Genomics: An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles

Inordinate Fondness Multiplied and Redistributed: the Number of Species on Earth and the New Pie of Life

An Inordinate Fondness for Eukaryotic Diversity

Why do some groups of organisms, like beetles, have so many species, and others, like the tuataras, so few? This classic question in evolutionary biology has a deep history and has been studied using both fossils and phylogenetic trees. Phylogeny-based studies have focused on tree balance, which compares the number of species across clades of the same age in the tree. These studies have suggest...

New dimensions of tropical diversity: an inordinate fondness for insect molecules, taxa, and trophic interactions

Most known insect species are involved in chemically mediated plant–insect multi-trophic interactions, and recent syntheses point to a substantial gap in our understanding of trophic interaction diversity, especially in the tropics. One approach to filling this gap is to examine relationships between genomic, metabolomic, taxonomic, and trophic interaction diversity via quantifying and comparin...

An Inordinate Fondness of Rarity

In evolutionary biologist circles, J.B.S. Haldane’s quip to a theologian that from his studies, he has learned God has an ‘‘inordinate fondness of beetles’’, is a perennial favorite to quote, misquote and modify, even though it’s unclear whether the encounter ever actually happened. The point was simply that, but for the vagaries of evolution, beetles were among the most diverse groups of speci...

A 'metaphising' dung beetle.

You may have seen the film Microcosmos, produced in 1996 by the French biologists Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perrenou. It does not star humans, but much smaller creatures, mostly insects. The filmmakers’ magnifying camera transposes the viewer into the world of these organisms. For me, Microcosmos is not an ordinary naturalist documentary; it is an exercise in metaphysics. One sequence in the f...