 The SEP entry  conservation biology  provides some basis for comparisons, in exploring the idea that conservation biology is all about a still-undefined concept of “biodiversity”. In the entry’s section  what is biodiversity?  there are no citations of the early discussions from the 1970s, and so there is perhaps an under-appreciation of the early ideas of variety as a possible guide to resolving questions of definition. This relates to the interesting issues raised in this section about how the concept/definition of “biodiversity” is supposed to cope with the dis-benefits of some individual species. The challenge remains to recognise the possible useful distinction between biodiversity/variety and biospecifics (individual elements).