When rapid environmental change creates fitness valleys, recombination plays an ambiguous role. Wirtz et al. investigate how swift population recovery is possible, and interpret chromosomal fusions in this context. Read now ahead of print! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Hey, fellow evolutionary biologists: If you support trans rights, like, comment, or repost this. I want to show that transphobes like Richard Dawkins are a loud minority that does not represent our community

Our recent article on the adaptive consequences of altered translation accuracy is the focus of December's MBE Highlight. Highlight: How Life's “Mistakes” Impact Adaptation 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf308 #evobio #molbio

Original blog post plotting out human data for HW proportions: gcbias.org/2011/10/13/p... They're also linked to on page 26 of my popgen notes.

Happy to highlight an essay I wrote together with @marcdemanuel.bsky.social, @natanaels.bsky.social and Anastasia Stolyarova, trying to think through what sets the mutation rate of a cell type in an animal species: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n

Now accepted in Genetics! academic.oup.com/genetics/adv... We ask why and when rescaling of forward simulations in population genetics is not accurate. There are some interesting results for people performing simulations with selection.

Finally published: #Cryptic species and taxonomic revision of kangaroo mice, the rodent genus #Microdipodops. 4 new species! Integrative taxonomy! Great co-authors! @n8upham.bsky.social @mammalogists.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/jmam...

Do extra chromosome sets mask bad mutations? Simulations show tetraploids often carry higher genetic load than diploids, depending on dominance, demography, and drift—with important implications for fitness and conservation. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic...

Why is phenotypic plasticity so common? Models show that even low migration between locally adapted populations can maintain costly plasticity in constant environments, revealing migration as a key driver of plastic trait evolution. academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...

Looking for a faculty job at one of the world's great research stations? We're looking for a marine invertebrate biologist at UW's Friday Harbor Labs. apply.interfolio.com/178804

@julietteluiselli.bsky.social et al. introduce a mathematical model of genome size evolution, showing that the noncoding fraction of the genome is shaped by biases in mutational neutrality, and robustness selection arising from structural mutations 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf315 #evobio #molbio

Apennine brown bear #genomic diversity - comparing whole #genome resequencing data from Apennine, Central European, and North American brown bears academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... #biodiversity #genomics

Our latest preprint revisits the classic model of mutation-selection balance. Do human recessive genes fit Haldane's 100-year old model? This work is by the wonderful @jonj-udd.bsky.social, and co-mentored by @jeffspence.github.io www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

GWAS has been an incredible discovery tool for human genetics: it regularly identifies *causal* links from 1000s of SNPs to any given trait. But mechanistic interpretation is usually difficult. Our latest work on causal models for this is out yesterday: www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short🧵:

Some more shenanigans on the Ctenophora Porifera debate from @rcply.bsky.social academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

1/28 New preprint up, which I think is the best theoretical idea I've ever had. We asked a simple question: what are the costs of investment into non-reproductive somatic cells? Turns out these costs decrease with the *logarithm* of organism size! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We are discovering new species at the fastest rate ever. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Delighted to publish Forum Article by @nicolasgaltier.bsky.social et al: "Journals run by learned societies or universities have more ethical policies while being cheaper and similarly cited" doi.org/10.1093/jeb/... Thank you for choosing JEB - we encourage the support of #societyjournals

On scientific "style" for @undark.org: "[Style] is a positive feature of science that facilitates different routes to solving problems.....We can embrace differences in our approaches while still promoting rigor and clarity." undark.org/2025/12/04/o...

me after this semester ends

Check out our cover article by @timjanicke.bsky.social and colleagues about the role of sexual selection in animal speciation. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic.... The beautiful illustration is by Katharina Bóth.

Today is the first of 25 days of #Crustmas! Post as many crustaceans as possible! (not just crabs) 🦑🧪 This year I'm less personally inclined towards "crabs are the ultimate form", and my piece below explains why. PS all posts will be right here on the crab feed 🦀 bsky.app/profile/did:...

How to keep in step when your (protein) partner speeds up… Here we investigated the adaptive remodeling of a protein-protein interaction surface essential for telomere protection. Congrats to whole team! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Check out this nice Digest in @journal-evo.bsky.social by Pedram Samani about our EM study of sperm cell gigantism! digest = doi.org/10.1093/evol... original study = doi.org/10.1093/evol...

