Top 10 E. O. Wilson Quotes
Reflections on life, nature, and our place in the universe
This is the latest in my quotes collection series. You can access the full collection here.
Edward O. Wilson (1929-2021) was one of the great evolutionary biologists of the modern era. A professor at Harvard University and one of the world’s foremost experts on ants, Wilson once wrote that “Every kid has a bug period... I never grew out of mine.”
The list of his achievements is long. Wilson did pioneering work on island biogeography. He coined the term sociobiology to refer to the use of evolutionary principles to explain social behavior - an enterprise now more commonly known as evolutionary psychology. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for his nonfiction, and in later life, became a passionate advocate for biodiversity conservation.
But Wilson was also a controversial figure. Much of this stems from the final chapter of his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Whereas earlier chapters applied evolutionary principles to the behavior of other animals, the final one extended them to humans. Many mistakenly interpreted this as an attempt to prop up reactionary political views. The backlash was swift and intense, sparking protests and public denunciations. At one conference, a protester famously poured a pitcher of water over Wilson’s head during a panel discussion. The poster below, which appeared nearly a decade after Sociobiology was published, captures the spirit of the backlash to his ideas.
Though the initial uproar eventually subsided, the debates around Wilson’s work never completely went away. After his death in 2021, for instance, the once-great Scientific American published a hit piece on Wilson - one so flawed that it finally persuaded me to unsubscribe from the magazine. Even in death, his work continues to divide opinion.
Despite the controversies, Wilson remains a towering intellectual figure. Here, then, are ten of his most thought-provoking quotes, each offering a glimpse into the mind of one of the greatest thinkers of our time.
“Let us now consider man in the free spirit of natural history, as though we were zoologists from another planet completing a catalog of social species on Earth. In this macroscopic view the humanities and social sciences shrink to specialized branches of biology… [A]nthropology and sociology together constitute the sociobiology of a single primate species.”
“We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology.”
“Because all organisms have descended from a common ancestor, it is correct to say that the biosphere as a whole began to think when humanity was born. If the rest of life is the body, we are the mind.”
“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.”
“The emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain… flood our consciousness with all the emotions – hate, love, guilt, fear, and others – that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers, if not epistemology and epistemologists, at all depths.”
“Great idea; wrong species.” [Wilson’s verdict on communism, derived from his expertise on ants.]
“Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.”
“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”
“The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic. Material reality discovered by science already possesses more content and grandeur than all the religious cosmologies combined. The continuity of the human line has been traced through a period of deep history a thousand times older than that conceived by the western religions.”
“You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.”
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All the best,
Steve
Excellent group.
E. O. Wilson was always to me the embodiment of genius, someone who generates the cliches we take for being obvious today. I’ve never understood the pushback. He was the logical next step from Darwin.
Ooh, I love number 9 -it never ceases to amaze me when people say that the World is made awesome, meaningful and wonderful only through (the notion of God). Epic shallowness.
Also, prefer this version of Number 2 - "The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology." Star Wars?