It is getting pretty bitter in the world of evolutionary biology, and it could come down to the survival of the fittest. In August I reported here on the extraordinary spat between Professor John Wiens of the University of Arizona – who formerly wrote of a ‘sixth mass extinction’ but has since changed his mind and now thinks the destruction of species would come in at a lower level – and Robert Cowie of the University of Hawaii, who damned Wiens for daring even to question the scale of the expected wipe-out of life forms over the coming centuries.

‘Arguing that we are not experiencing a sixth mass extinction, or at least playing it down, gives support to those who would happily allow it to happen,’ wrote Cowie in the normally docile pages of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution

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