[Taxacom] source of quote about keys

[Stephen Thorpe]

> keys as “written by those who don’t need them for those who can’t use them”
The problem, of course, is that there are 2 very different purposes/users for keys, and they don't always understand each other. On the one hand, systematists use keys to organise information that they can use to place new taxa into existing classifications. The characters used often have to be "less than convenient". On the other hand, a wider audience wants keys for routine identification purposes, using the most "convenient" characters possible. Systematists are sometimes not very good at writing the latter type of key, and wider audience end users are often not very good at being able to effectively use the former type of key ...
Having said all that, Steve, I'm hoping for a good Howickia key from you very soon! :)

Stephen

________________________________________
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Steve Marshall [samarsha at uoguelph.ca]
Sent: Tuesday, 1 September 2009 12:07 a.m.
To: Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: [Taxacom] source of quote about keys

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


_______________________________________________

Taxacom Mailing List
Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom

The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these methods:

(1) http://taxacom.markmail.org

Or (2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here