Really worry about this across all sectors covered by “service”

Cool work comparing a bunch of different character and tree models in brachiopods. Excellent to see more work at the interaction of character, clock and tree model.

Absolutely beautiful figures in this one

New from Sandy Carlson and co-authors... includes parsimony and Bayesian with FBD methods.

Ever wondered how to incorporate fossils as tips in a phylogenetic tree? Our new paper provides a comprehensive guide! #EarlyFossilFriday #FossilFriday #TipDating #Phylogeny #EvolutionaryBiology

1 week left to get your image in for Evolution 2026 logo contest! www.evolutionmeetings.org/2026-logo-co...

Finished my reread of all the His Dark Materials books. Ready for Philip Pullman to massively disappoint me next month with the Rose Field.

My neighborhood got a new, lighted crosswalk at its second most annoying intersection. One to go.

Today, scientists know that genetics plays a role in many conditions and diseases. But back in the ’90s, geneticist Mary-Claire King was the first to link a gene to an inherited form of a common cancer.

🎵Wait, they don’t love food like I love food SnaaAAAaaacks 🎶 I’m pretty sure the Yeah Yeah Yeahs only called the song Maps to cover their tracks.

New from #BiologyLetters: Combining fossil taxa with and without morphological data improves dated phylogenetic analyses buff.ly/abJm5Zv | #Evolution #Palaeontology #Taxonomy

In a lot of crucial ways, Louisiana is a canary in the coal mine. I lost personnel who were unable to comply with the state’s RTO mandate. Those of you in Georgia and TX need to be thinking about what happens if someone reports your staff for illegal work from home.

A consequence of the enshittification of universities: reliance on “free” services, like google drive. When someone leaves, they nuke the accounts post-haste. Better hope your automated backups to a personal server all worked…

Ursula K. LeGuin had a unique talent for writing a book that reads completely different as you age. Tombs of Atuan/Tehanu. I finished the Dispossessed again tonight. What an absolute light in the dark.

Great PI, great department, great city!

I am recruiting a PhD student this application cycle to explore questions on the evolution of morphological variation and phylogenetics. I'm especially seeking folks interested in fossil marine inverts. Please reach out to me if interested! Portal opens Nov. 1 eeb.utoronto.ca/education/gr...

Adding five minutes to my commute to repeatedly get off my bike and stomp on lanternflies

I feel like getting a manuscript to handle that you already read as a preprint is the adult academic equivalent of a snow day

New this week: I wrote about how people seem to always perceive that crime is rising -- a problem that goes back at least a century -- and what I'm hoping to do about it. Check it out! jasher.substack.com/p/what-to-do...

I’ve always sort of thought my son might be a Nike slides-cargo shorts-parka in winter guy he’s ice skating in a swimsuit now Called it

Fresh off the press! Our perspective in @natrevbiodiv.nature.com discusses the wealth of information on biodiversity contained in historical sources, and its integration for long-term ecological knowledge and biodiversity conservation. A thread on the paper and what led to it: rdcu.be/eEcIt

Excited to share a new paper! "Sorting of ancestral polymorphism and its impact on morphological phylogenetics and macroevolution". Part of some work I've been doing on modelling the evolution of polymorphic traits in fossil echinoderms. academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

Evolution Meeting 2026 logo contest! The winner will receive meeting registration and an Evolution 2026 t-shirt. www.evolutionmeetings.org/2026-logo-co...

My paper "Models and Analogies in the Reconstruction of Extinct Life" is also out now in this volume dedicated to Hesse ⬇️ #HPS #PaleoSky #Philsky ⚒️ link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

I can tell you that for actually getting people to do stuff (register for meetings, click links), newsletters and email announcements have much better engagement.

What was antibiotic resistance like before we ever used antibiotics? How did we change what antibiotic resistance genes looked like over 100 years? Our paper looking at resistance genes from a century of NCTC historical isolates now out in mGen: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

Here is the package Tapestree used in the paper (by @ignacioq.bsky.social and @jeremy-andreoletti.bsky.social): github.com/ignacioq/Tap...

