Biodiversity

We all love ‘biodiversity’ — the greatest possible variety of lifeforms — except when we don’t. Eliminating smallpox from the wild was a deliberate reduction in biodiversity. If some evil biologist engineered hundreds of new killer viruses and let them loose, that would be an increase in biodiversity, but not necessarily good news. So we don’t want just any old kind of biodiversity, but the ‘right’ kind.

Natural History Museum page on biodiversity issues

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