The last work of my PhD is finally out: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...! This work is about accurately estimating branch length in the Ancestral Recombination Graph (ARG), which is achieved by a really simple framework with minimal assumptions. (1/n)

Fujiwara et al. performed WGS and RNAseq of the termite Zootermopsis nevadensis, finding that gene duplications contributed to eusociality, and that lineage-specific Doublesex-related expression underlies caste diversification pathways. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf284 #evobio #molbio #eusociality

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

Very cool paper in Nature! I will probably cover it on the Avian Hybrids blog in due time (even though it concerns mammals). An ancient recombination desert is a speciation supergene in placental mammals www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"What James Watson got wrong about DNA" By the great Sohini Ramachandran (@sramach.bsky.social) and your boy for The Boston Globe (@bostonglobe.com). www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/14/o...

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Our research, published today in Science, reveals remarkable concordance between human and dog genomes through time, highlighting how deeply intertwined our evolutionary histories have been over the past 11,000 years. 🔗 Read the full paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I am so excited to share new work on a TE insertion that regulates iridescence in swordtails, led by fantastic grad student @nadiahaghani.bsky.social and with help from many coauthors! In a time that has been so difficult to navigate, this & other projects have kept my spirits up: shorturl.at/NE65A

New work led by members of the @rokaslab.bsky.social! ☺️ 1,154 yeast genomes in the Saccharomycotina subphylum were surveyed for their relationship between reduced gene repertoires broadly associated with genome stability functions and elevated evolutionary rates.🧬 academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

Now in Evolution: academic.oup.com/evolut/artic... This paper started when @3rdreviewer.bsky.social, Mike, and I had a lunch at which there was a lot of, "What do you mean when you say X?" Fun to spend time thinking about when terms get too muddy, and great work by Drew to pull it all together!

The November cover of Genome Biology and Evolution features @raularayadonoso.bsky.social @kenrokusumi.bsky.social @anthonygeneva.bsky.social et al., who studied how structural rearrangements and selection promote phenotypic evolution in Anolis. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf196 #genome #evolution

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Wei et al. present chromosome-scale genomes for three ecologically divergent ferns, demonstrating how regulated genomic dynamism enables adaptive diversification while sustaining morphological conservatism. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf247 #evobio #molbio #PlantSky

One of the most exciting works of my career, years in the making. We used high-throughput precision genome editing to test the fitness effects of thousands of natural variants. Our findings challenge the long-held assumption that common variants are inconsequential. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Genome maintenance by telomerase is a fundamental process in nearly all eukaryotes. But where does it come from? Today, we report the discovery of telomerase homologs in a family of antiviral reverse transcriptases, revealing an unexpected evolutionary origin in bacteria. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Reading @jrossibarra.bsky.social 's new pre-print for JC (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... ) and @gpreising.bsky.social noticed the hidden maize message in the corn illustration on each page!

Very excited to see the final version of our kingdom-scale fungal genome defense manuscript out in @plosbiology.org ! This work has been a major project of @tbadet.bsky.social during his time in our lab. We hope to stimulate much more exciting work on fungal TEs. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Congratulations to @jeffgroh.bsky.social on the publication of his paper on an ancient balanced polymorphisms controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts. The paper shows the putative turnover & reversal of dominance of a mating type polymorphism www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

If you're on the job market and are working in any area of Plant Molecular Biology, check this out. We have a very strong group: Jeff Dangl, Joe Kieber, Greg Copenhaver, Jason Reed, Zack Nimchuk, and an incoming new assistant professor starting in January bio.unc.edu/people/facul...

“the manosphere generates its own untested and speculative evolutionary hypotheses, or “just-so stories”, about men, women, and society… ..we reflect on implications for evolutionary scholars and for the field as a whole, in terms of ethics and public image” www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Really interesting quantitative genetic data/modeling work in @evolletters.bsky.social: Predicting the contribution of single trait evolution to rescuing a plant population from demographic impacts of climate change doi.org/10.1093/evle...

The most important paper in evolutionary biology I'd never heard of: 1/ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Delighted that our paper about the distribution of genomic spans of clades/edges in genealogies (ARGs), and using this for detecting inversions and other SVs (and other phenomena that cause local disruption of recombination) is out in MBE academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... (1/n)

...and if you missed it, here are 60 phylogenetically diverse brown algae genomes www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

NSF unexpectedly changed (at the last minute) who is eligible to apply for the Grad Research Fellowship, dropping 2nd year students. We started a petition to reverse this unfair change, Sign here: laurenkuehne.github.io/grfpChanges/ and please spread the word!!!!

New — with @joannarifkin.bsky.social, @jotlovell.bsky.social, @spicybotrytis.bsky.social, and many more — we created seven new high-quality genomes and explored pangenomic variation in the emerging oilseed crop pennycress (Thlaspi arvense). 1/