We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
Interpretation
We are no longer guided by natural selection, so we must consciously choose our future direction and identity.
In this quote, E. O. Wilson highlights the shift in human evolution and progress, suggesting that as we gain control over our own destiny, it is imperative for us to reflect on our values and aspirations. Unlike other species that adapt through natural selection, humans now have the unique ability to make deliberate choices about who we are and who we want to become, emphasizing the responsibility that comes with our advanced intellect and agency.
In practice
In a speech about the future of humanity, one might say, 'As E. O. Wilson once stated, we have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.'
Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. Four out of five animals on Earth are nematode worms — if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms.
Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
The worst thing that will probably happen-in fact is already well underway-is not energy depletion, economic collapse, conventional war, or the expansion of totalitarian governments. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired in a few generations. The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.
Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity.
A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.
Were the happiness of the next world is as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live.
We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.
I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.
To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly.
There are gods, but there is no God; and all gods become devils eventually.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.