Glassberg's public statement on collecting.

[Patrick Foley]

Alex and all,

Your attack on E O Wilson (who wrote the foreword to Glassberg's 1993
Butterflies through Binoculars) does not measure up to the paranoid standards we
expect from this list.

The ant man Wilson, (also author of Sociobiology, Consilience, Biodiversity and
about 100 other books) does have something to say about butterflies. He and St.
Robert MacArthur (as he was known among ecology graduate students back in the
day) _stole_ Island Biogeography from a Lepidopterist, Eugene Munroe who
invented it to get a doctorate at Cornell in 1948 on the biogeography of
Caribbean butterflies (see J. Brown and M. Lomolino 1989.Ecology 70: 1954-1957).
Wilson and MacArthur went on to organize the evolutionary ecological movement
that is now taking our guns, traps and nets from us. Munroe fell back on
Pyralids. And Lepidoptery failed to hold on to the biggest intellectual catch
since Clement's organismal-community and Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, theories
that
EVEN NOW ARE USED BY BAMBIFICATORS TO TAKE AWAY OUR RIGHT TO KILL!!!!

Luckily there is an attempt by Metapopulation ecologists, led by Lepidopterists
under Ilkka Hanski (who has also trapped mammals!!!) to subsume island
biogeography under metapopulation ecology, thus recapturing the flag. LONG MAY
IT WAVE!!!

Yours sincerely,
Patrick Foley
patfoley at csus.edu

"Grkovich, Alex" wrote:

> I think you're wroing. I think there's plenty of evidence of it. And look at
> the three books: The anti-collector tone is worse and worse, and more and
> mroe offensive, from the first toward the last. The first book really didn't
> particularly offend me, at least not as far as the author's writings were
> concerned. (What was written by the two scientists that did the
> Introductions, that's another matter. These writings were extremely
> offensive, at least to me. I STILL am waiting for someone to explain to me
> what it is that an ant scientist, for example, has to say about collecting
> butterflies and about the study of Lepidoptera. But what the heck,
> bird-watchers, gardeners, photographers, plant conservationists, botanists,
> bored and/or lonely soccer moms, everyone's got something to say about the
> subject, don't they? And somehow they're ALL opposed to butterfly
> collecting. Who's working on their minds?)
>
> And they are trying to ban it, no doubt in my mind. In a sinister and covert
> sort of way: One way is very simple: By getting species after species
> "listed", state by state. Long state hearings don't stop these people; many
> of them don't work or have full time jobs anyway. Do they?
>
> Of course, whether they CAN or not, that's another matter. There seems to be
> plenty of opposition, doesn't there?
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Neil at NWJONES.DEMON.CO.UK [SMTP:Neil at NWJONES.DEMON.CO.UK]
> > Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 8:30 AM
> > To:   leps-l at lists.yale.edu
> > Subject:      Glassberg's public statement on collecting.
> >
> > There have been a number of postings accusing Dr Jeffrey Glassberg
> > of wanting to ban collecting. The actual evidence for this is sparse.
>
>
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