Science Quote by E. O. Wilson

Wilson is doing something scientists rarely allow themselves on the page: he’s assigning moral weight to a graph. The line “millions of years to correct” isn’t a flourish so much as a time-scale weapon, yanking environmental damage out of the news cycle and into deep time. By framing biodiversity loss as a “process now going on,” he punctures the comforting fantasy that extinction is an occasional tragedy instead of a system-wide, human-driven momentum.

The phrasing is surgical. “Correct” implies nature has a baseline order and resilience, but it also quietly admits that resilience is glacial. Ecosystems can rebound after fires and storms; they cannot speed-run speciation. Wilson’s real target is the modern belief that technology can patch anything: that conservation is a lifestyle preference rather than a civilizational obligation. Habitat destruction becomes not a side effect of progress but progress’s hidden invoice.

Then comes the pivot from biology to judgment. “Folly” is an old word with a sting: not evil, not ignorance, but willful stupidity in the face of available knowledge. He’s indicting a society that can map genomes and still bulldoze the libraries those genomes live in. The “descendants” clause is a rhetorical trapdoor, shifting the audience from present-day stakeholders to future jurors. Climate change carries obvious self-interest; biodiversity loss reads as theft from people who can’t vote yet. Wilson’s subtext is that history won’t just ask what we knew, but why we chose convenience over inheritance.