[Nhcoll-l] childhood collecting and taxonomy

[Douglas Yanega]

Finding *peer-reviewed research* to back it up might be very hard, but 
the "anecdotal" evidence is really dramatic. I've had conversations with 
dozens of taxonomists over the course of my career where the topic of 
childhood collecting came up, and I can only recall twice meeting 
someone who did no collecting of any kind as a kid. For all the rest, 
there was something, usually insects, sometimes shells, and a few 
oddballs who collected stamps or matchbooks, to indicate an early 
predilection for sorting and organizing. Personally, I was an extreme 
case, as I collected nearly everything I could. Insects, shells, stamps, 
matchbooks, sure, but also things like bottle caps, seeds, comic books, 
baseball and football cards, car photos, coins, tobacco and liquor tax 
stamps, Star Wars paraphernalia, and more - plus LISTS of things, 
including a list of every prehistoric animal I could find. It would be 
fair to say I was pretty obsessive as a kid, though by high school I 
started to recognize that it WAS obsessive, and by the time I finished 
college had painfully weaned myself away from everything except insects.

Now, I'm a Commissioner of the ICZN, I work on compiling a list of all 
the genus and species names ever published in zoology, and manage a 
collection of over 4 million insects. Anyone could have seen that coming 
a mile away. ;-)

Peace,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
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