The great British biochemist J.B.S. Haldane was once asked by a theologian what his lifetime spent studying the natural world had taught him about the nature of the Creator. “That he has an inordinate fondness for beetles,” Haldane sarcastically replied.

E.O. Wilson, the famed biologist and environmental scientist who spoke at Michigan State University on Monday evening, prefers the ants that he has spent his entire life studying. He began his speech by repeating the question he gets most often about ants, which is: “What do I do about the ones in my kitchen?” His answer: “Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives.”

This, in tiny form, was the message he delivered on a much larger scale at the nearly sold-out Wharton Center. Wilson’s message was clear: we are impoverishing the Earth’s biosphere by constantly encroaching on the habitats of other creatures, most of whom we do not yet even know about. It is, he says, “like burning up a library with most of the books unread.”

It has been estimated that beetles make up 25% of all the existing species on the planet, with other insects making up a huge portion of the rest. These animals, combined with the vast world of plants and the even more vast world of fungi, make up the bulk of the world’s biodiversity. And the bulk of those species are found in rainforests, most of which are in poor and underdeveloped countries where the majority of people simply cannot afford to be concerned about preserving that biodiversity. They are too busy merely working to survive. This is a point that Wilson alluded to only fleetingly, but it could easily have been the subject of the entire speech.

Continued -The world’s tropical rainforests are located near the Equator, from Central America and the northern part of South America to Central Africa to Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. They are estimated to contain two-thirds of the world’s total species, the vast majority of which we have yet to identify. Within those rainforests are multiple distinct but interrelated biospheres — the canopy (the treetop biosphere, the densest area), the understorey (between the canopy and the forest floor) , the shrub (the layer just above the floor, made up of shrubs and small trees) and the floor. Each houses an incredible array of plant and animal life.

The canopy of those rainforests is particularly teeming with undiscovered life. Wilson showed a slide of a canopy research project and noted that his students had discovered 42 previously undiscovered species of ants in just one single tree. It has been estimated that the rainforest canopy contains a staggering 40% of all plant species on Earth. Combine that with all of the species of insects, birds and other animals that live there and it may well be that half of all species on the planet are found just in the canopy of the tropical rainforests.

Wilson has made the preservation of this biodiversity the focus of his work. He has, along with many others, founded the Encyclopedia of Life, a web-based database of all the world’s biodiversity. With the help of Google and grants from the MacArthur foundation and others, this project will be an invaluable storehouse of information, available to the whole world, about every single identified species on earth. It will be continually updated as new species are discovered and identified. He is also urging people to get involved at every possible level and to join with groups like the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund to help combat the global problem of species extinction.

Wilson makes the case for protecting biodiversity on several grounds, both moral and practical. Like all great scientists, Wilson is a man of great wonder, a man with a sense of awe that is, as he himself says, akin to religious fervor or spiritual feeling. His new book, “Creation: An Appeal to Save Life On Earth,” confronts this problem by calling for the scientific community and the religious community to come together and find common moral ground in the need to protect the natural world. It matters not to him that they may start from different premises; that they may reach the same conclusion is what can make the difference.

But he appeals also to our sense of practicality and our innate desire for self-preservation. Approximately 40% of all the medicines in the world came about only after being discovered in other species. Some 85% of the world’s antibiotics, most notably the entire group if cillins, are derived from a single family of fungi called the ascomycota, yet Wilson estimates that we have only identified 10% of the species in that family. There is probably not a single illness or disease that we have effective treatments for that do not owe those treatments to biochemical research done on plants, insects, fungi and other animals.

Imagine what other possible cures and treatments are lurking, as yet undiscovered, in the canopy or beneath the forest floor, he says. Unfortunately, at the rate we are bulldozing the rainforests, destroying the habitats and killing off these creatures before we can even identify them, much less study them, imagining those medical miracles may be all that we can do. And thus we return to Wilson’s advice: “Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives.” The lives you preserve may well be the ones that help save your own.