E. O. Wilson Quotes

I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker - yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

Crows are incredibly smart. They can be taught five things on the drop.

It is certain that there may be extraordinary mental activity with an extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter: thus the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin's head. Under this point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvelous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man.

We'd be really screwed if we had to start our life over again as children with our brains right now, because I think we lose the plasticity and flexibility.

Perhaps measuring animal intelligence by comparing it to human intelligence isn't the best litmus test.

We call a child's mind 'small' simply by habit; perhaps it is larger than ours is, for it can take in almost anything without effort.

Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language - sign language - and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.

For origin and development of human faculty we must look to these processes of association in lower animals.

Amongst the minds of animals that of man leads, not as a demigod from another planet, but as a king from the same race.

Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities.

Pigs are smarter than dogs, and both are smarter than Congress.

When it comes to brains, size matters. It's not all that matters, of course. Whales and dolphins have brains that are larger than humans', but few of the flippered and fluked set win tenure at Stanford. Our brains are the largest in proportion to body size, and they're also highly sophisticated.

A fly with a brain the size of a salt grain has the behavioral repertoire nearly as complex as a much larger animal such as a mouse. That's a super-interesting problem from an engineering perspective.

The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology.

Man is the only animal capable of reasoning, though many others possess the faculty of memory and instruction in common with him.

The proposition that humans have mental characteristics wholly absent in non-humans is inconsistent with the theory of evolution.

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.

Since everything is in our heads, we had better not lose them.

Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. I can spend half a dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about.

Scientists have shown that pigs are capable of playing simple video games, learning from each other, and even learning names.

Elephants have the largest brains of any mammal on the face of the Earth. They are creative, altruistic and kind.

How we learn has nothing to do with how brilliant we are.

The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties.

The human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.