ABSTRACT
The problem of understanding and managing the interactions of science, policy and society poses enormous challenges, notwithstanding the significant and growing attention it has received in recent decades. Issues such as the mitigation of climate change, determining the goals of space exploration, and coping with the changing nature of privacy in a digital society, are constituted by irreducibly complex configurations of facts and values that make broad concurrence on the nature and moral status of these developments both elusive and transitory. In a world that faces many such issues, biodiversity is especially challenging. And as other complex disciplines, biodiversity is a scientific concept that is obscure for most people other than those who have studied it.
