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Living in an entirely different physical as well as biotic environment, such a population would have unique opportunities to enter new niches and to select novel adaptive pathways.

Humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.

I think that this misses out on some of the interesting narrative realities, which is that it actually doesn't work very well, that eliminating diversity is actually a really good way to make a species and its individuals less robust.

We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.

We're close to losing our essential diversity. Look at our wheat crops - we rely on a handful of grain crops and plants that we've refined and bred over hundreds of years.

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.

I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species.

They are unique in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life that they enclose.

But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life.

Diversity really means becoming complete as human beings - all of us. We learn from each other. If you're missing on that stage, we learn less. We all need to be on that stage.