I'm excited to share with you all a conference I'm planning Oct. 10-12: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin. It will be hybrid in Toronto and on zoom, so please join us however you can! Register for zoom link here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

Hybridization and introgression are major evolutionary processes. Since the 1940s, the prevailing view has been that they shape plants far more than animals. In our new study (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... ), we find the opposite: animals exchange genes more, and for longer, than plants

woah this is genuinely, utterly WILD Ant queens of one species produce males of another species, so she can then mate with them and produce hybrid workers! This is so gloriously weird I can't quite compute it 🤯🧪🐜 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

MEME alumni (www.evobio.eu) at #ESEB2025! We span so many generations now, from the first cohort (graduated in 2012) to those who are still studying, with master students, PhD students, postdocs, and PIs among us! So happy to get together in every ESEB 🤩

Music to my ears. This is brilliant. Either 90% of us can claim to be better musicians than Beethoven or… maybe just maybe polygenic scores aren’t perfect?

Identification of multivariate phenotypes most influenced by mutation: Drosophila serrata wings as a case study #Drosophila

Given two genomes, can you tell who’s taller or more prone to a disease? How confident can you be? A fresh take on phenotypic inference, now out: rdcu.be/exW4f See thread🧵👇:

Why do treehoppers look so weird?! Our latest paper, out this week in @pnas.org, suggests a perhaps unexpected reason - static electricity ⚡ We show that treehoppers can detect the electrostatic cues of predators and that their crazy shapes may boost their electrosensitivity! doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

I need you, and I can't stress this enough, to read this paper by Margaret Kidwell et al. on horizontal transfer of P elements from mites to flies and back...from *1991*: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I am proud and grateful to present a dream project today in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... Meet #Mirasaura grauvogeli, a #wonderreptilewith skin appendages that rival feathers and hairs, challenging our view of reptile #evolution🪶🦎

#FlyCROSS mentee surveys are open for #earlycareer #Drosophila scientists. If you're a #gradstudent #postdoc or pretenure faculty or equivalent - fill up the survey by Sept 1 to participate & be matched by #mentor of your preferences to gain guidance to your unique needs. @flybase.bsky.social

Experimental evolution in an era of molecular manipulation www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

Context-dependent effects of developmental and adult diet on life-history traits in Drosophila melanogaster #Drosophila

In this month's issue of Nature Ecology & Evolution, we celebrate 200 years since the birth of Henry Walter Bates, who gave the first scientific account of mimicry in butterflies [thread] 🦋 Editorial: Bates’ many contributions www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Butterflies- not just beautiful, but essential! 🦋 Sadly, they are declining in many areas of the world...🌍 Protecting pollinators safeguards #biodiversity. Learn more: @ipbes.net #PollinationAssessment www.ipbes.net/assessment-r... Design by Eleanor Lutz🧪

If you (like me) are pulling together a reading pile to lose yourself in this summer, let me remind you of this terrific starter pack. go.bsky.app/2LmKSDN

Official accounts for SMBE and affiliated journals are now on Bluesky: ▫️ Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution @official-smbe.bsky.social ▫️ Molecular Biology and Evolution @molbioevol.bsky.social ▫️ Genome Biology and Evolution @genomebiolevol.bsky.social Starter Pack: go.bsky.app/2xnyMrS

New publication from @jiachengmiao.bsky.social and Qiongshi Lu lab github.com/qlu-lab/PIGEON

In this just published paper we reconstructed the almost 400 million of leaf venation evolution!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We had a fantastic time delving into the regulation of biological noise at the SMBE satellite meeting! Here's a starter pack with the participants who are already on Bluesky. We'll continue adding more researchers interested in this topic—follow them for inspiring science! 🧬🎲🧠🌀📊 go.bsky.app/4AQyofh

Please share widely! We have been running this course for 3 years now, and this is our fourth iteration! We also offer a mini grant program and mentorship opportunities! Check it out and sign up here: evobiocrashcourse.github.io

