E. O. Wilson 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

• La biología es una ciencia de tres dimensiones. La primera es el estudio de cada especie en todos los niveles de organización biológica, de la molécula a la célula, del organismo a la población y al ecosistema. La segunda dimensión es la diversidad de todas las especies de la biosfera. La tercera dimensión es la historia de cada especie a su vez, que comprende tanto su evolución genética como el cambio ambiental que impulsó la evolución. La biología, al crecer en las tres dimensiones, avanza hacia la unificación y seguirá haciéndolo.

  E. O. Wilson

  Science, Ecosystems, Organization

• En el proceso de selección natural, por tanto, cualquier artefacto capaz de insertar una mayor proporción de determinados genes en las generaciones posteriores llegará a caracterizar a la especie.

  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

• Ahora se ve al recién nacido conectado con una precisión asombrosa... Este maravilloso robot será lanzado al mundo bajo el cuidado de sus padres... Pero, ¿hasta qué punto el cableado de las neuronas, tan innegablemente codificado en los genes, predetermina las direcciones que seguirá el desarrollo social?

  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

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

  E. O. Wilson

  Religious, Believe, Dogma

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• Ése es el gran misterio de la evolución humana: cómo explicar el cálculo y 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

• 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.

  E. O. Wilson

  Principles, Variation, Levels

• La gran paradoja del determinismo y el libre albedrío, que ha atraído la atención de los filósofos y psicólogos más sabios durante generaciones, puede formularse en términos más biológicos de la siguiente manera: Si nuestros genes se heredan y nuestro entorno es una sucesión de acontecimientos físicos que se pusieron en marcha antes de que naciéramos, ¿cómo puede haber un agente verdaderamente independiente dentro del cerebro? El propio agente se crea por la interacción de los genes y el entorno. Parece que nuestra libertad no es más que un autoengaño.

  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

• Por supuesto, no hay reconciliación entre la teoría de la evolución por selección natural y la visión religiosa tradicional del origen de la mente humana.

  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

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