It's an article about biology, where it's actually understating the behavior, as others have noticed. The subtext that no one has pointed out yet is how provincial biology is. Biologists fervently ignore other fields. I think it's partially because they're not as bright as physicists, chemists, or other scientists, partially because they are poorly trained, and partially because it would be so embarrassing to have their culture contrasted with a healthier one.
Yes, yes, and yes, however I believe one of the primary reasons why the academic culture in the field of biology became toxic is that it had become a common practice to have multiple authors in a publication. Initially the practice was quite benign because many experiments indeed require expensive instruments and knowledge of some quite specialized skills, however, this practice was kept unchecked (there is no real penalty of any sort how many authors you add to the paper, except that some authors themselves may object to having to share credit), which allowed for cliques to become established where you basically have a few "friends", and you try to add those friends to every paper you publish for some very minor help/advice they offer, and your friends in turn try to add you to every paper they publish for very minor help/advice from you. This has become an effective method to boost publication count and thus ability to obtain funding without doing any real hard work.
