 The new term “biodiversity” energised some fundamental ideas developed over the previous decade (or longer). Precursor terms like “biotic diversity” had helped to communicate why we should be concerned about the loss of variety, arising from the species extinction crisis (later, the “biodiversity crisis”). This recognised the idea that living variation itself has current value, because it provides the opportunity for future benefits for humanity. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN 1980) summarised these early ideas about variety as providing both “insurance” and “investment” benefits. The focus on the variety of life was echoed later in the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) definition of “biodiversity”, and in the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The IPBES conceptual framework, describing “nature’s contributions to people” (Díaz et al. 2018), includes the maintenance of options for future generations that is provided by biodiversity as variety (see Faith forthcoming). This value of living variation complements recognised values of individual species, and it accords with the idea that “biodiversity” may refer both to the collection of individual species (or other units), and to amount-of-variation as a property of that collection.