E. O. Wilson Quotes About Evolution

Quotes about: Evolution

• Each of these [bacterial] species are masterpieces of evolution. Each has persisted for thousands to millions of years. Each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine.

  E. O. Wilson

  Motivation, Inspiration, Years

• 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.

  E. O. Wilson

  Science, Emotional, Long

• Biology is a science of three dimensions. The first is the study of each species across all levels of biological organization, molecule to cell to organism to population to ecosystem. The second dimension is the diversity of all species in the biosphere. The third dimension is the history of each species in turn, comprising both its genetic evolution and the environmental change that drove the evolution. Biology, by growing in all three dimensions, is progressing toward unification and will continue to do so.

  E. O. Wilson

  Science, Ecosystems, Organization

• 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

  Science, Generations, Evolution

• To be anthropocentric is to remain unaware of the limits of human nature, the significance of biological processes underlying human behavior, and the deeper meaning of long-term genetic evolution.

  E. O. Wilson

  Science, Long, Limits

• The newborn infant is now seen to be wired with awesome precision... This marvelous robot will be launched into the world under the care of its parents... But to what extent does the wiring of the neurons, so undeniably encoded in the genes, preordain the directions that social development will follow?

  E. O. Wilson

  Parent, Robots, Doe

• In fact, nothing in science as a whole has been more firmly established by interwoven factual information, or more illuminating than the universal occurrence of biological evolution. Further, few natural processes have been more convincingly explained than evolution by the theory of natural selection, or as it has been popularly called, Darwinism.

  E. O. Wilson

  Religion, Atheism, Information

• Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?

  E. O. Wilson

  Biblical, Religion, Important

• 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.

  E. O. Wilson

  Real, Looks, Research

  "E.O. Wilson Is on Top of the World". Interview with Jill Neimark, www.psychologytoday.com. September 1, 1998.

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

  E. O. Wilson

  Religious, Believe, Dogma

• 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.

  E. O. Wilson

  Views, Years, Alabama

  "Transcript of the complete E.O. Wilson interview". blog.cleveland.com. March 01, 2009.

• The great paradox of determinism and free will, which has held the attention of the wisest of philosophers and psychologists for generations, can be phrased in more biological terms as follows: If our genes are inherited, and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment. It would appear that our freedom is only a self delusion.

  E. O. Wilson

  Independent, Self, Brain

• Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.

  E. O. Wilson

  Law, Environmental, Abnormal

• The closer the genetic relationship of the family members, as for example father-to-son, as opposed to uncle-to-nephew, the higher the degree of cooperation.

  E. O. Wilson

  Uncles, Father, Son

• To genetic evolution, the human lineage has added the parallel track of cultural evolution.

  E. O. Wilson

  Track, Lineage, Evolution

  E. O. Wilson (2014). “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge”, p.190, Vintage

• Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.

  E. O. Wilson

  Religious, Views, Theory Of Evolution

• Women are extraordinary in lacking the estrus, or period of heat. The females of most other primate species become sexually active, to the point of aggression, only at the time of ovulation. Why has sexual responsiveness become nearly continuous? Unusually frequent sexual activity between males and females served as the principle device for cementing the pair bond.

  E. O. Wilson

  Pairs, Principles, Males

• Theology made no provision for evolution.

  E. O. Wilson

  Evolution, Made, Provision

  E. O. Wilson (2014). “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge”, p.15, Vintage

• Mating Strategy is influenced by the cardinal fact that women have more at stake in sexual activity than men, because of the limited age span in which they can reproduce and the heavy investment required of them with each child conceived. In courtship women consistently emphasize commitment of resources and material security.

  E. O. Wilson

  Children, Commitment, Age

• These slender little people (Homo Habilis), the size of modern 12 year olds, were devoid of fangs and claws and almost certainly slower on foot than the four legged animals around them. They could have succeeded in their new way of life only by relying on tools and sophisticated cooperative behavior

  E. O. Wilson

  Animal, Feet, Years

• The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding. Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.

  E. O. Wilson

  Reality, Thinking, Understanding

• That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.

  E. O. Wilson

  Evolution, Mystery, Calculus

  E. O. Wilson (2014). “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge”, p.76, Vintage

• Every native species, however humble in appearance...has its place in the nation's heritage. It is a masterpiece of evolution, an ancient, multifaceted entity that shares the land with us.

  E. O. Wilson

  Humble, Land, Heritage

• Progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard.... let us not pretend to deny in our philosophy what we know in our hearts to be true.

  E. O. Wilson

  Philosophy, Heart, Progress

• The green prehuman earth is the mystery we were chosen to solve, a guide to the birthplace of our spirit, but it is slipping away. The way back seems harder every year. If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding, through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations. And thus humanity closes the door on its past.

  E. O. Wilson

  Beautiful, Men, Past

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