Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.
Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.
In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.
I grew up as a Southern Baptist with strict adherence to the Bible, which I read as a youngster.
Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.
So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.
Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they've had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.
Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.
Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.
People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.
If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.
When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.
An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.
I was a senior in high school when I decided I wanted to work on ants as a career. I just fell in love with them, and have never regretted it.
But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.
Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.
