Viewpoint: Yes, greater species diversity does lead to greater stability in ecosystems.

Viewpoint: No, ecosystem stability may provide a foundation upon which diversity can thrive, but increased species diversity does not confer ecosystem stability.

In 1970, Philip Handler, president of the United States National Academy of Sciences, said "the general problem of ecosystem analyses is, with the exception of sociological problems, … the most difficult problem ever posed by man." Despite increasingly complex and sophisticated approaches to the analysis of ecosystems over the past 30 years, many ambiguities remain.

Although ecology is often thought of as a twentieth-century science, ecological thought goes back to the ancients and was prominent in the writings of many eighteenth and nineteenth century naturalists. Indeed, the nineteenth-century German zoologist Ernst Haeckel who proposed the term "ecology" for the...