Father of biodiversity warns of mass extinction due to climate change

07/Oct/2006: Dr. Edward Osborne Wilson, who is considered to be the ‘father of biodiversity’, has warned that more than half of the world’s species might go extinct or face extinction by 2100, in an address to more than 2,000 people at the Montana State University, where he accepted the George R. Stibitz Computer and Communications Pioneer Award.

Dr. Wilson, a Harvard university professor and a distinguished biologist, researcher, theorist and a man of letters, has won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1991, for his book, ‘The Ants’. He believes that rapidly changing climate, pollution, global warming, human population growth and other related influences could drive more than half of the Earth’s species to extinction by 2100.

George R. Stibitz Computer and Communications Pioneer award, was given to Dr Wilson, by the American Consumer Museum of Bozeman and Montana State University’s Computer Science Department, in recognition of his promotion of an electronic ‘Encyclopedia of Life’, which contains information on every species on this planet. He has pioneered many researches in field of biology and has developed a field, known as ‘Sociobiology’, which strives to link behavior in humans and animals to their evolutionary heritage.

Dr. Wilson hopes that steps to prevent the broad loss of species could still be undertaken in this century, making the 21st century, ‘the century of the environment’. Dr. Wilson has been seeking to recruit religious fundamentalists as allies in his campaign for environmental protection. In his new book, ‘The Creation’, Dr. Wilson presents a case for religion and science to work together for the protection of nature, calling them the most powerful social forces on Earth, which could bring about a change.

K Siva