Quentin Wheeler was President of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Vice President and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in Arizona State University, Keeper and Head of Entomology in the Natural History Museum, London, Director of the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation, and Professor of Insect Systematics in Cornell University, U.S.A. He produces a weekly podcast and newsletter, The Species Hall of Fame, and his previous books include The Future of Phylogenetic Systematics (2016), The New Taxonomy (2008), Letters to Linnaeus (2009), What on Earth?-100 of Our Planet's Most Amazing New Species (2013), Species Concepts and Phylogenetic Theory-A Debate (2000), Extinction and Phylogeny (1992) and Fungus-Insect Relationships (1984).

Part I - Overview

1. A Little about Molecules
2. Scientific Malpractice
3. The Science of Species
4. The Art of Survival
5. Cosmology of the Life Sciences
6. Choices
7. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Taxonomy but Were Afraid to Ask
8. A Science Misunderstood Greatly
9. The Species-Scape
10. The Illusion of Knowledge
11. Morphology without Apology
12. The Inventory Imperative
13. Other than That, Mrs. Lincoln, How Was the Play?

Part II - A Crisis of Crises

14. Extinction
15. Systematics under Siege
16. The Nature Gap
17. Options for a Sustainable Future

Part III - Solutions

18. Taxonomic Renaissance
19. A Planetary-Scale Species Inventory
20. Hall of the Holocene
21. Shameless Self-Promotion
22. The Evolution of Evolutionary Economics