Somatic and germline mutational processes across the tree of life https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.28.691837v1

My first post for @Forbes Anti-predictions for 2026. Stuff people say will happen that ain't gonna happen: UFOs as Aliens; AGI; 3I/Atlas forbes.com/sites/adamfr...

Los análisis genéticos sugieren que el virus de la peste porcina africana no salió del laboratorio de la Generalitat que estaba a cientos de metros, según los primeros resultados "no concluyentes" de @tonigabaldon.bsky.social elpais.com/ciencia/2025...

Right, what am I pretending to do here? open.substack.com/pub/stevecas...

Continents and oceans: we both. But it didn’t have to be this way and on most planets it probably isn’t. That’s important because truly complex life may need dry land to get going. Today's Everyman's Universe post. www.everymansuniverse.com/p/freaky-ear...

Multidisciplinary training, over time, produces the highest impact people www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Happy to hare that the preprint I was advertising below has been published by the Journal of Evolutionary Biology: academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-... Thanks @jevbio.bsky.social for supporting responsible publishing!

I am very pleased to see our work, in which we describe a mutational hotspot at transcription start sites in the human germline, out: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Great work from @castellanoed.bsky.social, @vseplyarskiy.bsky.social, Miguel Cortés Guzmán and Clàudia Serrano Colomé!

I wrote this piece at the start of the year, so it's nice to see it finally out before the year's end! It looks at the notion of "hard steps" in evolution that allegedly make intelligent life rare in the universe, and why that might not be correct after all. nautil.us/we-might-not...

Transcription start sites are new mutational hotspots, according to a new study by the CRG's Donate Weghorn in Nature Communications. The mutations can be passed down to future generations and appear shortly after conception, in the first few rounds of cell division.

I found myself writing this weird post about Descartes mind-body dualism, the Frequentist and Bayesian debate in statistics and John's Vervaeke work. open.substack.com/pub/stevecas...

Phase transitions, bifurcations, thermal vents, exoplanets and their interactive maps, as well as pointers to a whole special issue just published in @royalsocietypublishing.org about origin of life. With Spotify and Apple podcasts as usual. What do you need more? CC: @ricardsole.bsky.social

Excellent teaching material.

Next paper published in the @hpgg-pivot.bsky.social special issue on popgen methods and software! Coll Macià & Skov "Best practices and pitfalls in using hmmix for reference-free detection of introgressed sequences" doi.org/10.47248/hpg... Submission for contributions still open to 15 January!

Amazing to have a byline with @cbo.bsky.social - read our take on Watson’s ultimate legacy in the Boston Globe. Will be in Sunday’s print edition.

Putting aside the deeper issues of why this analysis was done and how it has been promoted, the choice to broadcast a tv show before releasing a preprint should make people skeptical of the results. How can one be sure of their scientific claims?

Our recent article on GHIST, the community competition to benchmark methods in genomic history inference, is the focus of this month's Highlight. Highlight: Community Tournament GHIST Fuels Advances in Computational Genetics 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf278 #evobio #molbio #compbio

I am happy to share our manuscript summarising the outcome of GHIST2024 (ghist.bio). With so many statistical tools and software, population genetics research seems easy. But every case is different. The approaches used vary! doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf257 @ryangutenkunst.bsky.social

With sequencing of Hitler's DNA making headlines, time for a reminder: analysing a polygenic score from a dead historically-significant figure won't give new insights into that person's behaviour. In a brief paper last year, we used Beethoven's genome to directly illustrate the fallacies involved.🧪👇

The Spanish public television has published the first audiovisual map showing the 6,000 mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the subsequent Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975). A testimony of what happens when fascism wins -something unknown in most of Europe.

ICE vehicles waste a whopping 80% of the energy in their fuel. Electric vehicles are propelled by entirely different mechanisms. Energy enters the vehicle as electricity, which directly powers the drivetrain: EVs need not convert one form of energy to another resulting in much higher efficiency.

@lntran.bsky.social @castellanoed.bsky.social @ryangutenkunst.bsky.social introduce a systematic permutation approach for interpreting haplotype matrix-based methods in population genomics. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf250 #evobio #molbio

Can consciousness arise purely from computation, or does it require the biological mechanisms that allow computing? The tension between computational roles and biological realizers may hold the key. Check this paper by @neddo.bsky.social @mkhochb.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🧵1/ Excited to share our new paper in Molecular Biology & Evolution! 👉 [https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf250] It started as a lab-meeting sanity check for another project — and ended up turning into a new way to interpret machine-learning models in population genomics.

