It comes in the main text of a paper titled "Variation in Melanism and Female Preference in Proximate but Ecologically Distinct Environments," which was published in a recent issue of the journal Ethology. Here's the unintentionally candid passage, as highlighted by UC-Davis grad student Dave Harris: The blooper was picked up by Retraction Watch, which contacted both the authors and the publisher for comment. The corresponding author told Retraction Watch the Gabor line "was added into the paper by a co-author during revision (after peer review)," and no one spotted it in the course of the final proofreading process. He apologized for the put-down, adding, "I would never condone this sentiment towards another person or their work." Wiley, the publisher, responded by removing the paper and says it will republish it with the line removed and the change noted. "We are in the process of investigating how this line made it to publication," the Wiley spokesperson said. That's a good question. Typos and editing mistakes are common on blogs and even in print newspapers, where reporters and editors are working on tight deadlines. But academics typically have weeks or even months to edit a paper before the journal goes to press, and the peer review process means that it has to go through close reads by multiple experts in the relevant field. For that reason, errors this glaring in the main text of an article are relatively rare, says Meredith Carpenter, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford and co-author of the science-humor blog Seriously, Science? As Carpenter and co-author Lillian Fritz-Laylin explained in a Slate post last year, overly honest asides are more commonly found in the acknowledgements section, which tends not to be peer-reviewed.