Page 42 - The Error of the Evolution of Species

The Error of the Evolution
of Species

deed, even with that part of biological diversity that has

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been already described and named." Another researcher,
John Alroy of California University, says that in all likeli-
hood, one-fifth of all species names in the scientific litera-
ture are invalid. 28
According to World Resources Institute experts, we
know more about the numbers of stars in space than those
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of the species on Earth. Norman Myers, an eminent Oxford
university environmentalist, expresses this in another way:
While biodiversity, and indeed life itself, is the key charac-
teristic of our planet, we know more about the total num-
bers of atoms in the universe than about Earth's comple-
ment of species. 30

Another scientist to express this is Nigel E. Stork,
Director of the James Cook University Tropical Rain Forest
Ecology and Management Research Centre. Professor Stork
says that the data regarding biodiversity are highly deficient:

In recent years biologists have come to recognize just how
little we know about the organisms with which we share
the planet Earth. In particular, attempts to determine how
many species there are in total have been surprisingly
fruitless... What these arguments show is how little we ac-
tually know about some of the fundamental aspects of the
biology and distribution of organisms. We cannot say how
widespread species are, we do not know the size of the

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