Introduction

Evolution generated the existing range of biological diversity in a process extending over four and a half billion years, with the vast majority of the forms of life arising in the past half billion years. These life forms have now evolved and coevolved for a period of five hundred million years producing a range of chemical and biological actions and interactions as a result. The existing set of species contain a static portrait of this lengthy process and these long-standing relations. They, and all of the inter-relations between them, are the product of the evolutionary process.

Over the last ten thousand years human societies have launched a concerted assault on both evolution and its product. We have usurped the evolutionary role, as we now allocate the resources required for survival between competing life forms, and we are performing this role in a manner that is rapidly depleting the evolutionary product. Obviously, the period during which evolution has been under assault matches closely the period of human societal development and the ‘birth of civilisation’. There have been human benefits derived from this usurpation of the evolutionary role; however, this volume concerns the costs of this operation. With humans undertaking this function, we have lost the benefits of having nature perform the same task.