in retrospect, it was a mistake to teach algebra and geometry but not "statistics for everyone" in high school we are drowning in lies, partly because we never learned to swim

Massive sibling regression study finds that human traits are largely environmentally driven (average heritability = 0.3)

Not sure about this one… & and $ are harder to type. I would just mkdir blah cd bl+ tab

In the midst of the darkness, I am pleased to announce that UCLA will be hosting the upcoming Southern California Evolutionary Genetics (SCalE) conference on November 1! Registration & abstract submission is here: www.scalemeeting.org/home Deadline is October 13! Hope to see you at UCLA!

A huge shoutout to all the dedicated grants management specialists at the NIH who are working around the clock to push grants out before the Sep 30 deadline. And also to the POs responding to frantic emails. Not an easy job under the best of circumstances and right now it's the pits. Thank you!

SINGER, our ARG inference method, is finally published and freely available online: doi.org/10.1038/s415... It was a long journey – 16 months from initial submission to acceptance. Is it just me, or has peer review gotten more arduous lately? 4+ rounds of review isn't so unusual these days...

What determines the human gut fungal community? @emilyvansyoc.bsky.social @erdavenport.bsky.social @symbionticism.bsky.social &co present the first #GWAS of human genetic loci that influence the abundance of gut #fungi, linking these to disease risk #mycobiome @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/42bCKou

Announcing SimHumanity, a baseline SLiM 5.0 model of the full human genome, replete with demographic history, autosomes, X/Y, and mtDNA. A shared starting point for reproducible evolutionary simulations. We’d love your feedback! #SLiM #evolution #genomics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Beautiful mural honoring Henrietta Lacks painted by Baltimore community members popped up near Hopkins med campus recently.

An abbreviation (ABB) in a journal article (JA) or Grant Application (GA) is rarely worth the words it saves. Every ABB requires cognitive resources (CR) and at my age by the time I'm halfway through a JA or GA I no longer have the CR to remember what your ABB stood for.

So if you take 1+2+3+4: --> contact tracing does nothing (inverse swiss cheese as @dcourvoisier.bsky.social says) But why simulation studies say it should work ? Because nobody in the simulation studies dares taking number as bad as the reality. Dear simu friends: consider that life is shitty 6/6

I wrote about how genetic risk works in the context of embryo selection and how people often think about it all wrong. A short 🧵:

Maybe the level of the worst PhD student ever. My worry isn’t so much AI can do PhD level work, but mentors will lose the motivation to train students to think, as it may be more efficient to tell AI to execute the analysis without thinking.

whelp, school is pulling an NIH on us. morningtrojan.com/p/live-usc-l...

It is depressing, but all too predictable, how swiftly we’ve gone from the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium offering reassurances about the uses of behavioural polygenic scores to one of their lead authors marketing embryo selection for IQ

NEW: The bipartisan Senate Appropriations Committee has rejected Trump’s proposed $18 billion, 40% cut to the National Institutes of Health budget and endorsed a $400 million increase. DO NOT GIVE UP! Our advocacy is working. Keep speaking up and calling your elected officials.

Covid measures pushed down deaths from influenza to remarkably low levels. The death rate is surging back--including 266 children. 90% of children who died in the 2024-2025 flu season were not fully vaccinated against the flu. www.cdc.gov/fluview/surv...

If anyone is interested NCI posted their FY25 funding strategy today www.cancer.gov/grants-train... Reasonable to assume other NIH institutes will follow the same guidelines

🚨BREAKING: Cal State LA just moved classes online and let faculty work remotely, not for a storm, not for COVID, but because ICE is in the area. Let that sink in, an entire university is treating immigration enforcement like a public health crisis.

😳

RFK Jr’s ACIP pick, Martin Kulldorff, said one of the most disturbing images from the pandemic was a toddler crying about having to wear a mask. I see toddlers cry about everything all the time, and I found it far more disturbing to see refrigerator trucks full of body bags outside of the hospitals…

Cool to see a study with N = 1200 can be informative of height genetics! X and Y gene dosage effects are primary contributors to human sexual dimorphism: The case of height | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

An ancient regulatory variant of ACSF3 influences the coevolution of increased human height and basal metabolic rate via metabolic homeostasis: Cell Genomics www.cell.com/cell-genomic...

