PISSING AWAY THE EONS 1

There are lots of things that really bother me about the currentbiodiversity crisis. But one item near the top of the list is theseemingly imminent loss of so many millions of years of evolu-tionary history across so many thousands or millions of lineagesduring the short span of my lifetime. It just would not seem quitesuch a waste if we were only a few million years out from the lastmass extinction event, or if we were not bumping off so many lin-eages that had survived previous mass extinction events, or if thecreationists were right and nothing was more than a few thousandyears old anyways.But how exactly evolutionary history (i.e., phylogeny) mightbe important to the conservation of biodiversity is not alwaysclear. This intersection of fields is the topic of a new book editedby Andy Purvis, John Gittleman, and Thomas Brooks. All threeeditors have each published important papers that combine phylo-genetics and conservation biology. Their goal here is to “explorethewaysinwhichthewealthofnewphylogeneticinformationcanbenefit conservation biology” (p. 2). Overall, I think that the booksuccessfully does this, although my satisfaction levels fluctuatedconsiderably from chapter to chapter.The book consists of 18 chapters divided among four sec-tions: (1) units and currencies, (2) inferring evolutionary pro-cesses, (3) effects of human processes, and (4) prognosis. I brieflysummarize these below.