induces members of the population to spread out in space, raises the death rate, and lowers the birth rate. In such cases aggression is said to be a "density-dependent factor" in controlling population growth.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.5 Aggression

Death , Behavior , Birth , Animals

“The increase in brain size and refinement of stone artifacts point to an unbroken advance in mental ability over the last two or three million years. …No organ in the history of life has grown faster.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.4 Emergence

Life , History

“The emergence of civilization has everywhere followed a definable sequence.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.4 Emergence

“Piaget, who was originally trained as a biologist, views intellectual development as an interaction of an inherited genetic program with the environment. It is no coincidence that he calls this conception "genetic epistemology," in effect the study of the hereditary unfolding of understanding.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.3 Development

Understanding , Study , Training

“To search for unasked questions, plus questions to put to already acquired but unsought answers, it is vital to give full play to the imagination. That is the way to create truly original science.”

Edward O. Wilson

Source: Letters to a Young Scientist (2013), chapter 16, "Searching for New Worlds on Earth", page 177.

Way , Imagination , Search , Question

“To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively.”

Edward O. Wilson

Source: Letters to a Young Scientist (2013), chapter 5, "The Creative Process", page 69.

Understanding , Thinking

“Intertribal aggression, escalating in some cultures to limited warfare, is common enough to be regarded as a general characteristic of hunter-gatherer social behavior.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.4 Emergence

Behavior

“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.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.3 Development

Communication

“Stable climates with muted seasons allow more kinds of organisms to specialize on narrower pieces of the environment, to outcompete the generalists around them, and so persist for longer periods of time. Species are packed more tightly. No niche, it seems goes unfilled. Specialization is likely to be pushed to bizarre, beautiful extremes.”

Edward O. Wilson

The Diversity of Life

Beauty , Time , Season

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

Edward O. Wilson

Statement quoted at the "TED Prize" website, which he won in 2007 http://ted.com/tedprize/winners2007.cfm

“[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.”

Edward O. Wilson

Talk at the 50th anniversary of New Scientist magazine (2006).

Life , Law , Nature , Science

“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.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.3 Development

Disease , Family

“Because it is… far slower than Lamarckian evolution, biological evolution is always quickly outrun by cultural change.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.4 Emergence

Change

“The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another.”

Edward O. Wilson

Source: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), p. 264.

Truth

“At the apogee of the state's evolution, architecture was monumental, and the ruling class were exalted as a pseudospecies. The sacred rites of statehood became the central focus of religion.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.4 Emergence

Religion

“Are human beings innately aggressive? …The answer to it is yes. …Only by redefining the words "innateness" and "aggression" to the point of uselessness might we correctly say that human aggressiveness is not innate.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.5 Aggression

“The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.”

Edward O. Wilson

Biophilia (1984)

Life , Search , Sense , Time

“The incest taboo is another major category of primed learning.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.3 Development

Learning

“Pure knowledge is the ultimate emancipator. It equalizes people and sovereign states, erodes the archaic barriers of superstition and promises to lift the trajectory of cultural evolution. But I do not believe that it can change the ground rules of human behavior or alter the main course of history's predictable trajectory.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.4 Emergence

People , Behavior , History , Knowledge

“The most dangerous of devotions, in my opinion, is the one endemic to Christianity: I was not born to be of this world. With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured- especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up. Enemies of the faith can be savaged and suicidal martyrdom praised.”

Edward O. Wilson

Source: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), p. 245.

Life , People , World , Faith