Education Quote by E. O. Wilson

Wilson smuggles a moral command into the cool language of a lab memo. "Every scrap" is deliberately unglamorous: not just pandas and coral reefs, but beetles, fungi, microbes, the disregarded circuitry of the living world. Calling biodiversity "priceless" rejects the usual cost-benefit frame where a wetland is weighed against a highway. Priceless means un-priceable, beyond the market's vocabulary, and that is the point: once you translate life into a line item, you've already conceded the argument.

The second half turns the knife. "While we learn to use it" concedes human appetite without endorsing it. Wilson isn't pretending we will stop extracting; he's insisting that extraction must be disciplined by humility and time. The subtext is that we are running an uncontrolled experiment on the planet faster than we can understand the results. Preservation becomes a form of intellectual honesty: keep the specimens because we haven't even figured out what they're doing yet.

Context matters. Wilson spent his career mapping the logic of ecosystems and popularizing the idea that biodiversity underwrites stability, resilience, and evolutionary possibility. He also wrote during the acceleration of mass extinction and the rise of biotech, when "use" increasingly meant patents, pharmaceuticals, and genetic tools. The phrase "what it means to humanity" widens the claim beyond ecosystem services. It's not only about medicines and crop yields; it's about identity and ethics, a species deciding whether it wants to be a careful steward or a clever vandal.