Diversity

Finally got around this morning to finishing the book on diversity by E. O. Wilson - an expert on ants not race relations - picked up in Topsham for £1 and first mentioned here back on 12th March.

Wilson is an eminent scientist, best known for his work on ants, one product of which caught my eye in the TLS quite a few years ago; the word sociobiology comes to mind, but I cannot now identify the book in Amazon or anywhere else. At the time I could not afford it and by the time I could, I had moved on. So I have never read Wilson on ants, but I have now read him on diversity.

A paperback from Belknap, an outfit whose hardbacks I usually like, a very good standard of book production, but this paperback is not so hot. I do not much care for the way the first pages of each chapter have been highlighted and I do not much care for the illustrations: the book designer has clearly focused on the fact that this is a bit of popular science and needs to be lightened up with some light illustrations - which do not work very well for me.

That apart, what we have is an essay on biological diversity, how it came about and how we are now in the middle of a massive extermination, the sixth such event in the history of the earth. How, massive exterminations and massive turnover of species aside, diversity has steadily grown, ever since it all kicked off a few billion years ago. Along the way we learn about all kinds of intriguing plants and animals, these last mainly quite small. Just the sort of thing needed to fire up lay interest in natural history, the sort of interest which is important for the securing of the funding needed to preserve some of this diversity in nature parks of one sort or another, nature parks which largely pay for themselves by getting us pay to visit at weekends. Perhaps I should stop being so sniffy about nature programs on the television.

A very species orientated book, the selfish gene notwithstanding. An approach with which I agree; the species is a perfectly respectable level at which to organise our thoughts about and models of nature. Genes are both terribly abstract and invisible to the naked eye. Not very photo or telly genic.

Lots of odd facts. There are, for example, a lot more kinds of animal than there are kinds of plant. And an awful lot of the animals are insects. And an awful lot of the insects are ants. Then there are are a lot more species out there which we do not know anything about than there are species which we have got around to naming, never mind learning much about. And snakes have been a major, often fatal, pain ever since we were monkeys and that our common aversion to them, if not phobia, may be genetic rather than learned.

Last but not least, the already well known facts that there are far too many humans around from a diversity point of view already and that our numbers are unlikely to stabilise for another half century, assuming that is that we do not do ourselves all in beforehand.

He closes with what I found to be a rather weak appeal for the preservation what we can of diversity, part of the appeal being pointing to some obscure plants and animals which have yielded important new chemicals, some of which have had a  startling effect on previously intractable cancers. Perhaps we need to get that bit rewritten by someone with a better grip on politics and economics, maybe one of those bossy sounding types who write for the 'Economist'.