Wilson found himself on the defensive , especially when a colleague of his at Harvard University, Stephen Jay Gould, became one of his sharpest critics about sociobiology. Readings assigned from E. O. Wilson's book The Diversity of Life are accessible to a general reader and I will design my lectures around these with the understanding that you have already read the assigned material for each day. As we learn about the diversity of life, the possibility always exists that we may re-interpret our understanding of their relationships. By taking this first step in organizing the living world into groups such as there we begin to conceive of nature in a way that allows us to make sense of diversity. To think of fungi as distinct life forms unrelated to plants is to conceive of them in a manner that is different from the recent past when they were considered to be unusual plants.
Much biodiversity is undiscovered.
An unknown, but probably large, proportion of the species on earth today have not been discovered. Much prospecting is still to be done. Most biologists actively avoid using undescribed species. Most diversity occurs in the tropics while most research universities and active biologists are in the temperate regions. A Latin binomial is applied to a species when it is first described.