[Taxacom] source of quote about keys

[Steve Marshall]

Dear Taxacomers, 

I’m looking for the original source of a choice quote describing keys as “written by those who don’t need them for those who can’t use them”. I’ve used this line in my lectures since the early 1980s, and when I used it in a talk at the 2002 International Congress of Dipterology I attributed to “my old professor” (a nice way of saying I had no idea where I had first heard it). Walter and Winterton, in their excellent 2007 review of keys and the crisis in taxonomy, preface their introduction with the same quote and attribute it to Lobanov, 2003. Packer et al 2009 also preface their in-praise-of-barcoding paper in exactly the same way with exactly the same quote, but credit Packer (2008) for the origin of the quote. I’m not aware of any other usage of the line in print, nor am I aware of where it originated. It is possible that Lobanov, Packer, and I all came up with the line independently, but it seems more probable that it has been circulating for decades. Can anybody help pinpoint the original source? 

Walter, D. E. and S. Winterton  2007. Keys and the Crisis in Taxonomy: Extinction or Reinvention? Annual Review of Entomology Vol. 52: 193-208

Lobanov, A.L. 2003. Keys to beetles and biological diagnostics. http://www.zin.ru/Animalia/Coleoptera/eng/syst8.htm

Packer, L., Gibbs, J., Sheffield, C., and R. Hanner 2009. DNA barcoding and the mediocrity of morphology. Molecular Ecology Resources 9:42-50.

Packer, L. 2008. Phylogeny and classification of the Xeromelissinae (Hymenoptera: Apoidea, Colletidae) with special emphasis on the genus Chilicola. Systematic Entomology, 333, 72-96.


Stephen A. Marshall
Department of Environmental Biology
University of Guelph
Guelph, ON, CANADA N1G 2W1