Nature & Animals Quote by Erwin Schrodinger

Schrodinger is doing something sly here: he smuggles a moral argument through the side door of biology. By calling egoism a "virtue" for the solitary animal, he borrows evolutionary language to make selfishness sound not just excusable but useful - a trait that can sharpen survival and, over time, the stock itself. Then he pivots. The same drive that optimizes an isolated creature becomes, in a social setting, corrosive. The line is built like a controlled experiment: change one variable (solitude vs. community) and watch the ethical valence flip.

The intent is less to scold than to reframe. Schrodinger isn't preaching altruism as a halo; he's arguing that morality is an ecology problem. In a community, your success is no longer separable from everyone else's conditions. Egoism doesn't merely offend; it breaks the feedback loops that keep collective life stable - trust, reciprocity, restraint. "Destructive vice" is clinical phrasing with a dark implication: selfishness in groups isn't a private flaw, it's a system-level hazard.

Context matters. A Viennese-born physicist who lived through the collapse of empires, fascism, and world war, Schrodinger knew what happens when individual ambition and national ego harden into ideology. Coming from a scientist, the subtext is pointed: if we can accept that cooperation is an adaptive strategy in nature, we should stop treating social responsibility as sentimental and start treating it as rational maintenance of the human machine.