The warp and weft : Synthesising our taxonomic tapestry

While this volume has been structured around three key themes, reflecting key research interests of Colin’s over the years, what has clearly emerged is the enormous influence Colin has had, at a range of levels and degrees of pervasiveness, on the thinking of many people. Our title, Taxonomic Tapestries, evokes Colin’s legacy in a number of ways with Kelley and Sussman’s (2007) paper on academic genealogies being particularly relevant in this context. Kelley and Sussman explore a series of ancestor (academic supervisor) and descent (PhD student) lineages in order to document, for the most part, the academic intellectual history of primatology. Indeed, we can all engage in such genealogical detective work either to explore our own intellectual roots, or simply to locate famous ancestors. Both of us, for instance, can directly (in a unilineal fashion) trace our roots back to Hooton and his descendent (student) Washburn, while our respective ancestries diverge quite markedly after that. Colin only needs to go back a single generation to John Napier to locate his illustrious ancestor and perhaps chief intellectual influence, during his formative years, at least. Such formative periods are relevant to our tapestry of influences as we are all shaped to a greater of lesser degree by our subsequent histories and networks of colleagues and acquaintances. The contributions to this volume are clearly illustrative of this point.