Science Faux Pas #4: Nature wishes their dog ate this advertisement

I know others have written about this already but I had to add this to my collection of Science Faux Pas because it is pretty good.  Nature had a recent issue that was covering the US election.  And look at the front and back cover … they claim it was an accident but hard to imagine given the posing/color matching.  I note I first heard about this from Bora on FriendFeed. And now the Times Online has a whole story on it.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis

2 thoughts on “Science Faux Pas #4: Nature wishes their dog ate this advertisement”

  1. I guess I’m not seeing the problem. Even if it *was* deliberate, what’s the issue? If it had been a picture of a dog and a human, the candidate who was being “represented” in canine form could see it as an insult, but two dogs?

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  2. Well, you may not get it, but Nature said “The journal swears they were not being deliberately cheeky. “We didn’t know until the issue landed on our desks,” Nature pleads. “It just goes to show that editorial and advertising aren’t working in cahoots.So that is what I was kind of trying to convey. I am not saying this is a huge screw up. Just a funny slip. Maybe “Freudian Slip” would have been a better title.

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