[Taxacom] panbiogeography critique

[Peter Stevens]

Croizat, on his very own "Space, Time, Form" - "I do admit that fully  
99% of the pagination of my works is  wind, trifle, piffle, rot,  
stuff, in sum, entirely unworthy of the attention of the serious  
scientist." - so that gave him on his own estimation 50-60 useful  
pages.  But then, you all should read what he thought about serious  
scientists...  Lily Perry told a very nice story where L.C. compared  
how he thought with how she thought: when asked to i.d. a plant, Miss  
Perry said she would think about it, and came back the next day with  
the name and how she had got there. L.C. thereupon said words to the  
effect, "you are so careful, you will not step from one stone to  
another until you are absolutely sure that they are close enough  
together; as for me, I skip from stone to stone without worrying how  
far they are apart" - and Miss Perry made skipping motions with her  
hands with pleasant accompanying sounds.

P.

On Jun 29, 2009, at 11:41 AM, John Grehan wrote:

> Michael Ivie characterized Croizat's writings as thousands of pages of
> gibberish and that Croizat being right on something is a correlate of
> the chimpanzee or orangutan pounding on a typewriter and occasionally
> producing a sentence.
>
> The trouble with such characterizations is that they are made without
> substance. Croizat had his own style, but it was not gibberish any  
> more
> than modern biogeographic papers (that in my view sometimes do read  
> like
> gibberish).