"Perhaps the take-home lesson is that Taxonomists do not
think like scientists, or at least they do not read outside of their very
narrow interests."
Braem has responded and noted the glaringly obvious about Longman's dictionary. This dictionary is on-line and will be found with the simplest of information searches. I do take some minor issue with the "leading" use of Longman's in Europe, at least in Britain and France, and it seems to be written inconsistently with the OED and predominant American English dictionaries, but the dictionary is readily available and on the desks of many of my colleagues in these latter countries.
Now, Pressman's slanderous comment above is taken both personally and professionally, as it seems a clear indication of a poorly diversified and intolerant position lacking both historical perspective and reality. Granted there are several, or more, taxonomist-haters around this list, and elsewhere, but these all seem to be anachronists that never quite grasped, or may have lost the ability to understand, the nuances of nomenclature; one of those probability factors, possibly. Curiously, Einstein's taxonomy of the universe is comparably difficult to the unfocussed, but as a contemporary scientist I do have to agree that the absoluteness of truth is all relative. Pressman's comment about String Theory recalls some humor from our campus cosmologist who has offered the observation, during one of his numerous interactions with biologists, that an inordinate number of hypotheses and theories in physics were premised in part on the ingestion of high volumes of bad coffee, pale beer, Kool-Aide, or other drugs and crutches.
Paul
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