Useless animals

[Doug Yanega]

>From: Joe Laferriere <josephl at CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU>
>Subject:      Useless animals
>
>> From:    Wilbert Hetterscheid <W.HETTER at PBN.AGRO.NL>
>> Subject: Useful Animalia revisited
>
>> Your "useful animals", "useless animals" and "dangerous ani-
>> mals" is such a one-level classification, resulting in enti-
>> ties that cannot serve as proper taxa in the sense of both
>> codes or current evolutionary thinking.
>
>I suggest looking up the word "joke" in the dictionary. I got a good
>laugh from the original posting, which was quite obviously not meant to
>be taken seriously.

Actually, if you're referring to the *first* posting from Boris Zeide in
Arkansas, that was indeed totally serious, and the fellow followed it up
with a lengthy exposition about two weeks ago, and the discussion is still
ongoing (though the moderator of sci.bio.ecology has recently gotten tired
of it and is trying to get it off the newsgroup). Wait til Boris becomes
head of the Forest Service and THEN see how laughable you think he is.
Telephone psychics may be ludicrous, too, but there are millions of suckers
who don't see things our way.

Doug Yanega       Illinois Natural History Survey, 607 E. Peabody Dr.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA      phone (217) 244-6817, fax (217) 333-4949
 affiliate, Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dept. of Entomology
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82