[Taxacom] A good year indeed!

[Fred Schueler]

> On Sat, 15/11/14, Jose Fernandez Triana <jftriana at uoguelph.ca> wrote:

>  One interesting thing, perhaps overlooked in
>  this debate, is that all of the positive comments are coming
>  from people currently employed and established (if employed
>  because they are 'excellent' or not, I am not even
>  going to discuss that). What would be the opinions of those
>  currently without employment, of those that are not that
>  'excellent' (to use Mike wording, although I do not
>  like this labeling and thus were not employed)? Would they
>  agree that all is good and well?

* as one evidently certified as unemployable by the system since 1981,  
with a father-in-law who was fully employed in an era when he never  
once had to apply for a job, and a son-in-law who, despite winning his  
university's "best Ph.D. thesis" prize is seriously depressed about  
the nonexistent prospects for employment, I'd say that the competitive  
system for hiring academics is biased against those who'd be the best  
scholars, since it takes a brazen assertiveness to get hired.

I've read that the most innovative scientists are either youngest  
siblings, like Darwin, or shy (=unemployable) oldest siblings or only  
children, suggesting that with the smaller family sizes required for a  
sustainable human population, some method of staffing universities and  
museums, other than flagrant publication whooping and self-promotion,  
will need to be found if the best scholars are to be employed. I'll  
admit that I never made much of a systematic effort to find  
employment, but the son-in-law has worked diligently at it and has not  
yet had any success.

fred.
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           Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
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"[The] two fundamental steps of scientific thought - the conjecture  
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of intelligence. If something is to be dismissed as inadequate, it is  
surely not Darwin [, whose] works manifest the activity of a mind  
seeking for wisdom, a value which conventional philosophy has largely  
abandoned." Ghiselen, 1969. Triumph of the Darwinian Method, p 237.
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