24 chapter one

Even so, we cannot assume that a way of representing diversity that is

optimal for the purposes of detecting some evolutionary processes is
also optimal for explaining the input to others. For example, it might
be important to identify cryptic sibling species in thinking about the
effects of evolutionary processes; these might be markers of nonselec-
tive factors in speciation. But this distinction might not be important
in characterizing the selective environments driving further evolution-
ary change. A more radical possibility is that in characterizing those
environments we might need the ecologists’ characterizations in terms
of guilds or functional groups, rather than a genealogical specification
of biological diversity.
These are very difficult empirical questions. But we cannot assume
that a solution to the units-and-differences problem optimal for de-
tecting the effects and relative importance of the different evolution-
ary mechanisms is also optimal for characterizing the environment in
which ecological and evolutionary forces interact to generate further
change. We think some attempts in conservation biology to incorpo-
rate phylogenetic distinctiveness into their metric of diversity do make
just this assumption. For example, there have been recent defenses of
the idea that conservation planning should give weight to phylogenetic
distinctiveness, not just endemic species richness, on the grounds that
in doing so we maximize the evolutionary potential of the diversity we
conserve (see, for example, Mooers 2007; Forest et al. 2007). Phyloge-
netic distinctiveness is backward looking. On some ways of measuring
it, we estimate the time since divergence from the common ancestors of
the species in a region and sum those times. The total gives us a reading
of the amount of evolutionary history those species represent. These
methods of estimating importance heavily weight species (like the Tas-
manian devil or the platypus) that have been long-separated from their
nearest living relatives. But (as Mace et al. 2003 points out) species-
poor lineages may be species poor precisely because they have little evo-
lutionary potential. They have low intrinsic rates of speciation. They are
“dead clades walking.” If so, despite their high scores by these procedures,
such lineages do not represent rich future possibilities at all.

1.5 prospectus: the road ahead

This book begins with conservation biology, and it will end with conser-
vation biology; we return in the final chapters to the problems of both
measuring and valuing biodiversity, with, we hope, a much richer un-
derstanding of the nature of biodiversity. In the road ahead, one theme
will be central. To what extent is the species structure of a biota—its