The Meaning of Human Existence - Edward O. Wilson

"Human existence maybe simpler than we thought. There is no predestination, no unfathomed mystery of life. Demons and gods do not vie for our allegiance. Instead, we are self-made, independent, alone, and fragile, a biological species adapted to live in a biological world. What counts for long-term survival is intelligent self understanding, based upon a greater independence of thought than that tolerated today even in our most advanced democratic societies."

"We are all genetic chimeras, at once saints and sinners, champions of the truth and hypocrites not - because humanity has failed to reach some foreordained religious or ideological ideal, but because of the way our species originated across millions of years of biological evolution."

"Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking over simplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue."

"It was only after eons of time, during which millions of species has come and gone, that one of the lineages, the direct antecedents of Homo sapiens, won the grand lottery of evolution. The payout was civilization based on symbolic language, and culture, and from these a gargantuan power to extract the nonrenewable resources of the planet - while cheerfully exterminating our fellow species."

"In ordinary usage the word “meaning” implies intention, intention implies design, and design implies a designer. Any entity, any process, or definition of any word itself is put into play as a result of an intended consequence in the mind of the designer. This is the heart of the philosophical worldview of organized religions, and in particular their creation stories. Humanity, it assumes, exists for a purpose. Individuals have a purpose in being on Earth. Both humanity and individuals have meaning.
There is a second, broader way the word “meaning” is used and a very different worldview implied. It is that the accidents of history, not the intentions of a designer, are the source of meaning. There is no advance design, but instead overlapping networks of physical cause and effect. The unfolding of history is obedient only to the general laws of the Universe. Each event is random yet alters the probability of later events."

To be kept forcibly in solitude is to be kept in pain, and put on the road to madness. A person’s membership in his group — his tribe — is a large part of his identity.

"the collective human mind shrivels without frontiers. The longing for odysseys and faraway adventure is in our genes."

"The human impact on biodiversity, to put the matter 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."

"We alone among all species gave grasped the reality of the living world, seen the beauty of nature, and given value to the individual. We alone have measured the quality of mercy among our own kind. Might we now extend the same concern to the living world that gave us birth?"

"All of man's troubles have arisen from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be" Jean Bruller - You Shall Know Them.

"The human mind did not evolve as an externally guided progression toward either pure reason or emotional fulfillment. It remains as it has always been, an instrument of survival that employs both reason and emotion."

"Decades of research have discovered that human nature is not the genes that prescribe the emotions and learning preparedness. It is not the cultural universals, which are its ultimate product. 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."

"The problem is not in the nature or even in the existence of God. It is in the biological origins of human existence and in the nature of the human mind, and what made us the evolutionary pinnacle of the biosphere. The best way to live in this real world is to free ourselves of demons and tribal gods."

"... what if anything in the manifold activities of the brain could possible pull away from the brain's machinery in order to create scenarios and make decisions of its own? The answer is of course the self. And what could that be? And where is it? The self cannot exist as a paranormal being living on its own within the brain. It is instead the central dramatic character of the confabulated scenarios. In these stories it is always on center stage, if not as participant then as observer and commentator, because that is where all of the sensory information arrives and is integrated. The stories that compose the conscious mind cannot be taken away from the mind's physical neurobiological system, which serves as script writer, director, and cast combined. The self, despite the illusion of its independence created in the scenarios, is part of the anatomy and physiology of the body."

"Because the individual mind cannot be fully described by itself or by any separate researcher, the self - celebrated star player in the scenarios of consciousness - can go on passionately believing in its independence and free will....Confidence in free will is biologically adaptive. Without it the conscious mind, at best a fragile dark window on the real world, would be cursed by fatalism. Like a prisoner confined for life to solitary confinement, deprived of any freedom to explore and starving for surprise, it would deteriorate."

"So, does free will exist? Yes, if not in ultimate reality, then at least in the operational sense necessary for sanity and thereby for the perpetuation of the human species."

"We were created not by a supernatural intelligence but by chance and necessity as one species out of millions of species in Earth's biosphere. Hope and wish for otherwise as we will, there is no evidence of an external grace shining down upon us, no demonstrable destiny or purpose assigned to us, no second life vouchsafed us for the end of the present one. We are, it seems, completely alone. And that in my opinion is a very good thing. It means we are completely free. As a result we can more easily diagnose the etiology of the irrational beliefs that so unjustifiably divide us."

"Faith is the evidence given of a person's submission to a particular god, and even then not to the deity directly but to other humans who claim to represent the god."