Why Ecosystems Matter: Preserving the Key to Our Survival

Every one of Earth’s teeming ecosystems is an evolutionary cauldron

Christopher Wills’s claim has its roots in an insight from Charles Darwin: the interactions between species in an ecosystem are a powerful driver of evolution. In this book Wills describes how, by using the latest genetic techniques, we are probing ecosystems and discovering that even the most apparently barren of them are rich in variety, especially of microbes. Exploring the many ways in which ecosystems have coped with past change, and how rapidly an ecosystem can develop complexity, Wills illuminates a pathway of hope for the natural world that we have so damaged and depleted. Our new genetic knowledge can help these evolutionary cauldrons to continue brewing richness and diversity, the better to heal our living world and to enable our own survival.

Christopher Wills, Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences, Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution, University of California San Diego

Christoper Wills is Professor Emeritus at the University of California San Diego. Wills was the first to generate an enzyme with changed function through artificial selection, and to show the nature of the genetic change and the nature of the functional change. More recently, his research includes widespread negative density-dependent selection and how it maintains the diversity of tree species in tropical forests. His books include The Wisdom of the Genes (1990), The Darwinian Tourist (2010), and Green Equilibrium (2013).