E. O. Wilson quotes - page 4

The emergence of civilization has everywhere followed a definable sequence. (E. O. Wilson)
Intertribal aggression, escalating in some cultures to limited warfare, is common enough to be regarded as a general characteristic of hunter-gatherer social behavior. View quote
E. O. Wilson
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. View quote
E. O. Wilson
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. View quote
E. O. Wilson
The incest taboo is another major category of primed learning. View quote
E. O. Wilson
Self-knowledge will reveal the elements of biological human nature from which modern social life proliferated in all its strange forms. View quote
E. O. Wilson
Early human beings... filled a special ecological niche: they were carnivorous primates of the African plains. ...When agriculture permitted the increase of population density, game was no longer abundant... carnivorism remained a basic dietary impulse, with cultural aftereffects that varied according to the special conditions of the environment in which the society evolved. View quote
E. O. Wilson
The rules followed are tight enough to produce a broad overlap in the decisions taken by all individuals and hence a convergence powerful enough to be labelled human nature. View quote
E. O. Wilson
God remains a viable hypothesis as the prime mover, however undefinable and untestable that conception may be. View quote
E. O. Wilson
Nothing fundamental separates the course of human history from the course of physical history. View quote
E. O. Wilson
A schema is a configuration within the brain, either inborn or learned, against which the input of the nerve cells is compared. ...the conscious mind ...can fill in details that are missing from the actual sensory input and create a pattern in the mind which is not necessarily present in reality. In this way, the gestalt of objects-the impression...-is aided by the taxonomic powers of the schemata. (E. O. Wilson)
Cultural change is the statistical product of the separate behavioral responses of large numbers of human beings who cope as best they can with social existence. View quote
E. O. Wilson
If we choose the path of destruction, the planet will continue to descend irreversibly into the Anthropocene Epoch, the biologically final age in which the planet exists almost exclusively by, for, and of ourselves. View quote
E. O. Wilson
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. View quote
E. O. Wilson
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. View quote
E. O. Wilson
Although the capacity to become schizophrenic may well be within all of us, there is no question that certain persons have distinctive genes predisposing them to the condition. View quote
E. O. Wilson
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. View quote
E. O. Wilson
The central idea of the philosophy of behaviorism, that behavior and the mind have an entirely materialist basis subject to experimental analysis, is fundamentally sound. View quote
E. O. Wilson
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. View quote
E. O. Wilson
Because the brain can be guided by rational calculation only in a limited degree, it must fall back on the nuances of pleasure and pain mediated by the limbic system and other lower centers of the brain. View quote
E. O. Wilson
Because of mathematical indeterminancy and the uncertainty principle, it may be a law of nature that no nervous system is capable of acquiring enough knowledge to significantly predict the future of any other intelligent system in detail. Nor can intelligent minds gain enough self-knowledge to know their own future, capture fate, and in this sense eliminate free will. (E. O. Wilson)
The cardinal mystery of neurobiology is not self-love or dreams of immortality but intentionality. What is the prime mover, the weaver who guides the flashing shuttles? View quote
E. O. Wilson
Cultural evolution is Lamarckian and very fast, whereas biological evolution is Darwinian and usually very slow. View quote
E. O. Wilson
The selection pressures of hunter-gatherer existence have persisted for over 99 percent of human evolution. View quote
E. O. Wilson
The theory of population genetics and experiments on other organisms show that substantial changes can occur in the span of less than 100 generations, which for man reaches back to the time of the Roman Empire. View quote
E. O. Wilson