Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

Honestly, if we win, great, very funny. If we lose, everyone will be extremely mad all over again, which, also great, also very funny.

ROLL TIDE

The case for Alabama: they are my favorite team & therefore deserve to be in

This is truly awful. I have served in the university media board for 3 years and saw how brilliant and committed the student editors of these magazines were to quality and integrity. This is such a loss for the university community at large. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/u...

#TheRefs are never not involved if Auburn doesn’t win

Episode 46: Sapiens It's an ambitious goal to write the entire history of humanity in just 400 pages. It's even more ambitious to do it without reading any research.

Thanks to Congress slashing funding for PBS, Alabama Public Television, the nation’s oldest public educational network, may sever ties with PBS, which would effectively kill the network. www.al.com/news/birming...

Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty Tenure-track faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years. #AcademicSky

like basically everyone who works in software I embody this tweet and do not under any circumstances want to talk to my computer

Western Alaska was hit hard by the recent storms. Houses floated away in Kipnuk, houses flipped over, people lost everything from the flooding that came with the storms. Please donate if you can. This group has a long history of supporting AK communities. alaskacf.fcsuite.com/erp/donate/c...

Biology is much more complicated than most non-biologists can imagine. And AI is not going to change this anytime soon. blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/we-still-c...

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

The Smith Bee Lab is HIRING! 🐝🐝🐝 - Postdoc (2-4yrs, flexible start-date) - 1-2 Graduate Students (to start Fall 2026) No prior experience with honey bees needed, we encourage people from diverse research areas to apply! (no jerks, plz)

What are you gonna do, tackle him?

Surprisingly, the phylogeny implies (equivocally, to be sure) that the Elegans Supergroup of species, which includes C. elegans, is derived from American ancestors, and that a lot of the groups diversification may have taken place in Oceania, prior to subsequent invasions of Asia.

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

Applying to the NSF-GRFP (or another fellowship) on a tight deadline? We built a 7-week guide + timeline to get you from draft to submission. It’s not too late — you’ve got this! ✨ 🔗 cientificolatino.com/apply-in-7-weeks #NSFGRFP #GradSchool #Fellowship

Vaccines are battle training for your immune system. If you could give it intel on the enemy, why would you withhold that? Give me ALL the vaccines! I want to be prepared for everything!

Obligatory sharing of John Oliver's take on this administrations fight against research and Universities #academia youtu.be/xk94il8L820?...

Nearly all PhDs take 5 years--with finishing in 4 a rare outcome. This is deliberately designed to eliminate the international powerhouse that is US postgraduate training.

The 2025-26 Eco-Evo job list is out. Good luck to those applying! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

There are a lot of details in yesterday's sweeping executive order, but the bottom line is that it gives political appointees immense power over scientific grants, which have until now been stewarded by career civil servants and experts. My reporting: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

@emilydriessen.bsky.social and I wrote a letter in Science calling for us to lean into our communities and increase support for change agents during this time of adversity and funding cuts. #DBER #BioEd Community support for inclusive US education | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

If I have to explain to you why it's a bad idea to use a machine that makes shit up 15-80% of the time AND destroys the environment AND contributes to rising fascism and genocide AND puts brilliant skillful creatives out of work by stealing their work, then we're already speaking different languages

Why isn’t bell hooks’s writing around men and love not seen as a progressive text on how men can get laid, i.e., form healthy romantic relationships with people in their lives?

NEW: 18,500 children have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. The Washington Post has just published every single known name. A seminal moment.

STEM ed has been foundational to NSF's mission & mandated functions ever since its founding in 1950. Ex: Remember the Magic School Bus? NSF funded that. Bill Nye the Science Guy? Zoom? Reading Rainbow? NSF was a key funder in all those [with others like the imperiled Corp for Public Broadcasting]

Normally write whatever comes to mind, but the editors specifically requested, if I had the time, to breakdown the meteorological factors that caused the Texas Floods. Here’s my take on 5 key ingredients www.forbes.com/sites/marsha...

To Craig's point, I always bring up the CRAZY stat buried in Morgan et al. '22: Babies of profs become faculty ~9.5% of the time, while the overall prob a STUDENT IN A PHD becomes faculty = ~12%. One would hope ≥20 years of work & commitment toward a goal puts you far ahead of babies, but no.

My deep dive on whether there were adequate weather warnings for the catastrophic flooding in Texas. Mentions Alan Gerard Balanced Weather and Jordan McLeod. I am really interested in your thoughts on my take. www.forbes.com/sites/marsha...

It's hard to avoid recalling this passage from the English historian Tony Judt:

Yes, misunderstanding ‘trans’ in molecular biology leading to grant cuts is bad. But so is cutting grants studying actual trans people, and cutting grants based on broader impacts aimed at DEI. It’s all bad!!

First time ever hanging out in federal court today. Stay tuned for an update on the anti-DEI lawsuit. Here's @alander.bsky.social recap from yesterday. www.al.com/news/2025/06...

I miss Fridays

Difficult to overstate this. It seems that many in core science and math fields feel that they will be able to hunker down and wait, but the infrastructure for ALL science is being diminished. This will diminish US higher ed in ways that will not be apparent for another 12-18 months.

Alabama voters banned prison slavery — but prisoners say it hasn’t stopped As a lawsuit from incarcerated workers tries to stop a forced prison labor program, a beer distributor is defending its own participation www.whatimreading.net/p/alabama-vo...

Another day testing the limits of resilience. The Alexandria NSF building was designed for the NSF merit review process (gold standard), complete with a floor devoted to panels. Now we aren’t allowed to have in person panels. The loss of US science leadership will haunt this country for decades.

The recording of my IDEA talk is up on the #Evol2025 YouTube channel, and I've thrown that together with a PDF copy of the slide deck and a bibliography: lab.jbyoder.org/2025/06/21/a...

Now hearing Joseph L. Graves putting the Scopes trial into its context in the Jim Crow era, a connection we don't often make #Evol2025

Using anti-DEI policies to dismantle education: A new front in a really old battle - a perspective with @kzutaustin.bsky.social and @hormiga.bsky.social | PLOS Biology journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

This is going to be an excellent symposium!

A US judge has ordered hundreds of terminated research projects at the US National Institutes of Health to be reinstated, calling the processes that led to their cancellation “bereft of reasoning”. https://go.nature.com/4kOmXDy

We've got action in Auburn, AL

#nokings in Auburn, AL ..hundreds of people

Despite warnings from the law enforcement not to attend today’s No Kings rally after this mornings shooting of Minnesota lawmakers with the killer on the lose, the No Kings Rally is happening at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul.

@governorwalz.mn.gov: "The road to authoritarianism is littered with people telling you you're overreacting."

For non-scientists: the funding rate is somewhere between 7% to ~25% (rare) for NIH or NSF grants, depending on where you are applying. Grants are reviewed by a panel of peers who read the grants, score them, then debate the ratings for 1-2 days to rank them. It is INCREDIBLY competitive already.