In 1995 the otherwise excellent scientist and writer Jared Diamond fell under the spell of fashionable pessimism when he promised: ‘By the time my young sons reach retirement age, half the world’s species will be extinct, the air radioactive and the seas polluted with oil.’ Let me reassure his sons that species extinction, though terrible, is so far under-shooting that promise by a wide margin. Even if you take E.O. Wilson’s wildly pessimistic guess that 27,000 species are dying out every year, that equates to just 2.7 per cent a century (there are thought to be at least ten million species),
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