As illustrated in Figure 1, conservation
biology shares certain characteristics
with other crisis-oriented disciplines.
A comparison with cancer
biology illustrates some of these characteristics,
including conservation biology's
synthetic, eclectic, multidisciplinary
structure. Furthermore,
both fields take many of their questions,
techniques, and methods from
a broad range of fields, not all biological.
This illustration is also intended
to show the artificiality of the dichotomy
between pure and applied
disciplines