Biodiversity definition/description

[Peter Rauch]

Well, I don't have any "stocking stuffer" books to recommend to
Taxacomers this year (do you?)  but I thought the following might raise
the spirits a little...

You're familiar with the standard definitions of "biodiversity", but I
just ran across a quote of W. M. Wheeler, in H. E. Evans' book, "Life on
a Little-known Planet", pg 139. I don't know the original source
of Wheeler's comments.

I would say that Wheeler's words about the world of nature can be
interpreted as the best definition of Biodiversity I can imagine:

"...an inexhaustible source of spiritual and esthetic delight."

Evans goes on to quote the conclusion of "one of [Wheeler's] best-known
essays" which, especially in its last sentence, further captures what
biodiversity must mean to the "amateur entomologist" and others:

"Our intellects will never be equal to exhausting biological reality.
Why animals and plants are as they are we shall never know, of how they
have come to be what they are our knowledge will always be extremely
fragmentary, because we are dealing only with the recent phases of an
immense and complicated history, most of the records of which are lost
beyond all chance of recovery; but that organisms are as they are, that
apart from the members of our own species they are our only companions
in an infinite and unsympathetic waste of electrons, planets, nebulae,
and suns, is a perennial joy and consolation,. We should all be happier
if we were less completely obsessed by problems and somewhat more
accessible to the esthetic and emotional appeal of our materials, and it
is doubtful whether, in the end, the growth of biological science would
be appreciably retarded. It quite saddens me to think that when I cross
the Styx I may find myself among so many professional biologists,
condemned to keep on trying to solve problems, and that Pluto, or
whoever is in charge down there now, may condemn me to sit forever
trying to identify specimens from my own specific and generic diagnoses,
while the amateur entomologists, who have not been damned professors,
are permitted to roam at will among the fragrant asphodels of the
Elysian meadows, netting gorgeous, ghostly butterfiles until the end of
time."

What a delightful way to think of biodiversity, even if Wheeler didn't
cast it in that term.
Peter