In article ,
Dave Poole writes:
|
| I've become thoroughly cheesed off with having to learn new names
| every coule of years Nick and am joining the ranks of grumpy old men.
| The way plants are being shunted from pillar to post nowadays makes
| your head spin. It's all well and good having a revision of a genus
| to iron out a few irregularities and re-assign one or two aberrant
| species, but to screw the whole lot up strikes me as being work for
| the sake of work and nothing else. It about time for the lumpers to
| reassert themselves and repair the damage that their schizoid
| counterparts have wrought.

I quite agree - except that I also agree with Stewart that insane
lumpers are as bad as their counterparts! As well as the people
with prurient prioritis.

| Ah well, what's the betting they'll take Paphs, Phrags (inc Mexi!),
| Cyps and Selenipediums out of the orchidaceae altogether? It's been
| mooted before and you can be certain there's some geeky loon out there
| desperately poring through the dna in the hope of discovering a
| pifling trifle that enables him/her to gain fame or infamy.

Yes. As I have posted, I am disgusted by the proportion of papers
in respectable journals that propose reclassification based on one
totally unreliable and inconsistent datum - or, if you are very
lucky, a couple of them.

| My message to them is quite clear, stop buggering things up, you bunch
| of taxsodomists!

Yes. If there are major reasons for major reclassification that will
cause trouble to many people - as has happened in the past - they
should not propose that it is acted on until it has been generally
accepted for a couple of decades. There is a chance that it will
then not be reversed because of some later whim.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.