Abstract

Biodiversity is a fundamental concept in biology. By biodiversity scientists usually mean taxic richness, i.e., the number of species, genera, or other higher taxonomic categories. Diversity sometimes is equated to the complexity of biological systems, but at the higher hierarchical level of observation (in: McShea DW, Brandon RN (2010) Biology's first law: the tendency for diversity and complexity to increase in evolutionary systems, University of Chicago Press, Chicago). Therefore, diversity is a deeply hierarchical concept that can be applied to multiple levels of observation in biology. Here we will concentrate on the problems of the dynamics of taxonomic diversity—the transitive currency of evolutionary, ecological, and developmental biology.