The Spider's Tail
Once Upon a Time, as these stories go, there was a web building spider. Relatively unassuming, and yet she was tired of living near her mother. The oppression of her mother's environment, coupled with the enforced subservience to the free ranging wolf spiders with their long established territories prevented her from realizing her dreams. Looking to found a new dynasty based on her principles, she moved far away.
The journey was dangerous and the new conditions at first primitive, but she was the first web builder to find the new barn where she settled. Dropping down in the interior from the roof of the barn, she began work on her new web. Yes, there were some wolf spiders there, but she fought them to a standstill and established her new kingdom, growing old and fat and prosperous. She raised many daughters, sent some of them to schools of higher education and even had enough left over to send money and assistance to her feeble mother. Life was good.
In her dotage she used some of her largess to send a particularly promising daughter to the best schools. The daughter earned a Bachelor's from Websley, an MBA in Web Management from Flyvard and a Ph.D. in Web Construction from Bug College. The daughter returned home only to find that the primitive nature of her mother's thoughts was just too oppressive. Yet she was not willing to leave the safety and security of her mother's wealth and web to strike out on her own. So she remained, discontent and scheming, awaiting her mother's demise. The hoped for event soon occurred as her mother turned all eight legs to the sky.
All of her sisters recognized that she was the elite one and the rightful heiress of the web. Surveying her new kingdom, the enlightened spider began to make necessary (to her mind) improvements. Her first task was to direct her sisters to remove all the old and unsightly strands from the web. Over the years, many had become collectors of dust and debris. As the work progressed, the elite daughter began an inspection, directing a snip here and a tuck there. With all nearly completed she spotted what appeared to be the oldest, dustiest, dirtiest thread ascending from the center of the web into the darkness of the roof of the barn. In a great rush to remove this dirty thing from her now pristine web, she raced to the old thread and removed it herself. Of course, this was her mother's first thread, the central support for all that had come after. So the web collapsed, throwing the entire clan, including their cousins far away, into rack and ruin.
The Moral Don't be overly impressed with the untested ideas of individuals, no matter how academically qualified (or not) and be very leery of discarding the old tested and successful things just because they are old.
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