E. O. Wilson Quotes

Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.

Things change in different countries as people grow, and as generations change.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

Culture is our nature, and the ability to learn and change is our most important and fundamental instinct.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

Civilization is not a spontaneous generation with any race or nation known to history, but the torch to be handed down from race to race from age to age.

We are the species who cooks. No other species cooks. And when we learned to cook, we became truly human.

The point of human evolution is adapting to circumstance. Not letting go of the old, but adapting it, is necessary.

Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.

Culture in America and everywhere else comes from the suffering, from those who don't want the old ways. They want to bring in the new, whether it's the ballet, when it started, or Shakespeare.

My father used to say that, through culture, humans effectively domesticated themselves.

The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.

The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilization, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people.

Cultural diversity and cultural change are desirable and inevitable. We are cultural animals, someone without a culture is not human. But the cultures we possess vary enormously. Indeed, the variability, over time and space is the great evolutionary advantage of humanity. Instead of changing biologically over millennia, human beings can change culturally over decades

Obviously it depends on how you define a word like "evolution," because of course we have been evolving - both biologically and culturally - in relation to the natural world for hundreds of thousands of years.

We became Homo sapiens not that long ago, from the scientific perspective, and we've retained a lot of our beast nature. We've done all these amazing things in terms of our knowledge base and technology, and now we're flying around and using the Internet. But we're still very animalistic.

I do think evolution is an important aspect of keeping a tradition alive. If it freezes and remains very static in its form, it dies, and so a natural evolution has to occur.

I want to talk about the nature of human beings or how we're evolving as a race.

There's a distinct American culture that evolved from the United States founding, and that is what made America great, is what allowed the human being to become.

Evolution usually occurs in response to a crisis situation, and we now are faced with such a crisis situation. This is why there is indeed an enormous acceleration in the awakening process of our species.

Our ambitions are bold and so must be our desire to change and evolve our culture.

The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.