Finally able to nab @restingdinoface.bsky.social’s When the Earth Was Green from the library. Despite not being a botanist, plant evolutionary history is one of my favorite topics to teach. What a lovely and meditative walk through the entangled history of plants, animals, and the larger environment

NEW: Last week, oil literally rained down on a Black town in rural Louisiana where 60% of folks live in poverty. The company isn’t taking responsibility & the federal + state governments are saying residents have to clean it up themselves. capitalbnews.org/louisiana-oi...

Gill, @lemeylab.bsky.social et al. develop Bayesian infinite mixture models for phylogenetic inference, finding that infinite hidden Markov models best capture complex patterns in large datasets; they implement this framework in BEAST X. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf199 #evobio #molbio

Elisabeth S. Vrba, the “Three Musketeers,” and the Expansion of Macroevolutionary Theory🧪 J. Lucas da Silva & @andrejpaleo.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1... Elisabeth Vrba Important figure in paleobiology and evolutionary theory, leaving an indelible mark on macroevolutionary research.

I cannot think on a screen. First draft of everything from papers to creative writing to pseudocode is always on paper

SSB newsletter highlighting #SSB2026 (January 9-11; Baton Rouge) is out! Miss it? ✅✅ Your member email on our website: www.systbio.org/my-account.h... You can still access the content of the newsletter below:

Are you teaching for the first time? Running your first grant? Just became Chair? In charge of a new thing of any kind? Don’t downplay your structural power over others. Be sincere and humble about your authority, because your students/mentees/employees take your power over them seriously.

Alone in this house. How did my roomba get a hat?

Shouldn’t be this empty on such a lovely day

Right, I think there are big problems with locking content behind a $500 ticket. I see what we do at Evolution as the equivalent of enabling using arxiv or self-archiving: we provide a low-cost ($10) meeting and provide the platform and a recording of a talk. You do with that talk as you please

As April points out, we actually had more people attend our virtual component in 2025 than we did in 2023. More than half of the people attending the virtual component also attend the in person. This is helped in large part by the societies moving some big draws online.

The societies moved the student award talks online, and also the lifetime achievement talks. SSE and ASN have both put up some society-sponsored symposia online, with speakers recruited by the society leadership. We've made the virtual part free for anyone from a low or middle income country.

Bed thief

I think we've figured out the right solution at the Evolution Meetings: Bang for your buck, a virtual meeting two weeks before the in-person is the most cost-effective way to involve remote participants. A couple thoughts 🧵

Look busy, supervisor’s here

I'm hiring a postdoc to work in theoretical / computational phylogenomics! More info at tinyurl.com/63hb5ew8. Please share!

🚨 Job Alert! 🚨 Assistant Professor in Global Change and Disease Ecology at Stony Brook University, Department of Ecology & Evolution. Deadline: October 1. #AcademicJobs #tenuretrack #facultyjobs apply.interfolio.com/171403 (I love being here. Come join!) @stonybrooku.bsky.social

Day three is too early to get a text from school that they’ll be sending the Tic-Tac case full of crickets back home with our son for us to manage

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

Early career researcher in systematics? Make sure to apply for early career travel funds to attend #ssb2026 👇 www.systbio.org/early-career...

"Our results show that evolutionary dynamics can lead to clusters of species that act as a self-perpetuating group that exhibits greater information-theoretic agency than a single species for a broad range of stable mutation rates" 2/2

Geological information improves phylogenetic inference 🥳 Excited to present our work on the interactions of #stratigraphy, #paleontology, and #phylogenetics at #ESEB25, poster board 312 @eseb2025.bsky.social @rachelwarnock.bsky.social

Decided to revisit this book now that we’re well into the AI revolution. Holds up. But I forgotten how beautifully and relatably she wrote about mathematics, particularly integrating anecdotes about being a parent