What is this image selling?

I saw this at the curb for garbage collection day this week.

I can imagine the planning meeting.

Project manager: "We need a cover for a new book for children called Looking at Insects by David Suzuki."

Graphic artist: "How about a photograph of David Suzuki and a couple of children looking at insects?"

That's a 1986 edition. By 1992, the cover looked like this:

That's meant to be more inclusive but it strikes me as a little creepy that Suzuki appearing to look at the little girl that way rather than the butterflies. The decision-making process here is interesting. They decided to stay with a white girl but update her fashion choices while going with a black boy. Is Suzuki looking towards the girl meant to encourage girls to study sciences? I would think it more likely to encourage girls to seek adult approval by doing whatever adults want them to do. The more independent little boy is the sort of role model you should use to if you actually want children to study science. This is a study in sexism disguised as anti-sexism.

I don't know how the little girl gets her hand on Suzuki's shoulder here without having a longer right arm than left. My guess it's not her hand—that they took an outtake from the session used in the first cover and edited the new butterflies, the  girl and the boy into the shot and changed the colouring a bit to get this. You can just imagine the angst-ridden decision not to have the little boy touching Suzuki: what messages are we most scared of appearing to send?

Not related to the design: this is a book on a subject that Suzuki is actually an expert in. Most of what Suzuki writes about he is not an expert in. There is nothing wrong with that. I think anyone should be able to write a book about anything. The problem is that when someone such as Suzuki or Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson writes about matters they are not experts in we get something I call expertise creep. None of those men, for example, is an expert in climate science so we shouldn't attribute any more authority on the subject to them than we do to any interested amateur. Unfortunately, it doesn't work out that way.

The pattern that we actually see played out works like this. A scientist with an actual area of expertise branches out into science education after their career doing real science (or, in Nye's case, engineering) has passed its prime. They prove to be very good at science education but they aren't content to stop there and get a taste for telling other people how they ought to be living. Thereafter they produce a series of preachy books and TV shows that are mostly political activism mixed with a very little science in fields they have no expertise in. Despite this, we're all supposed to rollover like good little puppies because SCIENCE!!!

I suspect the implied argument goes like this: "Okay, these guys aren't experts in climate but they are experts in science." And it pretty much has to be implicit. Make it explicit and the stupidity at work becomes obvious.