I cannot resist. Every once in a while, I'll show a bad graphic from the world of molecular biology to one of my classes, and I'll try to extract the significant point from it…but I'll also tell the class that this is one of those places where the stupid scientist ought to have walked over to the fine arts building and asked one of those hip young undergraduates to apply a little design sense to their work. However, that peculiar astrobiology paper had a doozy, and I just have to show it off. Behold. Figure 4.
So…are your eyes hurting as much as mine are? I don't know what it is that figure is trying to tell me, but whatever it is, that clutter and eruption of primary colors isn't helping.
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