Best quote I've heard all day, from @npr.org: "I don't know where Elon Musk is going to get his engineers in the future if you have drastic cuts in science and in technology." -- Donna Shalala, former US Secretary of Health and Human Services www.npr.org/transcripts/...

Myopia is an example. It is rare in cultures where people live mostly outdoors and reading is rare, but in modern societies it is common and the variation in risk results mostly from genetic variation. @evmed.bsky.social @ibg.colorado.edu @genetics-gsa.bsky.social @autismsocietync.bsky.social

The fifth installment from our group this year, Led by a former postdoc Ying-Chu Lo, our evaluation of polygenic scores (PGS) for BMI and T2D for Native Hawaiians is published in @commsbio.nature.com! (actually, earlier last month, but you know, who's counting...) www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each apparently determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing. 🧬🧵🧪 1/n

I'm doing an AMA as part of the @geneticssociety.bsky.social DNA Day 2025! Feel free to ask me anything (genetics related) :) #DNADay2025 redd.it/1k7i3t1

For #rstats people working on computing environments without GUI, you should check out the package `txtplot`. E.g. this density plot is pretty useful to get an idea what my data looks like:

Scientists disagree on whether GWAS was born in 2005 or 2007 🤷

in case you're wondering, "what's the harm in claiming an extinct species has been brought back from the dead" when it most certainly has not, our interior secretary is already using it to justify taking animals off the endangered species list

I'm unreasonably proud of these slides.

Reckon we still have a while before ChatGPT replaces genetic counselors

It's pleasing that most of the responses to this cartoon, posted by The New Yorker on Instagram, say it's unfair to Neanderthals. @mattpope.bsky.social @lemoustier.bsky.social @fossilhistory.bsky.social

On ARGs, pedigrees, and genetic relatedness matrices https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.03.641310v1

How f-ing divisive

2025 quickly went from busily productive to doomsday-like chaos... but, batting third from our group, led by Dr. Dorcus Malomane with big assists from @mp-williams.bsky.social , our first attempt into population genetics of the Saudi Arabians. Explainer here: www.linkedin.com/posts/dr-dor...

Batting second, we present our latest work on childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in Latinos. Led by the amazing PhD student Jalen Langie, who has taken over the mantle in our group on this line of investigation. 🧵 (from that other place again): x.com/j__langie/st...

RNA xkcd.com/3056

Help me, science sky, this is something I should know but have long since forgotten: The frequency of a rare genotype is 0.003; how many individuals do I need to sample to collect 3 with the rare genotype? Intuitively it feels like it can't be 1000 b/c birthday paradox‽

“I don’t think [my research is] something the New Republic would be interested in.” How eerily ominous… (No, I’m way behind on Star Wars shows… i don’t know what is going to happen. This scene just struck a nerve.) #thisistheway

I've been using review requests as training opportunities for trainees, so they learn the process of manuscript review (this ends up being more work on me, I feel...) Often trainees are at the stage they have limited experience seeing reviews of their own paper ...

It's already a busy 2025, and we're still in January! Batting first from the lab, led by postdoc Ji Tang, we present the ancestry-specific eGRM based on inferred genealogies (i.e. ARGs) to reveal population structure for admixed populations. 🧵(from that other place): x.com/JiTang1024/s...

Got a review request from Theoretical Population Biology. Feels like that ought to be some kind of achievement unlocked for me 😂 alas, I'll have to decline as this is the fifth request in January...

Need to copy files to your HPC or cloud machine? Meet your new best friend: rsync. Here’s why it’s better than scp and how to use it like a pro. 🧵👇

How population stratification makes environments look like genes. A short 🧵:

I swear, every time I find some time (give in) and agree to review a new manuscript, I then get bombarded with 4-5 other requests. Usually from different journals. Are they colluding?

Our mentor Casey Brown, apart from being an extraordinary scientist, was a brilliant teacher who loved everything genetics. In his honor, some of the world's leading experts came together to create the 'Casey Brown Lecture Series' on human genetics 1/ shorturl.at/eCm7S