One reason for Democrats to ditch their reflex to say "You have a point" to the other side is the right wing hasn't had a good point about anything in most of our lifetimes
Postdoc in evolutionary genomics of polyploids at RBG Kew | science & society | opinions mine Mizzou, Fulbright Belgium, and Michigan State alum. Here because of medicaid, public universities, and pell grants https://kevinabird.github.io/
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One reason for Democrats to ditch their reflex to say "You have a point" to the other side is the right wing hasn't had a good point about anything in most of our lifetimes
its impressive how Labour watched the Biden immigration strategy fail and decided it "what if we get even more restrictionist"
I prefer the ADHD excessive parentheticals
I’d like to congratulate the em dash for definitively replacing the Oxford comma as the main way writers and English majors can be annoying on the internet
No. You’re not closing off the primary this early. Come back in 2028
What’s crazy/hilarious is Lasker was too racist for even the SSC subreddit and was a driver of the creation of the even-more-of-a-cesspit /r/TheMotte
That too. Like Obama was actually 100% correct with the guns and religion comment. If any group in society needs to be “disciplined” it’s those kinds of parochials, not cosmopolitan liberals
They’re also totally unaware of how often they themselves are annoying! We basically all get a turn to be obnoxious in public, that’s a key component of the social contract
Frankly, it’s a lot of people on almost all sides imputing their beliefs on to rural people. Sorry, a lot of people in rural areas are genuinely nasty, selfish ignorant, small-minded people who are both victims of and participants in institutional decay and structural violence.
It really is amazing how uncommented on it is that so many “liberal” pundits and commentators find inclusive, if a bit clunky, technical language so much more an affront than literal frothing-at-the-mouth blood and soil fascism.
Same, I think I read them a bit too young and lost the plot a bit around book 3
I don’t really see where you and she disagree…
“Rowling took the idea and developed it along other lines. She didn't plagiarize. She didn't copy anything. Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything.”
🙏
Yeah that one really is the standout of that era of YA fantasy imo
I found it here, originally from a publishing coop she was involved in from 2010 I guess
Actually this one is even better, though I can’t find the original publication
True, but we at least got this masterclass in shade throwing
I’ve enjoyed reading Le Guin write about writing or Sci Fi just as much as her actual literature. So refreshing and unique in her confident unpretentiousness
Deleting a 600kb region in a genome? Not that crazy of an idea anymore! Papikian et al show that plants have an incredible ability to compensate for large genomic deletions. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Why do speciation rates vary across the tree of life? Some of the best yet most underappreciated places for this investigation are natural hybrid zones. This preprint takes you to the hybrid zones in the origin of species to find a clue. 👉 shorturl.at/N7FXE #Speciation #Evolution #hybridization
This is like in Peter Pan where the audience tries to revive Tinkerbell with applause. Except, you know, the opposite.
The impact of the first austerity policy in the 1800s: "From 1740s to 1810s in England, a strong improvement in mortality is evident, followed by 5 decades of stagnation. Only in the 1870s did life expectancy rise again; it continued to rise until 2010s, when a new austerity policy was unleashed"
Graph-based pangenome analysis uncovers structural and functional impacts of allopolyploidization events https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.26.672342v1
The thing about conservatives who say they’d never end a family relationship over politics is that, like every other thing they say, they’re lying.
No, they didn't
He's gonna get the horns
Whoa one of the profs behind that shitty AI TA company is a reactionary blowhard, what a shock
When I read EO Wilson's letters at the LOC, it was clear that he was an ACTIVIST (for "scientific racism"). He was organizing with "race scientists," supporting them, positively reviewing their pubs and books, encouraging them to write Op Eds. Yet only progressives get the "activist" label.
It’s crazy that America just like. Destroyed science. Just looked at its golden goose and went “wow should we kill this? And not for the gold, but just because we fucking hate this thing” And if you tell random people about it they go “no, that doesn’t seem true” and just refuse to believe you
I wrote about gene-gene interactions (epistasis) and the implications for heritability, trait definitions, natural selection, and therapeutic interventions. Biology is clearly full of causal interactions, so why don't we see them in the data? A 🧵:
One question I have: do we know if statistical additivity that's actually from biological epistasis behaves the same way (e.g. response to selection) as statistical additivity from biological additivity?
