Edward O. Wilson

1929–2021 · American biologist, naturalist, and writer

Topics: creativity, biology, learning, life

• In the process of natural selection, then. any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• 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.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• Cultural evolution is Lamarckian and very fast, whereas biological evolution is Darwinian and usually very slow.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• To search for unasked questions, plus questions to put to already acquired but unsought answers, it is vital to give full play to the imagination. That is the way to create truly original science.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• Much of good science — and perhaps all of great science — has its roots in fantasy.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• The evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• Be prepared mentally for some amount of chaos and failure. Waste and frustration often attend the earliest stages.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• The channels of human mental development... are circuitous and variable. Rather than specify a single trait, human genes prescribe the capacity to develop a certain array of traits.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• My definition of a scientist is that you can complete the following sentence: ‘he or she has shown that…’,

  — Edward O. Wilson

• The increase in brain size and refinement of stone artifacts point to an unbroken advance in mental ability over the last two or three million years. ...No organ in the history of life has grown faster.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• Because the brain can be guided by rational calculation only in a limited degree, it must fall back on the nuances of pleasure and pain mediated by the limbic system and other lower centers of the brain.

  — Edward O. Wilson