Spring break hits different in Europe

New paper led by Yu Mo, with @psudmant.bsky.social Ever wonder how extreme genealogical discordance can help you to find the genetic basis for trait variation? Wonder no more! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Are there any problems in the country right now larger than the words people to your left are using

Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us

I had a strange dream. I woke up as the boss of a large Australian university and went straight to work fixing it. Fewer international students, harder degrees, students back onto campus. The real product isn’t the degree, it’s the trust that comes with it. Then I woke up. buff.ly/wWfB0fp

Too funny not to share: alignmentalignment.ai

Canberra Earthquake March 2026

🌿 Postdoc opportunity in plant evolutionary ecology/genetics! My lab in the Dept. of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan is recruiting a postdoctoral researcher to start Fall 2026. We study plant adaptation, using weeds as model systems. #Postdoc #EcoEvo Pls RT!

Leipzig U and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) have an open faculty position (W2) in evolutionary population genetics! This position is tenured and comes with generous core funding. We are eager to welcome a new colleague! Deadline March 11. www.uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetai...

This is an amazing piece of scientific satire by @russcd.bsky.social. The first sentence alone is a banger: "The defining goal of the academic endeavor is to establish a single perfect value that completely summarizes entire careers’ achievements." academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

That's a good name for software: MKado: a toolkit for McDonald-Kreitman tests of natural selection www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

David Marques was an amazing speciation genomics researcher, a passionate birder, and a wonderful friend, husband, and father. May he rest in peace. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Good piece from Jerry Brewer in the Athletic yesterday The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team won gold — and then lost the room www.nytimes.com/athletic/706...

A question about Falconer's formula. The standard formula is: h^2=2*(r_MZ - r_DZ) My question is: can I replace the mono- and dizygotic twin correlations with terms for full-sibs and half-sibs? It's the same ratio of genetic relatedness, so I don't see why not. What am I missing?

So excited to share this manuscript led by the inimitable Cara Brand, who discovered that Topoisomerase II evolution causes hybrid female lethality in Drosophila. Congrats to Cara, @nickbr0wn.bsky.social, Anirban, and @buszczaklab.bsky.social! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

TIL that some childhood cancers (especially neurological ones) lack obvious driver mutations and are likely caused by misregulation of epigenetic marks. 🤯 e.g. www.nature.com/articles/nat...

The Guerrero Lab at NC State University seeks a postdoc in computational evolutionary genetics. Ideal candidates have quantitative skills. Apply by March 10, 2026, via [email protected]. More info: rguerrer.org #postdoc

We (as a society) are good and truly f*cked

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point. I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

Calibrating and documenting host-switching and evolution of incompatibility loci for two closely related Wolbachia clades https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.13.705778v1

get the kid in the brown hoodie a scholarship

Relatedly, @mweissensteiner.bsky.social recently told me that the German science foundation (DFG) has changed its policy to allow AI review: www.dfg.de/de/aktuelles... (only in German, sorry)

A reviewer just very clearly used AI to write a review. What do I do (as an author)?

his appreciation evolved over time, apparently

In celebration of #DarwinDay, here are his decidedly mixed first impressions after landing on the Galápagos (17 Sept 1835; from 'the Voyage' Chap X): "Nothing could be less inviting..."

Reading and really liking this #openaccess paper by Ary Hoffman and @brandonscooper.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... Describing endosymbiont–host interactions within the parasitism–mutualism continuum

Check out our paper on the neo-sex chromosomes in mountain pine beetle! We assembled THREE neo-Ys that are quite distinct and their corresponding neo-Xs .

Breakfast in Poznan, Poland

❗⏰ Please remember that the deadline for submitting your applications for abstracts and awards for SMBE 2026 ends today. Join us in Copenhagen from June 28 to July 2 for a fantastic meeting! #SMBE2026

Random q: Does anyone know if it's still possible to access the titles and abstracts from the Evolution 2025 meeting? Asking for someone who forgot to save his own text...

Duke Ellington once said: “I don’t need time, I need a deadline.”

snow & stairs, Berlin

Interesting article on preprinting (though there's no guarantee that would have caught errors). More importantly, can we please stop referring to whichever lineage ends up sister to all other animals as either the "first" animal or the "root" animal? This is not helpful

noooooooooooooooooo! (nice figure btw, with time of duplication vs probability)

New paper with @smishra677.bsky.social! How many different trees can be generated by just one duplication event? It turns out A WHOLE LOT, if you consider the coalescent process. 1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New paper with @smishra677.bsky.social! How many different trees can be generated by just one duplication event? It turns out A WHOLE LOT, if you consider the coalescent process. 1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

An interesting bit of history: In 1916, Denmark sold the Danish West Indies to the US. You may know of them as the US Virgin Islands. As part of this sale, the US recognized Danish authority over Greenland. The text of the complete, ratified agreement is here: www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/...

My first PopGroup—it was great! Thanks to all the organizers, especially.

Earlier this week, David Marques, my beloved PhD brother, died after a battle with cancer. He was an amazing person, friend, father, husband, scientist, collaborator, birder, among other things. I am immensely grateful for many years of friendship and close collaboration with him. We miss you!

Final version of paper with @smishra677.bsky.social now published in a wonderful issue of GENETICS! academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

While our updated paper is fast approaching book-length, the results remain the same: our method (reconcILS) is still highly accurate. So if you want to reconcile gene trees and species trees--and you might have any ILS at all--this is the best method out there! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Cheating on my German beer gardens to taste some good Dutch stuff:

My year in Christmas markets... #1 Schloss Charlottenburg

Biergarten nummer zehn

Achievement unlocked: I cancelled a doctor's appointment (for my kid) over the phone **in German**!

Have you ever wondered: just how strong *is* the evidence for Muller's ratchet on mtDNA? Well, wonder no more! (Project led by Yu Mo, with @smishra677.bsky.social and @yadirapga.bsky.social) "No molecular evidence for Muller's ratchet in mitochondrial genomes" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

No molecular evidence for Muller's ratchet in mitochondrial genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.16.694700v1

Biergarten nummer neun

Today the members of the Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior graduate program at Indiana University celebrated the upcoming retirement of Dr. Ellen Ketterson. Ellen was a bastion of civility and scientific excellence. The program would not be what it is without her presence over these past decades.