It's definitely not my favored explanation for "missing" heritability but it still seems to me like the methods available in humans are ill-suited for estimating epistatic effects compared to what is possible in Drosophila, yeast, or plants. I just find it hard to believe epistasis in humans is ~ 0
Excited / nervous to share the “magnum opus” of my postdoc in Andreas Wagner’s lab! "De-novo promoters emerge more readily from random DNA than from genomic DNA" This project is the accumulation of 4 years of work, and lays the foundation for my future group. In short, we… (1/4)
yeah. the fact that conservatives are bleating about women's sports at all is a huge tell, 5 minutes ago these people were mocking the WNBA and trying to dismantle Title IX
The public's opinion is not based on facts or reason. It's whipped up reactionary hysteria. You're either willingly promoting it or dumber than a sack of wrenches
Nigel Farage believes you can’t have a strong economy and a welfare state along with a multi ethnic society either you fight him on that basis or you don’t really fight him at all.
It's not based in reality, and it's where we are because of credulous idiots like you.
I haven’t seen major commercial operations. I’d imagine the fields are just far enough apart? In field trials I believe they put nets over plots so less cross-fertilization happens but that feels too onerous at commercial scale.
You’re supporting the peak of moral depravity and you’re whining about light teasing? God you lot are pathetic
The Dark Ages didn’t actually exist
If it wasn’t for all the mess it’d introduce to past literature I’d be for revising as many polyphyletic taxa as possible, including my beloved Brassica
It’s kind of like an extreme form of an ecotype. I’m of two minds about it. It’s certainly fine to have functional categories for many fields (ecology, physiology, etc), but for evolutionary studies I’m a pretty staunch proponents of classifications based on ancestry.
Yeah that’s almost exactly backwards. Pollen is the small plant gamete, fruits are ovaries
I could maybe see that for the larger voting body, but I’m not sure the “elite” see themselves as connected to the hoi poloi like that
Almost missed this! The bibliography of critiques is here zenodo.org/records/8263...
There's obvious tensions and weird contradictions there with traditional ideas of neoliberal/liberatarian free market ideology, but the genealogy and shared cast of characters was convicing to me. From the other direction,you can see that kind of ideology in people like Richard Lynn or Peter Brimlow
It's a weird ideological mix right now for sure, in no small part due to Trump's melted brain and obsession with tariffs. I think Slobodian's thesis that the alt-right/NatCon space are neoliberals/liberatarians who consciously merged with nativists and race scientists is largely correct.
It’s mostly because environmentalism and egalitarianism broadly undermine their idea of libertarian free market capitalism
P1: Virtue is good P2: Good things are worth pursuing ∴ Virtue is worth pursuing QED.
Yes, and also environmentalism
Beyond single-trait GxE: higher-order environmental interactions and clonal diversity govern trait relationships in yeast https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.21.671491v1
Today’s Executive Order creating a *nationwide* military “quick reaction force” and setting up an online portal to permit random fascist vigilantes to join soldiers is one of the scariest things I’ve seen in U.S. politics in my adult life. Why is it not getting more attention?
This was inevitable. But oh no, the flag raising campaign is nothing to do with the international far right. It’s just English people expressing English pride!
It's almost like even scientific categories have normative as well as descriptive functions and you can't separate science from the sociopolitical context in which it's practiced
they're literally taking science out of your kid's classroom
Today 14 scientific societies in #ecology #evolution and #marineScience are publishing the results of a survey that finds negative impacts of federal policies on food security, flood mitigation, infectious disease preparedness, and wildlife conservation: 🧪👩🔬 www.firsthandaccounts.org/impacts/2025...
