Have We Reached Species Overload?

In 2006, a team led by Ed Louis, Jr., a molecular biologist at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo, identified fourteen new lemur species. The discovery was not made in some forgotten enclave of Madagascar, the only place where lemurs live in the wild, but rather in a laboratory. Last year, after reviewing the data, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature determined that all the new lemurs were at “high risk of extinction,” or worse. In the last twenty years, the total number of lemurs...