Entomologist Quotes (7 quotes)
Among those whom I could never pursuade to rank themselves with idlers, and who speak with indignation of my morning sleeps and nocturnal rambles, one passes the day in catching spiders, that he may count their eyes with a microscope; another exhibits the dust of a marigold separated from the flower with a dexterity worthy of Leuwenhoweck himself. Some turn the wheel of electricity; some suspend rings to a lodestone, and find that what they did yesterday, they can do again to-day.—Some register the changes of the wind, and die fully convinced that the wind is changeable.—There are men yet more profound, who have heard that two colorless liquors may produce a color by union, and that two cold bodies will grow hot of they are mingled: they mingle them, and produce the effect expected, say it is strange, and mingle them again.
In Tryon Edwards, A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908), 243.
If entomologists have things backward, their errors have spawned a host of others central to modern evolutionary science. … E.O. Wilson is … the founder of a rich and fruitful discipline—sociobiology. And sociobiology has … helped lay the groundwork for the dogma of the “selfish gene.”
In 'The Embryonic Meme', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 34.
Most children have a bug period, and I never grew out of mine.
In Naturalist (1994, 2006), 53.
No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human
intelligence to grasp.
In 'The Poet at the Breakfast Table: II', The Atlantic Monthly (Feb 1872), 29, 231.
There are exactly eight entomologists worldwide with the general competence to identify tropical ants and termites.
In 'Edward O. Wilson: The Biological Diversity Crisis: A Challenge to Science', Issues in Science and Technology (Fall 1985), 2, No. 1, 27.
Thus, remarkably, we do not know the true number of species on earth even to the nearest order of magnitude. My own guess, based on the described fauna and flora and many discussions with entomologists and other specialists, is that the absolute number falls somewhere between five and thirty million.
Conservation for the 21st Century
Who are so rich as the poet and the man of science? “The meanest flower that blows” is an unfathomable mine of thought to the one, and “the poor beetle that we tread upon” holds a whole museum of nature’s miracles for the other.
In 'Professor Jeffries Wyman: A Memorial Outline', The Atlantic Monthly (Nov 1874), 621.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
