Mike D's grandiousity

[MICHAEL A. IVIE]

I just cannot let Mike D's statement that no one should be doing keys any
way except his way because his are so much better!  This patently self-
serving statement is absolute bullshit.

Mike, I use and love keys that use your software, and I wish that all keys
were available that way, but this is the real world.  To fully utilze your
system in an isolated situation takes years of work, years that could produce
good, usable keys along the way.  I have worked with one of the users at your
institution that has published an intkey CD, and he admits that without you
right there, and the huge storage capacity in the back-up computers on your
local network, he would never have been able to do it.  It is rediculous to thin
that only institutions with the wealth to have a Mike D and such a network
should be producing keys.

Your system is still 'way too expensive to be practical.  I expect it to
become cheaper as time goes by, and younger workeres will eventually come
on line in the profession with INKEY type  expertise as a matter of course.
That is in the future, not today.

To state that anyone "wasting" time on convintional keys should be looked down
on is simply irresponsible, and cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.  I hope
that no 80 year old systematist with a bad heart stops working on the last
few couplets of the genus they have worked on for 40 years to learn a
stops doing so in response to your view, and begins all over to learn a
new system similar to yours.  Instead of good key, we will probably get
a "modern" nothing. The same goes for many other excellent taxonomists
without the means, skills, back-up, or inclination to do it your way.

Lets quit telling people "if you don't do it my way, your an oaf"
and get back to providing excellent tools for progress, for those that
choose to use them.

Michael A. Ivie
Department of Entomology
Montana State University
Bozeman, MT 59717