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By Sharon Begley
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If biological diversity needed a borscht-belt comic ("How diverse is life on earth? It's so diverse that. . .") Harvard University entomologist and evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson would be it. He's full of stories starring microorganisms that thrive in boiling sea water, or featuring the extinct Titanis, a 10-foot-tall carnivorous bird that "lop[ed] along on stilt legs like a malevolent ostrich," or Nanaloricus mysticus, a .01-inch-long creature that "vaguely resembles an ambulatory pineapple."
It only seems as if Wilson has personally met and studied every one of the 100 million species thought to live on earth. Of course, no one has-and that's the subject of _B_The Diversity of Life_b_ (424 pages. Harvard. $29.95). Since we don't even know the names of the vast majority of these creatures, when they vanish from earth "they enter oblivion like the dead of Gray's Elegy, leaving at most a name, a fading echo in a far corner of the world, their genius unused," Wilson writes. And vanish they do, thanks to the destruction of (especially tropical) habitats, to climate change, to that paradoxical thing called development. Wilson predicts that if we do nothing, we'll lose one quarter of the planet's species within a few decades. If we wise up, we'll lose maybe 10 percent.
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So what? Wilson dutifully runs through the standard biodiversity arguments: that 40 percent of the prescriptions written in this country are for drugs derived from natural sources, from fungi to flowers; that miracle fruit and fibers are waiting to be tapped in the jungle. He points out that the loss of just a few species can doom an entire ecosystem, and spins a persuasive case that if all the insects died out, humankind would follow within a few months. But the man who loves ants so much that he's coauthored a Pulitzer Prize-winning book ("The Ants") about them also believes that people need "the rest of life" for their own psychological development. "Biodiversity is the key to the maintenance of the world," he says. The inner world, too; why else do people grieve so about the passing of the last dusky sparrow, or write checks to save the whales?
Biodiversity holds a paradox, however. Ninety-nine percent of the species that ever existed are now extinct, and yet the number of species alive today dwarfs the count from any time in the past. How can this be? Earth has endured five great extinctions (due to climate change caused by glaciation, volcanic eruptions or meteorite hits). After each, evolution topped off the species inventory, and biodiversity bounced back to higher levels than before. So why should we care if, as Wilson argues, humankind has, through relentless population pressure, destruction of habitats and overhunting, launched the sixth great extinction? Just because it takes 10 million to 100 million years to recover from a wave of extinctions. And even that assumes a stage for recovery; humankind has razed most of the theaters of natural selection. Our descendants will be pretty annoyed to find that they'll have to wait five times the length of time that humans have been on earth to see species recover from what 20th-century humans managed to do in one little century.
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