They shouldn't though
David Shor and his consequences have been disastrous for society
Words/phrases Democrats should never use: * bipartisan * my Republican friends * real, valid, legitimate, serious, important (to describe issue raised by Republicans) * yea (when voting on Republican bills) * distraction (to describe bad thing Republicans did) * woke (in derogatory sense)
Surely he's said we should listen to Republican voters before
Why do males and females often differ in traits? The expected answer: selection. But our new paper in GENETICS shows that genetic drift alone can generate sexual dimorphism — even when male & female optima are the same
putting aside the trans rights issues specifically (lol), I think part of what has me so frustrated with the Newsom thing is that Pritzker, Walz, and Zohran are putting on clinics for a popular, progressive politics and we’re wasting time talking about this used car salesman ass goblin.
Insisting on expertise over ideology is not “politicizing” science. The ideologues installing scientific and governmental policy that is contradicted by evidence and data are. By emphasizing ideology over expertise, THEY have made arguing for expertise and evidence-based decision making partisan.
Insofar as there is inefficiency, it is often caused by republicans themselves so teaming up with them or adopting their rhetoric seems self-defeating.
I see little compelling evidence that government is terribly inefficient or wasteful, or that current entities like the GAO are insufficient. Especially enough to warrant embracing an obvious bad faith effort like DOGE/Musk
Inferring the history of gene copy number evolution https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.21.671444v1
How common are frequency dependent fitness effects? New preprint out today 👇 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Our paper on the evolution of MUC19 in humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans is finally out today in Science! This has been a six-year effort by 13 authors to weave together 3 separate but related evolutionary stories around this one gene (more on thread 🧵). www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
How about Florence Cytometer?
Is there any crime greater than forcing a politician to see the human cost of their policy failures?
Oh shit the heterosexual family unit is also a labor relation
A week and a half ago, a shooter emptied hundreds of bullets into a federal building
Ji, Kapli, Flouri & @zihengyang.bsky.social assess the impact of genotyping errors in phylogenomic data on Bayesian inference of species trees, suggesting that it is better to sequence a few samples at high depths over many samples at low depths. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf184 #evobio #molbio
Obviously! You only ever hear about people eating ground turkey, not tree turkey
I’m honestly more jealous you’re unaware of him
Clearly you’ve never encountered Miller before
It does make a lot of things finally make sense
2 bits of data from new Economist/YouGov poll..... 13% support for cutting research funding to universities. 24% among Republicans. Polling on this continues to be catastrophic for the Rs, suggests Dems should be learning far harder into standing up for science and our universities. 1/
NEW: McCarthyism returns to immigration law, as @USCIS announces that it will begin screening applicants for immigration benefits for "Anti-America ideologies or activities." The term has no prior precedent in immigration law and its definition is entirely up to the Trump admin.
Gene duplication and clustering underlie the conservation and diversification of benzylisoquinoline alkaloid biosynthesis in plants www.nature.com/articles/s41... @natcomms.nature.com
Go back to cowering in fear at the thought of an apartment complex coming to your neighborhood
Pretty much everything you said was wrong. Congrats
You’re engaging in a very frustrating white supremacism strategy to minimize colonialism and slavery. Hopefully that’s unintentional
Iirc the distinguishing feature was not property without rights but that chattel slavery was hereditary. I don’t believe that was part of ancient forms
Sorry, Cathy hasn’t read or listened to anything with informational content since Gamer Gate
*Please don’t inquire further about who defines and builds knowledge, who is human, or who and what is flourishing
Right. Chattel slavery was an entirely new invention as were the racial categories and the way natural sciences were directed toward the job. Linnaeus tried to define the races using the newly developed taxonomic standards he had just created
They don’t go back to the dawn of civilization at all, they were largely a product of the enlightenment.
Sorry that was the predominant intellectual milieu the founders were swimming in
Idk I think it makes good sense to assign that label to the people who created the racial categorizations and the scientific justification for colonialism and white supremacy
A Labour Party like this is useless. You’re an embarrassment
truly god’s own special idiot
They can move to Davis
Maybe by the time your N is back up to the size of your regression sample. It still seems like a stretch to apply population statistics about variance to pairwise differences like this.
I’m not sure it really makes sense to talk about a pairwise difference being “90% genetic”. Does a regression slope tell you much of anything about the difference between any two points?
It’s also mostly empirically wrong
"kids playing counterstrike like to say slurs" wow thats crazy man. is this your first day playing video games
