E. O. Wilson Quotes

When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.

Of course we're all programmed genetically to some extent. But the "selfish gene" thesis doesn't explain everything.

We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.

I think if you don't say something it's lying by omission. I personally think it's immoral.

The state does not demand justice of its members, but thinks that it succeeds very well with the least degree of it, hardly more than rogues practice; and so do the neighborhood and the family. What is commonly called Friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues.

I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how people work. So I think most moral philosophy is disconnected from the species that we happen to be. In fact, they like it that way. Many moral philosophers insist that morality grows out of our rationality, that it applies to any rational being anywhere in the universe, and that it is not based on contingent or coincidental facts about our evolution.

It would be really worrying if, as a Darwinian, it was impossible to think of ways in which our behavior could be explained.

In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.

Men are always thinking that they are going to do something grandly wicked to their enemies; but when it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

Vice deceives us when dressed in the garb of virtue.

If biologists so often forget the most universal of all biologic principles [variation], it is not surprising that men and women in general expect their fellows to think and behave according to the pattern that may fit the law-maker, or the imaginary ideals for which the legislation was fashioned, but which are ill-shaped for all real individuals who try to live under them.

It strikes me how strange people are. You can see them every day - you can think you know them - and then you fшnd out you hardly know them at all.

I don't think I was constructed to be monogamous. I don't think it's the nature of any man to be monogamous. Men are propelled by genetically ordained impulses over which they have no control to distribute their seed into as many females as possible.

I think what makes us human is those choices - whether to tell the truth or not.

How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.

That a man lives is because he is straight. That a man who dupes others survives is because he has been fortunate enough to be spared.

My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It's that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana's don't do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that's different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn't work. Sorry about that.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

People are more twisted than people think.

There's no biological reason why a man shouldn't just try to have sex with every woman he meets - all of them get pregnant and your genetics are winning.

There's a good case to be made that having fun is a key evolutionary advantage right next to opposable thumbs in terms of importance. Without that little chemical twist in our brains that makes us enjoy learning new things, we might be more like the sharks and ants of the world.

[T]he only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim.

I could easily believe that religion could enhance health and hence survival, and that therefore there could be indeed be literally Darwinian survival value, Darwinian selection in favor of religion. None of that of course bears at all upon the truth value of the claims made by religions.

Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him.

One glance and I knew exactly who and what he was. The classic alpha male, the kind who had spurred evolution forward about five million years ago by nailing every female in sight. They charmed, seduced, and behaved like bastards, and yet women were biologically incapable of resisting their magic DNA.