Reader William H. sent me a pdf of a Current Biology paper with this note:
I’m a dinosaur enthusiast, a passion that I acquired in childhood and has never left me. The attached paper is interesting, but I bring it to your attention because of the one of a kind occurrence at the end of the acknowledgements. What, do you think, was the answer?
The title:
The acknowledgments:
If you’re a diligent reader, find out the answer!
Yes!
+
A greater love hath no nerdy biologist than this, that he proposeth in the acknowledgements.
Is it even legal? 😎
Of course, here at the Tyrrell Museum, we were all disappointed that Lorna simply answered “yes,” without crafting a separate manuscript as the vehicle for her response. We all wish them the best!
My lab figured that the answer was probably, ‘Yes’, but it’s nice to have confirmation!
Sorry, but I don’t approve in a serious scientific journal.
Are you serious?
Quite. I doubt you will find such things in Science or Nature.
I am sad.
It does distract from the subject, don’t you think? I’m not in favor of turning the acknowledgements into a personal page for all sorts of messages.
And this is a serious issue! We must stop this rampant abuse of science!
“We live in a world where we must worry about offending the feelings of religious believers and also worry about the potentially offended feelings of humanity’s humorless population.”
I never said I was offended (a commenter below said “not my cup of tea” which sums up my feelings too. And even if I was, I am free to say I don’t approve aren’t I? The editors clearly think it is OK. I’m not against a bit of levity or humor (the proposal strikes me as neither). The examples given below, with article titles and author listings are nicely witty and I smiled as I read them. The NPR article i cite below (with Dr. Coyne so nicely featured) suggests the levity has gone a bit too far for many.
Nick, the people who are (potentially) offended are described in the NPR story you provided the link for, the people that you claimed to “not be alone” with.
Nope, I don’t think that, and I very much doubt the slippery slope argument is a credible threat/reason to prevent this sort of thing.
No, I don’t think it distracts from the subject. I acknowledge that I might be wrong about it, but a position such as yours seem like it might be a case of propriety for propriety’s sake. That is something I’ve always had issues with when I’ve run up against it personally. Legacy of a stubborn, rebellious childhood perhaps.
This is why we have genes called Sonic Hedgehog and important Martian landmarks called Scooby Doo.
My view on this is different enough from yours that it seems to me that you must be taking the piss with this comment. I just don’t have the slightest problem with genes being coined Sonic Hedgehog or important Martian landmarks called Scooby Doo. And I have trouble taking complaints of such seriously. I don’t mean that as a scoff, I mean that I am unsure if they are serious. In my opinion such things are a positive, not a negative.
I am in earnest and not alone.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100468532
We live in a world where we must worry about offending the feelings of religious believers and also worry about the potentially offended feelings of humanity’s humorless population.
Very useful names, much easier to remember than the usual boring stuff.
[Scooby Doo, really? Unfortunately I don’t think that has anything to do with humor, but that the cartoon is – as earlier mentioned here – a skeptic non-magic series.]
I don’t think a planet that has a ‘Pacific’ Ocean has a very high horse to sit on here. =D
Shouldn’t we solve the problem of frivolous place names here on Earth before worrying too much about Mars?
Much too earnest & not nearly alone enough.
I guess you wouldn’t agree with the lesson The Hitch said he took from Oscar Wilde — be “flippant about serious things, and serious about the apparently trivial.” I’ll also go out on a limb and guess you’re no Marx Brothers’ fan.
(Reply to Nick’s complaint and Darrelle’s response to Sonic Hedgehog and Scooby Doo)
My biggest sad in science is that the two quarks originally known as “truth” and “beauty” now usually go by the far more prosaic (that’s Latin for “boring”) “top” and “bottom”.
I think any fundamentally non-harmful method of enlivening science (not to us; we think it’s the most interesting thing in the world) to those who think science is dull and scientists are nerdy, unromantic, absent-minded, or uninteresting, has to be a good thing. I was just reading about Robert Wilson (cowboy? artist??) at Fermilab, and my gast was well and truly flabbered.
My biggest sad in science is that the two quarks originally known as “truth” and “beauty” now usually go by the far more prosaic (that’s Latin for “boring”) “top” and “bottom”.
The amusing anecdote about that selection goes: there was an American/European split, with Europeans preferring to discover the naked truth and Americans preferring to discover bare bottoms. 🙂
This sentimentality in acknowledgements must be ripped out root and branch! No more “I especially must thank my wife/husband/children…” stuff!
Well, I certainly hope the marriage happens and then lasts. The proposal will live forever, especially in a paper describing a new species. If the marriage goes south, they will have that staring at them for eternity.
Oh, the horror! How would they ever be able to move on?
LOL how many published journal articles do you read over and over again? “Staring at them for eternity” is pretty melodramatic for a thing that typically gets read once and then stuffed in a file drawer, to be pulled out if you need to reference an exact number or something.
And by extension, marriage itself distracts from science and should be avoided. It can lead to sentimentality and you will certainly not find that in Science and Nature.
I think acknowledgements are exactly the right place for personal messages.
Message, fine. But this is a question. Must we wait for another paper to find the answer?
Me too!
