You can't joke about anything anymore. Because you signed a multi figure contract with the Saudi government that said they wouldn't pay you if you did.

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 🧵]

This may sound a bit weird, but I have been waiting for someone to make a robust defense of shame for what feels like ages and folks, this is it

I have a couple of small updates on this story, in case y'all have been wondering about any fallout since its July publication! 🧵

Now published in Cell! We found that ~15% of SNPs from divergent refs did not liftover as SNPs in the gray fox ref—half mapped to monomorphic sites, half failed to map. Co-authored with Matthew Genchev, @elliecat.bsky.social, and @jazlynmooney.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Friends: I'm recruiting at least one PhD student to join our lab in Atlanta in the Fall of 2026. Information about our research can be found at the link below. Please pass along to any students interested in the quantitative study of speciation, secondary contact, and the build-up of biodiversity!

Check out our new preprint! We compare sequence versus synteny approaches for resolving a challenging #phylogenetic problem. In this case, synteny is far more informative! Also includes the first chromosome-level #genome for the enigmatic #fish family Gyrinocheilidae. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Fun to synthesize some exciting future directions for spatiotemporal genomics in this Tansley perspective. Check er out!

What can a planet tell us about hands?

🎉🆕📰🎉: Diversity patterns and knowledge gaps of Atlantic Forest epiphyllous bryophytes: a highly neglected group doi.org/10.1093/aob/...

Interested in measuring trees and branches from Lidar data? Don't want to use Matlab? (who does). Take a look at our new Python package for reconstructing trees from point cloud data using quantitative structure models (QSM's). Fun with @jefferybcannon.bsky.social! ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Happy to share that our paper on the #evolution and #genomics of the most common #color polymorphism in #frogs is now out in @pnas.org! My favorite frogs even made the cover of this week’s issue! 🎉🐸🎉 Read the paper here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨 NEW: Climate change is already causing 30,000 deaths per year - a global annual economic loss of $100-350B USD - but the true damage is probably 10x higher. Out TODAY in Nature Climate Change: the first systematic look at the science of "health impact attribution" 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If You're Rare, Should I Care? How Imperfect Detection Changes Relationships Between Biodiversity and Global Change Drivers 🌎🌐🧪 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

First pop gen paper from our lab! We find repeated evolutionary turn over of sex chromosomes in darters contributes to reproductive isolation. Turnover may be an escape hatch to resolve mitonuclear conflict & neo sex chromosomes evolved via a rare recessive mutation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Israel committing genocide in Gaza, world’s top scholars on the crime say

Got a story out today about something I’ve been fascinated by for years: From Atlanta hip hop to Bama RushTok, here’s how and why the South has taken such a firm grip on modern American culture. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

My company is hiring a computational biologist! This role is the same position as mine, and will involve building genomic prediction models, some bioinformatics, and a lot of independent research on developing new methods to improve our crop development initiatives. www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/42...

Really enjoyed reading this one. Good food for thought, with important implications for how we might think about things like limiting similarity and character displacement / species sorting in recently diverged taxa

Anas Al-Sharif was one of the most remarkable reporters of his generation. For 673 days, he defied Israeli threats to kill him. Al Jazeera now confirm their crew in Gaza City have all been assassinated: RIP reporters Anas Al-Sharif & Mohammed Qareqea and cameramen Ibrahim Zaher & Mohammed Nofal

Jim Lovell did lots of cool things in his life. Maybe the coolest was the Xmas gift he got his wife in 1968. While he was orbiting the moon over Xmas, he had a mink coat delivered to her with the inscription “from your Man on the Moon”. Sets the bar rather high.

He didn't get to the moon but he got his crew home, and that was the more remarkable task. www.nbcnews.com/news/rcna223...

this is one of the worst crimes in human history and the entire global north and all of us in it share the responsibility

Canada: “We are prepared to issue as many empty statements as necessary to stop this genocide”

for Bills Week I decided to read the new 1000 page Buckley biography

Talk about The Wire, Sopranos, Game of Thrones all you want, but the greatest US television program ever made is Sesame Street. It's not even close. 50+ years of treating kids across class, ethnicity, religion not as mini-consumers...but as citizens with a stake in this world.

Hugely honoured, surprised, excited, and all the other emotions to receive a Maxwell/Hanrahan Award in Field Biology! www.maxwell-hanrahan.org/award/james-... (1/n)

New paper in Evolution Letters @evolletters.bsky.social by an undergrad in my lab! academic.oup.com/evlett/advan... We modeled eco-evo dynamics of infection & immunity and then analyzed 50 years of data from stickleback & tapeworms (thanks to museum samples!)

real analysis >>> breathless concern

"All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipated phenomenon occurs again & again–finally turning into an expectation–then theories are overturned." - Stephen Jay Gould

This is wonderful

Check that, 5pm #Evol2025

If you’re keen on comparative studies in speciation, and want to hear about a new tool for conducting them, come by and check out my talk this afternoon at 4:45 in Athens A #Evol2025

The New York Times is terrified by the idea of a mayor who wouldn't invite their editor to dinner party

AI trains on wikipedia, wikipedia uses AI for summaries, God creates Man, Man destroys God, Man creates dinosaurs

The Washington Post, which silenced its Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist and reduced its opinion pages to a defense of “free markets and democracy” alone, would like to lecture other people on the importance of a free and full exchange of all ideas.

Sam Neill is a guy who can convincingly act with a great sense of arrogance and pretension and cruelty and in real life is the world’s chillest nicest guy who spends every day drinking wine with his pigs

Anecdote from an English lake country farmer

Reminder that SSE members in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, India, and 152 low-income countries around the world can still get FREE registration for the virtual Evolution meeting! Please share with your colleagues: www.evolutionsociety.org/index.php?mo...

I'm reviewing applicants later this week and will continue to accept new applications until the position is filled

you might think N American species are getting common at their north range limit and rare at their south range limit as temps get warmer but you would be wrong new paper in GEB w/ @eliotmiller.bsky.social & Matt Strimas-Mackey, eBird Status & Trends ftw onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Wonderful cover, and amazing research by Zhang et al. - they used classic Chinese poetry that mentions the Yangtze finless porpoise (724 poems in total!) to estimate the range contraction of the species over the last 1400 years. Such a creative approach to generate truly novel data!

More good news this month! 🎉 I'm excited to share my PhD colleague Filip Thörn's fantastic study on hybridisation in lek-mating Birds-of-Paradise, which I had the privilege to be part of. 🐦 doi.org/10.1111/mec.... #museomics #genomics #hybridisation

“Does mommy disappear forever when she leaves the room?” our tech columnist asks.

Movie night 🍿

A lot of blood sweat and tears put into this one: we revisit Robert MacArthur's classic warbler study—with @eliotmiller.bsky.social and colleagues—using, among other techniques, fecal metabarcoding. 🧪🦉 📸 Ronnie d'Entremont royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... @psubiodept.bsky.social

I'm hiring a postdoc! Searching for a candidate interested in the process of speciation to come join me at Georgia Tech in Atlanta -- an exciting place with a growing core of eco-evolutionary researchers. Various skill sets will be applicable. Please share!

I'm hiring a postdoc! Searching for a candidate interested in the process of speciation to come join me at Georgia Tech in Atlanta -- an exciting place with a growing core of eco-evolutionary researchers. Various skill sets will be applicable. Please share!