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REVIEWS, Page 101BOOKSA Hole in The Ark
R.Z. SHEPPARD
TITLE: THE DIVERSITY OF LIFE
AUTHOR: Edward O. Wilson
PUBLISHER: Harvard University; 424 pages; $29.95
THE BOTTOM LINE: A leading biologist's warning about
ecological disaster is both top-drawer science and high-level
art.
The world is coming to an end. Again. Edward O. Wilson, a
pioneer of sociobiology and professor of entomology at Harvard's
Museum of Comparative Zoology, lists five earth-shattering
events in the past half-billion years. The latest may have been
a one-two punch. A meteorite six miles wide struck the Caribbean
region 66 million years ago and set off intercontinental
volcanic eruptions. The smoke and dust changed the global
climate, killing countless plant and animal species.
Earlier mass extinctions, 440 million to 210 million years
back, are attributed to the breakup and drift of the single
supercontinent known as Pangaea. All these cataclysms, says
Wilson, drastically reduced the variety of species. But given
world enough and time (at least 20 million years), biological
diversity reasserted itself.
The Diversity of Life argues that Homo sapiens does not
have the luxury of such a leisurely recovery. Nor does it
deserve it, because it is now the leading threat to life-forms,
including itself. What Darwin called the tangled bank and Wilson
calls the web of life is a highly interdependent system. An
event in one part of the web jiggles the whole.
Wilson has mastered his science and the art of teaching
it. He moves easily from the macro to the micro, from the
eruption of Krakatau to the silent messages of chromosomes. He
strives for clarity, but never at the expense of complexity. An
explanation of how species evolve may require more attention
than Homo televideous is willing to muster. Hang in. Accounts
of the author's field experiences convey an excitement of
discovery that many readers probably last felt as children
examining insects in a patch of grass.
Much of Wilson's expertise derives from his award-winning
studies of life on islands where the number of species increases
or decreases with the size of habitat. This finding is less
obvious than it sounds and has big consequences for large
landmasses where biological diversity is rapidly losing out to
development and pollution. Wilson estimates that 10,000 species
are destroyed each year, a rate that is increasing as the
world's population grows toward 10 billion people by the middle
of the next century.
So what, critics argue? Evolution is littered with the
remains of organisms that didn't make it, and prophecies of
ecological doom have replaced nightmares of thermonuclear
holocaust. The thinking animal is also the one that worries the
most. It should. Wilson's intellectual, aesthetic and moral
conception of life on earth suggests that survival may depend
on a new age of anxiety.