E. O. Wilson
E. O. Wilson
Edward Osborne Wilson, usually cited as E. O. Wilson, is an American biologist, researcher, theorist, naturalistand author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants, on which he is considered to be the world's leading expert...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth10 June 1929
CountryUnited States of America
views years alabama
So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.
prayer religion world
No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system; if it were otherwise the whole world would pray continuously.
mind religion hens
[W]hen the martyr's righteous forebrain is exploded by the executioner's bullet and his mind disintegrates, what then? Can we safely assume that all those millions of neural circuits will be reconstituted in an immaterial state, so the conscious mind carries on?
emotional long brain
The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior-like the deepest capacities for emotional respone which drive and guide it-is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact.
survival mind purpose
No species ... possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history ... The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.
neurons levels might
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.
dark matter bacteria
[Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].
rest-of-life viruses planets
The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.
thinking ants way
The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.
player cycling world
The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
real looks research
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.
loyalty military school
In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.
two theory harvard
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.
variation levels way
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.