Abstract
Two parallel debates, on cultural diversity and on diversity in animals and plants, are underway with insufficient meaningful contact, but a shared focus on declining diversity. Underlying the sharp decline in diversity in many human and non-human domains is cultural change, bringing about sudden contact between life forms with no previous experience of contact with one another. A common consequence of sudden contact is catastrophic evolution, involving a rapid and often fatal decline in the numbers of a particular life form; this is more likely for life forms low in both preadaptiveness and postcontact adaptation speed. Greater efforts are needed, particularly on the part of cultural researchers, to develop an integrative ‘bio-cultural’ policy to manage diversity, recognizing that cultural changes impact on diversity in all life forms, and that cultural diversity and diversity in animals and plants are inter-connected.
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