Hey virtual #evol2026 speakers: do you prefer to see audience with camera-on or camera-off, or no preference?

It’s Mayr Day! Starting at 1:30 US EST, tune in to watch our student research award talks! Registered attendees can access the platform below. Can’t make it? We’ll let you know when the talks post to YouTube. www.evolutionmeetings.org/virtual-prog...

87 Gaza-bound flotilla activists detained by Israel have launched a hunger strike in protest of their abduction & detention conditions, as Israel's far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir circulated footage of himself taunting the restrained detainees

Cohen: "any paper we accept will be scraped up and fed to the next generation of LLMs, and we don’t want to contribute to a death spiral of nonsense and hallucination" @philipncohen.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Stories like this one going around today are why I'm skeptical of the trust-but-verify AI crowd. Totally predictable that people who are too confident in their own mastery of these things will slip into the lazy corner-cutting that they think they're too smart for! www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/b...

AI is the lynchpin of the whole political project. It’s the container for the parallel governance they have promised each other. I truly think that they are surprised that people don’t like it…and that they can’t yet wholesale punish everyone for not liking them.

Head's up SSE members: Virtual Evolution is next week! Join us for the SSE Presidential Symposium on May 21 for talks from SSE leaders and past presidents on sustaining research, supporting trainees, navigating funding uncertainty, and strengthening evolutionary biology. Pls RT!

“…in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.” @nickkristof.bsky.social

Application deadline is coming up to join us in Glasgow for the next IoS workshop!

Really interesting analysis arguing that the post-pandemic drop in crime—the sharpest drop since 1900—is thanks at least in part to all the Covid federal spending on social services open.substack.com/pub/briefing...

They’re saying Boo-ezos

Dawkins after meeting Claude

🚨 I wrote in @statnews.com on the #hantavirus cruise ship outbreak & highlight how quickly outbreaks can evolve. It’s a reminder of what the U.S. has risked by stepping back from @who.int With World Cup ahead, global surveillance and coordination are essential. www.statnews.com/2026/05/05/h...

Maybe it’s a bad time to eliminate epidemiology in the United States.

A year after Mahmoud Khalil’s unlawful arrest and detention by the Trump administration, Khalil grapples with holding two truths together: that he’s both watched and seen, that he feels both fear and belonging in the city.

Another extremely cool and well-deserved honor for a great Georgia Tech colleague! Big congrats!

Pleased to share our study on brachiopod genomes and bilaterian dorsal–ventral patterning, now out in Nature Communications. doi.org/10.1038/s414... We present the first chromosome-level genome of a brachiopod and show that the core patterning mechanism is deeply conserved across bilaterians.

Excited to visit UToronto this week for the famous Atwood Symposium! 🦎🦎🦎

"Withered away" is an interesting way to describe a cultural tradition that had major cities dominating large areas to the mid-15th Century, minor cities successfully resisting the Spanish to the 1690s, had a major independence movement from 1847 to 1915, and are still a major part of 3 countries.

🌻 Next STRiVE seminar: Loren Rieseberg (UBC) explores SVs, adaptation & speciation—from wild sunflowers to 1000+ species! 🗓️ Apr 29 | 9am PDT / 6pm CEST ✉️ Zoom link via mailing list: groupes.renater.fr/sympa/subscr... ℹ️ Info: structuralvariantsstn.github.io/about/

An mRNA treatment for PANCREATIC CANCER was in trials, among many other uses. Choosing to end this research is choosing to sentence millions to an early, painful death

The scale of the killing in Israeli strikes on Lebanon Wednesday is "horrific", the UN rights chief said, urging the international community to help end the unfolding "nightmare." u.afp.com/Sbth

Wooowwww!!😆🤪 I think the best feeling in mothing is when you put up a pheromone up and while you watch your target species flutters over! So pleased! 3rd time lucky! #teammoth

One cool thing about Cleveland is that it’s a strongly union town! The conv center plans for their people to have humane working hours. That means they need a little more info from us about space use, catering, etc earlier than normal. Unlikely we can extend early bird much if at all Don’t wait!

Norms shift. In any decade of the post-WWII 20th century, Trump’s statement today would have resulted in immediate removal from office (tho he would have been removed 200 scandals ago). Nixon’s coverup, for e.g., was laughably minor compared to what happens daily now.