#Solar becomes main source of electricity in the #EU for first time. More than half of the EU’s #electricity in the second quarter of 2025 came from #RenewableEnergy www.independent.co.uk/tech/solar-p...

Exciting news! The next #PopGroup meeting will take place in Lille 🍟, France, 7–9 January 2026 – just 1 hour by train from London, Brussels, and Paris. This year, PopGroup will also host ALPHY, the annual meeting of Evolutionary Genomics. More info: populationgeneticsgroup.org.uk See you there !

Mathematician Hilda Geiringer was born OTD 9/28/1893. In philosophy of science, best known for translating and adding to her husband Richard von Mises' books on probability and statistics, in biology for seminal work on genetic linkage. www.bbc.com/future/artic... #philsci #evobio #probability #math

So exhausting..

Proud to announce the project I've been working on 🏳️‍⚧️🧬 Had hoped to have more ready, but the events of the last week stressed the importance of speaking up against fascism NOW I'd appreciate your support in spreading the word, esp if you work in life sciences research, healthcare, or biotech

Women, non-native English speakers & those form low-income countries are disadvantaged in science but by how much? We found that women with non-English first languages from low-income countries publish up to 70% fewer in English than their counterparts. 1/5 doi.org/10.1371/jour... #languagebarriers

@adameyrewalker.bsky.social Nice to see you here!

Giving a little boost to this appendix to #BeyondTheAgeOfMachines: "Limitations of Mathematical Modeling" https://expandingpossibilities.org/a4-limitations-of-mathematical-modelling.html It starts with static network models, then shows how to include dynamics […] [Original post on spore.social]

I'm excited to share with you all a conference I'm planning Oct. 10-12: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin. It will be hybrid in Toronto and on zoom, so please join us however you can! Register for zoom link here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

With two months to go, @alwaysrong.bsky.social is dominating the Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament leaderboards. Jump into the competition to help dethrone Stephen! Glory, money, and authorship are all on the line! ghi.st

Chapter 12 of #beyondtheageofmachines is out! "Was lange währt, wird endlich gut" we'd say in German. It's called "The World is Not a Set." https://www.expandingpossibilities.org/12-the-world-is-not-a-set.html

Curious to hear thoughts from #popgen, #humangenetics, #genomics folks on recent paper: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... "Directed mutation" in specific human pop'ns seems unlikely to me. DM didn't stand up as proposed in bacteria, but there are hot spots shaped by past selection. Plausible here?

Save the date! #PEQG26 June 9-12 2026 in Asilomar, CA. Happens only every 2yrs, but is my favorite conference. Full website coming soon, and registration and abstract submission opens November 14, but I'm allowed to tease that keynotes will be @jnovembre.bsky.social @jennytung.bsky.social and me!

Biology never ceases to amaze!

The SMBE 2026 Annual Meeting in Copenhagen is open for symposium proposals from Sept 1 to Oct 15, 2025. Details at https://smbe2026.org/symposia/. Looking forward to your submissions! #conference

Our latest preprint led by @conjustover.bsky.social with fantastic undergraduate Sam Gibbon and @ryangutenkunst.bsky.social! Read Justin's thread below for more information on this fun project diving into mutation-selection balance in tetraploids! #polyploidy 🧪

New Preprint! This one led by Sam Gibbon, an outstanding undergrad I've worked with for the past year. We take a look at whether segregation patterns in tetraploids (disomic v polysomic) affects mut-sel dynamics. We found some surprising results, and some subtleties: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

SimHumanity: Using SLiM 5.0 to run whole-genome simulations of human evolution https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673541v1

When Ted Turner asked Carl Sagan if he was a socialist, Sagan gave the answer America keeps failing to learn.

Next ESEB meeting will have an innovative format, across four hubs. The aim is to make it easier to avoid plane travel, and to diversify the locations that can host a meeting #ESEB2025 #ESEB2027

Hello, community! My boss has organised a fantastic competition in the field of population genomics inference. Take a look and get involved if you (truly) think your method is the best!

Me promoting the Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament at #eseb2025! ghi.st Population geneticists: join, compete, earn cash, become an author, learn, help the community! ghi.st

Surely one of the all-time best conference outreach activities: an evolution-inspired decorated street for Les Festes de Gràcia #ESEB2025

If you're interested in learning #JuliaLang and are currently an #RStats user (or even if you're not!), then here's a little introduction to getting started! 📊 Blog post: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introdu... #QuartoPub #Julia @tidierjl.bsky.social

Folks going to #ESEB2025 : To help people connect on Bluesky, I've started making starter packs. Here is a first one with the names that were available when I started. Ping me if you want to be included in the next one!

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.