The Diversity of Life.

AuthorGould, Stephen Jay

We meet, and need, leadership in many guises. Sometimes we crave statesmen or generals; but other moments require prophets. Jeremiah began his lamentations over the captivity of Jerusalem with a powerful image of emptiness: "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people .... She that was great among the nations ... how is she become tributary." He then switched to a biological metaphor (Lamentations 1:6): "Her princes are become like harts that find no pasture; and they are gone without strength before the pursuer." If, as Pogo said, the enemy is us, then we are the huntsmen, the destroyers of habitat, the blight upon former plenitude.

We all know about dodos and great auks as abstractions or stuffed specimens in museums. But for most people most of the time, the wave of extinctions unleashed by human depredation of our earthly environment ranks as something distant from immediate locales and concerns (however global the ultimate threat). Therefore we need prophets to shake the souls and grab the attention of those who have eyes but see not. The Diversity of Life is a deft and thoroughly successful mixture of information and prophecy.

Wilson has composed his text in three parts: first, on natural extinctions (and recoveries) at scales rising from the local and historical (Krakatoa in 1883) to geological and global (the five great mass dyings of our palaeontological record); second, on the evolutionary construction and richness of biodiversity; and third, on human disruptions, malfeasances and (if we are both lucky and smart) potential reversals and solutions. The connecting thread is the familiar theme that our current geological micromoment of anthropogenic carnage ranks as a full-blown sixth episode of mass extinction, not as one of those pervasive blips that mark planetary business as usual--in other words, a rare and portentous punctuation, not a part of the permeation. (On this connecting theme, and with apologies for a petty comment from my own parish, may I request that subsequent printings of this book--a great and fit work destined to survive and thrive well into the next millennium--correct the numerous palaeontological errors scattered throughout: foraminiferal tests are generally calcareous, not siliceous; Pangaea did not congeal until the late Palaeozoic, and therefore did not exist during the Ordovician and Devonian mass dyings.)

But what combination of influences can recast a celebrated academician into the unfamiliar role (in our church) of effective prophet Above all, of course, one must have a cause--and what purpose could be more...

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