Biodiversity, the most conspicuous property of life, has fascinated generations of ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Part of this fascination arises from the fact that only a small fragment of this diversity has been described and catalogued, providing endless opportunities to speculate about the rest, Part arises from the sense that any regularities and general patterns in the biodiversity that we see today exist despite, or perhaps because of, the complexity of the processes and interactionsthat have driven the dynamics of biodiversity through time and space. In the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin made a specific appeal to this idea when he wrote his famous description of the complex ecology of a bank covered by dense vegetation: "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructedforms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us" (1).
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