Biodiversity

Seen over long timescales, species do not operate as independent units. The only ecosystem that can truly be called living is one whose nutrient cycle is fully integrated. The lack of trophic autonomy is treated as one of the key factors that ensure and maintain biodiversity.

Abiotic conditions shift across space and over time, and that variability opens up a wide range of niches and subniches for genotypes and species. Life also keeps its core quantities, biomass and productivity, as stable as it can by relying on a layered variety of structures, from genes and macromolecules to metabolic pathways, genotypes and species. Structures that reach their optimum are multiplied and so become active, while those that have lost their optimum have their function suppressed.

Building on these facts and concepts, the monograph argues four points. Genotype and species diversity is supported by trophic specialisation. Biodiversity helps stabilise the essential variables of individuals, populations and ecological communities. In evolution, the emergence of biodiversity is determined by heritable variation and by the advantage that specialised, more effective structures hold over non-specialised ones. Biodiversity can also increase itself and organise into relatively consistent structures, which the book calls production pyramids and nutrient cycles.

Taken together, the work aims to answer why the diversity of life takes the particular form it does.