In a debate at the Harvard Museum of Natural History on September 9, 2009, the late sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson offered this (this may not be the only citable source for this quote – note that, in the fuller quotation included later in this post, he says that this is how he likes to characterize the problem, so this may have been expressed elsewhere in his work):
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.
Wilson, who won Pulitzer Prizes in 1979 (for his book On Human Nature) and 1991 (for The Ants), debated James D. Watson, the Nobel-Prize-winning co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA.
As of November 2024, a video recording of the debate is available at the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s website. The quote comes in response to a final question posed by moderator Robert Krulwich regarding the dangers that are being created within the natural world (pollution; climate change, which he refers to as “global warming;” “extinction problems”), and this is the full response from Wilson, which starts about 51 minutes into the recording:
…I’ll tell you how I like to characterize what the real problem of humanity is right now… The problem is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. And it’s terrifically dangerous. It’s now approaching a point of crisis overall. And until we understand ourselves – until we answer those huge questions of philosophy that the philosophers abandoned a couple of generations ago – where do we come from, who are we, and where are we going? Until we address those rationally, we are running a very dangerous course.