Our silence on Gaza, and the way we set aside international law, is the greatest gift we have given to authoritarian regimes. By abandoning our own moral compass, we set a precedent that weakens democracy and strengthens those who challenge it.

I feel physically sick tonight. A psychopath with the means to do it has threatened to annihilate a civilization, and nobody with any power seems willing or able to stop him. People on the news are talking like it’s an intriguing story rather than a world-altering crime, as if life has no value.

This is simply genocidal language and is a horror in itself.

While Trump's assertion that "a whole civilization will die tonight" represents a discrete threat of genocide against Iran, the fact that it comes from a U.S. president, while Congress does nothing, actually represents a broader civilizational collapse — whether he follows through or not.

i think if you tweet "a whole civilization will die tonight" you shouldn't go to the hague, the hague should get to come to you

The United States is behaving in a way that is indistinguishable from how an advanced Third Reich would had it emerged victorious from World War 2, and nearly every leader in the developed world is now abandoning their duty to confront it, having acclaimed and legitimated it every step of the way.

Some reports say over 500 schools, 55 libraries, & 25 universities hit. You can debate the numbers, but hitting Sharif University & Beheshti is like hitting MIT & Stanford. I keep wondering: How would the scientific community respond differently if it was those universities? What’s the difference?

Delighted and grateful for this recognition from @sse-evolution.bsky.social. The Dobzhansky Prize is a special honor, and I'm thrilled to have been in the conversation this year. Big congrats to Wendy Valencia-Montoya!

Culture was assumed to be unique to humans, but recent scientific discoveries have revealed that it's in fact widespread in the animal kingdom. This #PhilTransB issue is the first to present a comprehensive picture of the science & implications of this: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

It took forever but my last paper as an academic is finally out. ironically this paper probably has the smallest audience, but I believe is my most impactful work. I think it provides some nice support for theories on polyploid origins, and has practical implications in crops and conservation

Delighted to see our work on the cover of Systematic Biology!! We introduce an approach for analyzing pairwise-defined traits (e.g. 'strength of RI', 'diet niche overlap') in a phylogenetically informed context (R package 'phylopairs' now on CRAN). Read it here: academic.oup.com/sysbio/artic...

Twitter's 20th anniversary today. Twitter has and always had many faults, but it also provided an invaluable societal function that I'm not sure ever existed before or will ever exist again in that it connected, immediately and without filter, the powerful and everyone else

Nowruz Mubarak!

A news story that gave me genuine glee instead of the usual dread

Heading into conference abstract / presentation season, I 100% recommend Kathryn Langin's (@kangin.bsky.social) "Tell me a story! A plea for more compelling conference presentations". It's short, sweet, and not just for ornithologists. I can get behind every word! 🔒 academic.oup.com/condor/artic...

This is really extraordinary. I've never seen anything like this from a government official.

And if you have not been accepted, understand that this is a VERY weird time for grad admissions. Lack of acceptance may not be due to YOU, but due to uncontrollable factors at the university. Keep trying in the future.

We're hiring a post doc! Looking for a global change ecologist to work with Jenny McGuire & a multidisciplinary team including me and @jameststroud.bsky.social on the ecology side of things please share widely!

This is the most overt rhetoric, but it obviously goes much deeper. Really nothing in World Affairs makes sense except in the light of profound anti-Muslim racism being entirely acceptable in the Western mainstream.

A fitting end to teaching speciation in the last week of undergrad evolution. Darwin 1858 March 11th, definitely was running on empty in week 10 of the quarter.

"Maybe you noticed that Monet's lily pads are hardly lifelike. A.I. used to make mistakes like these"

Applications to the Gordon Research Seminar in Speciation are now open! We encourage PhD students & postdocs from all geographies, backgrounds, disciplines to APPLY! This 2d seminar in beautiful Lucca 🇮🇹 will be followed by a 5d conference open to the broader community. www.grc.org/speciation-g...

SSE members in 152 countries and territories around the world can attend virtual #Evol2026 this May for free - check your eligibility and request your discount code today! shorturl.at/J6GS0 @evolmtg.bsky.social

Assistant Professor Benjamin Freeman has been named a 2026 Research Fellow by @sloanfoundation.bsky.social. Freeman studies birds worldwide, focusing on how species respond to a changing climate and how to facilitate their survival.  🎉Congrats, @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social !