“Biodiversity provides the raw material for natural selection to work on. It also allowed Wallace to compare and contrast the differences among many species — differences as subtle as the graceful curve of a butterfly’s wing. Whitten says Wallace marveled at the variety of life on earth, even as he mourned man’s effect on it. “He just wondered how could it possibly be that … we celebrate creation, in whatever way you want to understand that, and yet destroy it at the same time; [and that] just was so awful that we should all work to try to conserve that biodiversity,” Whitten says.”
