Top 5: lxxii

Excerpts from Edward O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence (2014)

1. On story: "Gossip, celebrity worship, biographies, novels, war stories, and sports are the stuff of modern culture because a state of intense, even obsessive concentration on others as always enhanced survival of individuals and groups. We are devoted to stories because that is how the mind works--a never-ending wandering through past scenarios and through alternative scenarios of the future."
2. On the final frontier: "Someday, perhaps in this century, we, or much more likely our robots, will visit [potentially hospitable sites in our solar system] in search of life. We must go and we will go, I believe, because the collective human mind shrivels without frontiers. The longing for odysseys and faraway adventure is in our genes."
3. On biodiversity: "The human impact on biodiversity, to put the matter as briefly as possible, is an attack on ourselves. It is the action of a mindless juggernaut fueled by the biomass of the very life it destroys."
4. On 'human nature': "What we call human nature is the whole of our emotions and the preparedness in learning over which those emotions preside.... Human nature is the ensemble of hereditary regularities in mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to others and thus connect genes to culture in the brain of every person."
5. On science and the humanities: "They are complementary to each other in origin, and they arise from the same creative processes in the human brain. If the heuristic and analytical power of science can be joined with the introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an infinitely more productive and interesting meaning."