Edward O. Wilson Quotes

American biologist, naturalist, and writer (1929–2021)

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Edward Osborne Wilson (10 June 1929 – 26 December 2021) was an American entomologist and biologist known for his work on ecology, evolution, and sociobiology. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, Wilson is also known for his advocacy for environmentalism, and his secular-humanism ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters.

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Native Name: Edward Osborne Wilson

Alternative Names: E. O. Wilson • Edward Osborne • EO Wilson • E O Wilson • Wilson • Edward Wilson, Junior • E.O. Wilson • Wilson EO

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The mosquito is an automaton. It can afford to be nothing else.

Genetic determinism... On its interpretation depends the entire relation between biology and the social sciences.

The genius of human society is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken, and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute.

We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom and dignity.

God remains a viable hypothesis as the prime mover, however undefinable and untestable that conception may be.

The evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have.

Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of philosophers and biologized.

The key to the sociobiology of mammals is milk.

Samuel Butler's famous aphorism that the chicken is only an egg's way of making another egg has been modernized: the organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA.

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.

We have stone age emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology.

The pattern of human population growth in the 20th century was more bacterial than primate. When Homo sapiens passed the six billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that had ever existed on the land. We and the rest of life cannot afford another 100 years like that.

Will we solve the crises of next hundred years? asked Krulwich. “Yes, if we are honest and smart,” said Wilson. “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” Until we understand ourselves, concluded the Pulitzer-prize winning author of On Human Nature, “until we answer those huge questions of philosophy that the philosophers abandoned a couple of generations ago—Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?—rationally,” we’re on very thin ground.

The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.

Wonderful theory, wrong species. (On Marxism, which he considered more suited to ants than to humans.)