[Taxacom] source of quote about keys: PS

[Neal Evenhuis]

At 11:08 AM +1200 9/1/09, Stephen Thorpe wrote:
>In my experience, some biosecurity people (in particular) tend to 
>think that the ONLY way to identify something reliably is using a 
>key!

There were no biosecurity people around when that quote was 
originally made. I was merely giving my hunch on the reasons for why 
it was quoted then and why I heard it back in the 1970s when I was in 
grad school....

I have no problem with keys if they are done correctly and have nice 
illustrations to help those who are unfamiliar with or really need to 
"see" the salient characters.

Verbose keys that have no illustrations and/or one page per couplet 
(larger than or supplementary to a species description!) are not in 
my view the "best" keys and more than not can turn students off to 
taxonomy if they happen to run into them.

-Neal