Humanity needs a vision of an expanding and unending future.

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.

In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

Known as the biosphere to scientists and as the creation to theologians, all of life together consists of a membrane around earth so thin that it cannot be seen edgewise from a satellite yet so prodigiously diverse that only a tiny fraction of species have been discovered and named.

The global conservation organisations are doing everything they can on modest budgets. They essentially promote setting aside reserves and parks around the world.

Most people are surprised when they hear my somber figures: we know of 2 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms, and we can give them each a scientific name and a diagnostic description. We know, perhaps generously, more than just a little bit of the anatomy in no more than 10 percent. We have done thorough studies in fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent. And the total number of species on Earth is unknown to the nearest order of magnitude.