My paper with @schmidmax.bsky.social and @charlesmullon.bsky.social is out in @journal-evo.bsky.social 🌟 doi.org/10.1093/evol... 🌟 We show how the effect of longevity on local adaptation, rather than being unidirectional, depends on the life cycle and how frequent selection is relative to dispersal

More information about the course at the Consortium webpage: evobiocrashcourse.github.io + Other initiatives such as: Mentorship programme 🧑🏽‍🔬 Mini-grants 🌻

Registrations are open for the Evolutionary Biology Crash Course 2025! This is our fourth year of organizing this open-access course for anyone who is interested in evolution! 🧬

Our SMBE Satellite Meeting on Biological Noise is only couple of days away! We will be streaming the talks on Zoom, in case you couldn't join us in person - Info about the zoom link and the program is here: pallareslab.github.io/bionoise2025...

I am very happy to host a Marie Curie Fellow in my lab. Please email me in case you are interested in experimental evolution, evolution of cooperation, bacterial multicellularity, metabolic cross-feeding, or related topics. marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/calls/msca-p...

Variation in temperature but not diet determines the stability of latitudinal clines in tolerance traits and their plasticity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.20.655196v1

Interesting model, but the bottleneck claim is very controversial: academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

“Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.” —Mahatma Gandhi

Elegant new theory on polygenic adaptation by Will Milligan, Laura Heyward, and Guy Sella.

Now out in @NatureEcoEvo! Life (and adaptation to warming) is a story of chance and history, but also... epistasis... Congrats to former grad student Alex Rego and ace collaborator David Berger for their brilliance and endurance and thanks to Zach Blount for a great commentary!

How to estimate the additive genetic variance for fitness, without measuring fitness. Work from Manas Geeta Arun and Jarrod Hadfield: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The rest of Mendel's alleles characterized! So, out of 7 traits, 3 caused by TE insertions!!! (though apparently there are two different green alleles, one cause by a TE insertion, but another a promoter deletion allele) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

No degradation of temperature-mediated phenotypic plasticity in Drosophila melanogaster after more than 275 generations of artificial selection on body-size #Drosophila

New writing! For @sciam.bsky.social, I talk about misleading memes. If you understand evolution enough to know this already, great! But memes/youtubes/etc reach folks with no biology background. Science has been twisted to justify bad things, such as eugenics, before. NOT IN CRABS' NAME. 🦀🧪🦑⚒️

Optimal division asymmetry in E. coli bacteria https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.10.648155v1

Pleiotropy increases parallel selection signatures during adaptation from standing genetic variation #Drosophila

Be careful online today. This is the one day a year when people post false information on the internet

Imagine if those funds went to paying students, technicians, or postdocs to do more research. 🧪

As advisor of this high school iGEM team, I must say that I am truly impressed by these very young researchers 👩‍🔬👨‍🔬 They need our help to join the iGEM competition 🦠🌱 Please check Nick's thread for details and spread the word!

Phenotypic plasticity, heritability, and genotype-by-environment interactions in an insect dispersal polymorphism https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.18.643873v1

Who wants some good news? The overwintering monarch population, which had plummeted last winter, has doubled this winter! www.worldwildlife.org/stories/east...

Stable hypermutators revealed by the genomic landscape of DNA repair genes among yeast species https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.15.643480v1

Our Evolution of Evolvability work is finally* out! *technically it has been out for a bit, but all of ~this~ bullshit was happening www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

In honor of Pi Day and Einstein's birthday, occasional repost of the deep geometric connection between the two. www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/03...

Analysing wing shapes within and across distantly related dipteran lineages, Rohner & Berger show that intrapopulation variation reflecting microevolutionary change can predict deep divergence at macroevolutionary timescales spanning 185 million years

Revealing Multidimensional Associations in Life History Traits Across Four Animal Taxa https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.09.642183v1

Recombinant inbred line panels inform the genetic architecture and interactions of adaptive traits in Drosophila melanogaster #Drosophila

Family-based Selection: An Efficient Method for Increasing Phenotypic Variability https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.28.640850v1