Extraordinary. We've known for a while that JD Vance and the rest of the Trump admin all follow the same race-and-IQ obsessed weirdo freak accounts on twitter (like this eigenrobot loser), and that miasma of idiocy is what runs America now

Massive sibling regression study finds that human traits are largely environmentally driven (average heritability = 0.3)

Suddenly "hate speech" is bad. Suddenly "dehumanizing" people is bad. Suddenly "cancel culture" is good. Suddenly words have consequences. The modern American right in 2025, folks.

"They're politicians, what are they supposed to do? Literally fight in the streets?" Unashamed to say this made me cry.

Thanks to @oceansinitiative.org for prompting this idea. Here's the state heatmap of where official congressional e-newsletters mentioning "killer whale" come from:

@psychillinois.bsky.social Social Cognition Lab, fall 2025

UK Biobank data is being used here for blatant race pseudoscience by a white supremacist blogger, Jordan Lasker. @ukbiobank.bsky.social this looks to be a clear breach of terms and an unauthorised use the data, no?

Political violence is not just violence against politicians. Political violence is also violence for political ends - like ramping up dehumanizing language against marginalized groups, disappearing people off the street, & calling for the release of police convicted of the murdering Black people.

Here's a really handy "Back to School" toolkit from @aaup.org @aft.org with resources for campus organizing, defending academic freedom, promoting racial justice, and supporting international communities. Great go-to guide, and includes several resources created by #CDAF. Solidarity.

This is a reminder that if you are faculty in Texas or anywhere else for that matter you need to join @texasaaup.bsky.social and @aaup.org . Your administration will not protect you from right wing attacks

Absolutely correct—a number of US universities have and are currently losing their status as legitimate, both due to their appeasement responses to external pressure and/or having been sabotaged by their own state legislatures (Texas, Indiana, Ohio, and so on).

I told myself that supporting my diverse lab and teaching about complex biology with excitement and appreciation was a way that I was countering the current *waves hands*. With today's news from Texas, I stand by that feeling - I look forward to teaching Genetics again next semester. #AcademicSky

The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.

IMO the biggest differences between universities are: - does the library have books (not only digital subscriptions) and a budget - are there staff for support/admin work or is it someone’s second job - do students have time to study and faculty time to teach No big names or tech matter as much.

Repost for Labor Day! ✊❤️‍🔥🖖

"Eugenics was rooted in rational modern science then" needs re-stating. Far too many people describe eugenics as a "pseudoscience", but it wasn't to those who studied it, wrote books and papers, formed societies and argued its benefits.

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I can

Academic writing tip: if you can’t explain it clearly, just say it’s complex, layered, and theoretically rich

Figure 5 in some genomics papers

Amidst the other…excitement of yesterday, I found this really helpful as someone who’s been thinking a lot lately about evolution of a very complex & also rapidly evolving trait, where different subpopulations can wind up with pretty wacky epistatic conflicts…

I am for debate. Vigorous, principled, candid debate about the things that matter most. And in good debates about things that matter, people may frown at you. In fact, they might do worse. This is the price of being a serious person. Embrace it, or shut up.

Civility discourse is a war on thinking and writing clearly. None of this is in defense of nuance. What civility pundits want is to be absolved of responsibility for the content of what they say, provided it's expressed in a particular way. Their fight is against judgement itself.

How long are we going to have to put up with mush like this? Frowns? Muttering? The humanity! Also, what do you mean ad hominem attacks were "just as harmful?" Surely they were more? Dreck elevated in the discourse so readily, you're not even expected to make the strongest version of the argument.

This always blows my mind. Dude mapped qtl for a quantitative trait to a chromosome in 1923!

I wrote about gene-gene interactions (epistasis) and the implications for heritability, trait definitions, natural selection, and therapeutic interventions. Biology is clearly full of causal interactions, so why don't we see them in the data? A 🧵:

Our article "Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience" (with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social, @kztwyman.bsky.social & Marc Feldman) is now published online. We describe five factors that contribute to the spread of racism and suggest strategies for countering them. doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

Last lecture of summer popgen:"Evolutionary QuantGen: why (almost) everything we learned is (kinda) wrong". how selection on traits affects alleles. Architecture, stabilizing selection, popgen on gene sets, corn example & a shiny app from @mgstetter.bsky.social mgstetter.shinyapps.io/quantgensimA...

It was great meeting @masahitotsuboi.bsky.social at #eseb2025 and learning about his fantastic research. Check his paper showing the interaction between micro and macro evolution! 🔥

I signed this open letter. I’d appreciate it if any academic or tech person who sees this would consider signing as well.

Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia (Hat tip to Rineke Verbrugge)

🚨 Our parent-of-origin study is out in Nature! 🧬 Maternal and paternal alleles can have distinct — even opposite — effects on human traits, revealing a hidden layer of genetic architecture that standard GWAS miss. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Highlights below!

I'm looking to recruit a PhD student to study patterns of local adaptation and introgression across the spruce hybrid zone in the Rockies near Calgary. Projects can include field work, bioinformatics, pop gen theory, or comparison to plant/ conifer species yeamanlab.weebly.com/uploads/5/7/...

I have no idea how I managed to miss this... Just brilliant.

Allow me to retort:

Out today in @genetics-gsa.bsky.social #G3journal - our manuscript describing biases in summary statistics like genetic differentiation (Fst), diversity (pi), Tajima’s D, and estimates of theta, migration rates, and divergence times when not accounting for ghost gene flow. doi.org/10.1093/g3jo...

Amen.

Day 2 of Popgen is also where I say “Please look at your kinship matrix.”Probably the best summary of pop structure there is, identifies problems or weird stuff in the data, and avoids pitfalls of structure-like plots and PCA.

Looks like a great resource for teaching popgen inference.

Critics of #ColosalBiosciences, including myself, are not angry, or getting meaner and meaner, we are being intellectual honest about what Colossal is up to 1/n

Oops, there women go, not ruining science again 👇 Almost as if the claim that women are ruining science because evolution made us incapable of it is political activism, not science 🤷‍♀️

A few thoughts on Herasight, the new embryo selection company. First, their whitepaper (drive.google.com/file/d/1EpFi...) implies that competitors like Nucleus have been marketing and selling grossly erroneous risk estimates. This is shocking if true! 🧵

It is depressing, but all too predictable, how swiftly we’ve gone from the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium offering reassurances about the uses of behavioural polygenic scores to one of their lead authors marketing embryo selection for IQ

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Happy to announce I just defended my dissertation at Harvard and I’m now a PhD.

Apropos of the obvious...

Here's a recent article on the Big 10 "rising up". Some of what it suggests the Big 10 can do (like support each other financially) seems a very gray area in terms of whether faculty can do that without admin signoff. Anyway TBC ✊🏻 newrepublic.com/article/1983...

“Nationally, 47 percent of instructional higher education faculty work on a part-time, contingent basis, often facing low pay with little or no benefits or job security.” Adjunct faculty deserve fair loans and debt relief! This legislation—which AAUP endorses—gets us closer to this aspiration.