This is certainly the reason I’ve never published anything in either Science or Nature.
I understand it would not be everyones’ cup of tea. But heady science journals do have their jokes. April 1 rarely goes by without something published in a science journal somewhere in observance of that holiday. For example here or here.
When I was a post-doc my boss had a peer-review journal article up on his wall published by the authors Knox, Knox, Hoos, Dere (or something similar; I forget the spelling).
And don’t forget “The origin of Chemical Elements’ by Alpher, Bethe and Gamow in Phy Rev Lett
And, very loosely related, the law firm of Dewey, Cheatam and Howe.
Which law firm represented the Car Talk brothers;-)
It was Knox, Knox, Hoose, and Zare on a whimsical paper about a zero-femtosecond laser pulse. Dick Zare is a rather well-known laser chemist at Stanford – sometimes you have to have a reputation like that to get away with something like this…
Very good; thanks for the reference!
I guess you won’t approve of this then.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/pdf/jaba00061-0143a.pdf
Ha ha!
love it!
I do approve of this proposal–heartily. There are many examples of levity in papers, but this is beyond levity: it’s romance and love, and it’s incredibly sweet. Scientists are human, and nothing shows it better than this. The scientific literature doesn’t have to be 100% sterile and impersonal.
I think Nick is perhaps just being a bit…well….chicken….
b&
A proper abuse is those physics papers where the ‘author’ list goes for pages. That is totally absurd!
Not so absurd if you’re part of a huge team of experimentalists who spend a decade or more building a detector and collecting data for something like the Higgs boson. If those teams were not listed as co-authors on the resulting papers, they’d have no publications at all.
Doing high-energy physics is like making a blockbuster action movie. It takes a village, and they all deserve credit.
sub
Here’s wishing them many joint publications in the future!
b&
Hmmm…I wonder if they’re into peer review? #bowchickawow
Well, maybe, but Laura is busy working on the Burgess Shale fauna, while Caleb is a vertebrate palaeontologist specializing on dinosaurs. So while their corporeal forms exist here together today, their academic specialties are separated by hundreds of millions of years, tragically.
Invertebrate paleontologist marries vertebrate paleontologist! It will never work! What about the children!
Well, if anybody is ever going to find that rabbit lurking in the Precambrian, it’ll be them!
b&
Yes, and then all of us evolutionary biologists will be out of a job.
Be careful what you wish for.
This reminds me of Robert Silverberg’s story Hawksbill Station, in which male criminals are sent on a one-way journey to the Cambrian period, while female criminals are sent to, roughly, the Silurian. Which probably says more than even I want to know about how my mind works.
Females being naturally more advanced than males…
Wait, you mean that scientists can love?!
Seriously, I think that’s really sweet.
Of course scientists can love:
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/54414-tell-me-why-the-stars-do-shine-tell-me-why
All those movies and TV shows…they’ve lied to me!
The problem with these public proposals that it will be difficult to say no, especially in front of a large audience. Which is not the case here, but nevertheless…
He gave her the final copy to proof-read for him before submitting it, so she got to accept in private, before anyone else saw it.
All this from a simple question. Yes, No
The intertubes can be testy…
It would have been funny if she had waited years for a paper to be published container her response.
Or, what if his paper had been rejected?
She said yes.
I was slightly disappointed that he reportedly didn’t wait for her to discover the paper on her own, and instead just showed it to her.
But I approve nonetheless. It’s sweet.
I wish them both the very best.
Very sweet. 🙂
I’ve been told that those wanting to propose marriage often try to do it differently than others. So that takes care of repeats in the literature …
Oh, that is so sweet!!!!!!!
Aw, that’s so cute.
Also, in case anyone’s wondering what the big deal is regarding the convergent evolution thing; there are basically two major groups of Ceratopsians, the Centrosaurines and the Chasmosaurines, and normally it’s easy to tell which is which based on facial design. What was usually the case was that the latter contained variations on a similar facial design – two brow horns, one nasal horn, elongated head frills with minor decoration, and protrusions on the cheeks – whereas the former contained much more variation in its frills and horns.
For instance, in the Centrosaurines, there are ones with spiky frills (Styracosaurus), ones with horned frills (Diabloceratops, ones with down-turned nasal horns (Einiosaurus), and ones with stumpy bosses rather than actual horns (Achelousaurus and Pachyrhinosaurus). The Chasmosaurines mostly look like variations of the famous Triceratops – which is, in fact, a member – and aren’t so diverse. For this reason, you can glance at a set of Ceratopsian skulls and quickly deduce who belongs in what group, at least until now.
In brief, Chasmosaurines are usually Triceratops lookalikes, whereas Centrosaurines tend to go crazy with their head designs. Regaliceratops is, in effect, the first “Centrosaurine” in the Chasmosaurine clan. It’s a bit like finding a cat-lookalike in the dog family.
Ceratopsians really are amazing creatures. Here’s an artist’s lovely picture of majestic Regaliceratops peterhewsi:
http://i0.wp.com/retractionwatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/horned-dino-current-biology.jpg
Wow!
Who are you who are wise in the ways of science? 😉
Oh I believe that picture is Julius Csotonyi’s lovely rendition!
It is.
/@