  What confuses this question from the very beginning, is the multiplicity of possible definitions of “diversity” and “stability.” There are probably no better instances of formalization indeterminacy in any scientific context. For instance, a reasonable first attempt to define diversity would be to equate the diversity of a community to the number of species in it, that is, its species “richness.” The trouble is that there is ample reason to doubt that richness captures all that is relevant about diversity, whether or not we are interested in only its relationship to stability. Consider two communities, the first consisting of 50% species A and 50% species B, and a second consisting of 99.9 % species A and 0.1% species B. Both communities have the same richness because they both have two species; however, there is a clear sense in which the first is more diverse—or less homogeneous—than the second. Moreover, the difference is likely to be relevant. If diversity does beget stability in these communities, then that stability must be a result some interaction between the two species. If species B comprises only 0.1% of the community, the scope for such interaction is typically much less than if it comprises  50%.[37]  Diversity must mean more than richness. There have been several attempts to define and quantify diversity beyond richness; one of them is described in Box 2.