Description
Book SynopsisWilson, internationally regarded as the dean of biodiversity studies, conducts us on a tour through time, traces the processes that create new species in bursts of adaptive radiation, and points out the cataclysmic events that have disrupted evolution and diminished global diversity over the past 600 million years.
Trade ReviewWilson’s is still the best work we are ever likely to have on the tangled, ever-changing relationships that all species on the planet have with one another—and why the preservation of the same biological diversity that sparks our curiosity and enriches our spirit may also be the key to our survival. -- T. H. Watkins * Washington Post *
The central message of Edward O. Wilson’s stirring new book…is that
Homo sapiens is in imminent danger of precipitating a biological disaster to rival anything in evolutionary history. Mr. Wilson…is the doyen of American biology. Two decades ago he popularized the term ‘sociobiology,’ and generated a small industry of speculation about the biological basis of human nature. In this book he stops asking what biology does to humans, and asks instead what we humans are doing to biology. -- David Papineau * New York Times Book Review *
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. -- Stephen Jay Gould * Nature *
Edward O. Wilson…has laid and elegant and ingratiating literary style over a fundament of science to produce a book that will enlighten the uninformed, correct the misinformed and serve as a beacon of lucidity in the wilderness… Wilson takes us by the hand and leads us through the wilderness of diversity—explaining along the way how species evolve, adapt, specialize, colonize, hybridize, recreate new versions of themselves, radiate out to new locations, become new things in often symbiotic combination with other new things, then transmogrify themselves into something else and move on again to fill other niches, other combinations—a mad, wonderful saraband of complexity and cohabitation that Wilson conducts with eloquence, clarity, and wit. -- T. H. Watkins * Washington Post Book World *
[Wilson’s] passion for the beauty and mystery of nature, coupled with his adherence to scientific method and his unsurpassed professional standing, give the work the possibility of being the most important environmental book since Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring. -- Charles A. Radin * Boston Globe *
Edward Wilson reminds the jaded viewer that there really is a crisis, and that—just as in 1917—it is already almost too late to do anything about it. He gives a penetrating historical analysis of what went wrong and even has a New Economic Plan which might, just, pull us back from the brink… [This] book is a passionate defense of life’s variety. -- Steve Jones * London Review of Books *
One of the most engaging and interesting books that this reviewer has seen recently. Wilson, internationally recognized as one of the leading experts in this field, leads the reader through the often difficult subject of biodiversity. * Choice *
Table of Contents* Violent Nature, Resilient Life * Storm over the Amazon * Krakatau * The Great Extinctions * Biodiversity Rising * The Fundamental Unit * New Species * The Forces of Evolution * Adaptive Radiation * The Unexplored Biosphere * The Creation of Ecosystems * Biodiversity Reaches the Peak * The Human Impact * The Life and Death of Species * Biodiversity Threatened * Unmined Riches * Resolution * The Environmental Ethic * Notes * Glossary * Acknowledgments * Credits * Index
