Edward O.Wilson

Edward O. Wilson: Pellegrino University Professor and curator in entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. He is also the author ofInsect Societies; On Human Nature, and The Biophilia Hypothesis, co-edited with Stephen R. Kellert.

The organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA. Naturalist, 1994.

 

A child comes to the edge of deep water with a mind prepared for wonder. Ibid.

 

An animal society is a population . . . and it should be possible to analyze its structure and evolution as part of population biology. Ibid.

 

As populations increase in density, those of many species are constrained by a growing resistance from one or more factors. Among these density-dependent responses are the rise in per capita mortality from predation and disease, the loss of fertility, a greater propensity to emigrate, and - aggression. Ibid.

 

Let us now consider man in the free spirit of natural history, as though we were zoologists from another planet completing a catalog of social species on Earth. Ibid.

 

In 1978 farmers from the valley below were moving in along a newly built private road and were cutting back the ridge forest. This is standard operating procedure in Ecuador. Fully 96 percent of the forests on the Pacific side have been cleared for agriculture, with little notice taken by conservationists outside Ecuador and no constraining policy imposed by local governments. American Nature Writing 1995.

 

Any number of rare local species are disappearing just beyond the edge of our attention. They enter oblivion like the dead of Grey's Elegy, leaving at most a name, a fading echo in a far corner of the world, their genius unused. Ibid.

 

In order to know that a given species is truly extinct, you have to know it well, including its exact distribution and favored habitats. You have to look long and hard without result. Ibid.

 

. . . biologists agree that it is not possible to give the exact number of species going extinct; we usually turn palms up and say their number is very large. Ibid.

 

One fifth of the species of birds worldwide have been eliminated in the past two millennia, principally following human occupation of islands. Ibid.

 

If species vanish en masse when their isolated habitats collapse, they die even more catastrophically when entire systems are obliterated. Ibid.

 

. . . the organisms of the tundra and polar seas have no place to go even with a modest amount of global warming; the north and south poles are the end of the line. Ibid.