E. O. Wilson Quotes

Why is it not just as likely that there were as many small general nearly at first as now, and as great a disproportion in the number of their species?

I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.

Habitats keep evolving new pageants of species, and we shouldn't interfere.

I could take you for a walk on the beach and I could point out just about any creature and give you their Latin names.

Moreover, all our knowledge of organic remains teaches us, that species have a definite existence, and a centralization in geological time as well as in geographical space, and that no species is repeated in time.

Pretty much every plant and animal alive today is the result of eons of natural cross-breeding.

If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It's not good to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one's ever heard about.

The thing I'm particularly interested in is natural history. In its heyday, the mid- and late-nineteenth century, when people were going out and gathering the first huge caches of data and trying to understand what was living and growing everywhere, there was such a sense of freshness to that pursuit. It's very exciting.

Discovering new species is a passion. A day without collecting plants is painful for me.

Species can be recognized by their morphological characteristics and songs.

It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.

Most people are surprised when they hear my somber figures: we know of 2 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms, and we can give them each a scientific name and a diagnostic description. We know, perhaps generously, more than just a little bit of the anatomy in no more than 10 percent. We have done thorough studies in fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent. And the total number of species on Earth is unknown to the nearest order of magnitude.

Wonderful theory, wrong species.

And there hasn't been much progress in Darwinism since [the life of Darwin].

... not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.

Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.

Some species increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life.

Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes.

My feeling is that Darwinism is only at best a partial solution, and an extremely dangerous partial solution. I would say, based on the little I know, Darwinism explains microevolution within species quite well. As to its broader consequence and implications, I don't think it explains individual species evolution at all well.

The living world is not a single array... connected by unbroken series of intergrades.

Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.

You wouldn't consider all the bipeds you pass on the street human beings simply because they walk upright and carry their young in their bellies nine months! It is obvious how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or angels, how many are ants, how many are bees!

It may be argued that to know one kind of beetle is to know them all. But a species is not like a molecule in a cloud of molecules-it is a unique population.

By one bait or another, Nature allures inhabitants into all her recesses.

The reality is that if we in this rich, lucky quarter of the planet cannot make a stand for the 30 million other species we share this planet with, let alone our own species, then who can?