An Inordinate Fondness for Wasps
There are probably more species of them than any other animal group.
When talking about whether theology has anything to learn from science, the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane used to quip that God must have “an inordinate fondness for beetles.”
He had a point. Around species of beetle have been described, which accounts for a quarter of all known animal species. There are more species of ladybugs than mammals, of longhorn beetles than birds, of weevils than fish. Textbooks and scientific papers regularly state that beetles are the of animals; that is, there are more of them than there are of anything
