I’ll never look at avocados in quite the same way: The latest from UC Berkeley Miller Fellow Jeff Groh who sits in my lab and Ben Blackman’s lab. He works on balancing selection and molecular mechanisms underlying the coevolutionary phenomenon of mating type alternation (PhD with Graham Koop).

and the winner of the "2025 best thing on Internet" has just arrived neal.fun/size-of-life/ @carlbergstrom.com

Carlson et al. build a mathematical model considering how genotype-by-environment interactions can maintain variation and parametrize their model to test its applicability to real mutualisms. Read now ahead of print! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

This is well worth a read. It is essentially qualitative, which some might baulk at, but sometimes that's the way to start fleshing out an idea.

Thrilled to announce the Handbook of Computational Social Science is officially out! 956 pages, 118 authors, and truly global, interdisciplinary perspectives. Deep thanks to the contributors and anonymous reviewers who shaped this over 4 years. Buy your copy now! @elgarpublishing.bsky.social

Probably still time for last-minute Xmas shopping.

A little review of some of the things I wrote this year. 🧵 It was of course the Year of Quantum, a highlight of which was the meeting on Helgoland in the summer. Here's what that was all about, and what happened there. www.marginaliareviewofbooks.com/post/the-hol...

Happy to highlight an essay I wrote together with @marcdemanuel.bsky.social, @natanaels.bsky.social and Anastasia Stolyarova, trying to think through what sets the mutation rate of a cell type in an animal species: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n

Happy to share my new paper w/ @cgershen.bsky.social, just published at @royalsocietypublishing.org Interface! Open Access🔓: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article... Instead of proposing a new theory, we offer a synthesis in theoretical biology. Want to know more? Read the full thread./1 👇🧵

Really interesting research showing that while ultra-specialization in a single discipline might lead to better results early in one’s career, multi-discipline training and practice pays off big time in the long run. This applies to a range of professions from scientists to athletes and more

Multidisciplinary training, over time, produces the highest impact people www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This is a good time to talk about the TRUE genetics revolution brought in by sequencing the human genome: The genetic underpinning of traits is not simple, will never be simple. Complex gene-gene interactions are the rule, not the exception 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Multiple anthropogenic stressors can negatively impact species but can a single stressor also have multiple, concurrent impacts? Here we show that light pollution creates several simultaneous impacts to the nocturnal movement ecology of a moth and a spider: tinyurl.com/5eku5bff (1/5)

While stories of singular DNA changes that drove evolution of human brain/behaviour remain seductive, advances across multiple fields of biology cast doubt on such simplistic narratives of our origins. A new paper from my lab shows how biobanks may speak to this fundamental question.🧪 Explainer🧵👇1/n

My science is more sciencey than your science! "Boundary work is more contentious, however, when it desciences research on ideological grounds." New work by Robbie Sutton and @stefanleach.bsky.social on science rejection. Open Access: doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Article about scientists leaving (or not leaving) the US - including me! I landed in a truly great spot - but what's happening in the US is messed up. @isemevol.bsky.social @sfstatebio.bsky.social @umontpellier.bsky.social

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...

So, bowhead whales, which can live over 200 years, may not be so special after all. "Extreme longevity may be the rule not the exception in Balaenid whales", big if true 🧪 🐋 #PetosParadox www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Just decline the peer review invitation. What are you people even doing?

Well well. The standard model for how frequencies of recessive disease genes are established doesn't work. And that seems to be because recessive variants are visible to selection due to pleiotropy. (But still we teach Mendelian genetics...) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Good luck. Go with God (and take this shit with you)

The R35 Established/New Investigator MIRA RFA was issued on Dec 11 (earliest submission is Dec 27, 2025): files.simpler.grants.gov/opportunitie...

Looking for a gift for that somebody who likes food, drink, and...nature? The hardcover, paperback, and kindle editions of Most Delicious Poison are currently <$15 (and audiobook is on Audible and narrated by me): www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/noah-... Review: www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/b...

I wrote about the bizarre case of Herasight, the embryo selection company going all in on eugenics.

Interesting model here. “If universities genuinely want to realize their potential to solve societal challenges, they must create mechanisms to recognize publicly engaged research in the P&T process” www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

Our latest preprint revisits the classic model of mutation-selection balance. Do human recessive genes fit Haldane's 100-year old model? This work is by the wonderful @jonj-udd.bsky.social, and co-mentored by @jeffspence.github.io www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Just a year after the first AI-designed protein was made, scientists are preparing for clinical trials testing AI-designed antibodies go.nature.com/4oS76VI

GWAS has been an incredible discovery tool for human genetics: it regularly identifies *causal* links from 1000s of SNPs to any given trait. But mechanistic interpretation is usually difficult. Our latest work on causal models for this is out yesterday: www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short🧵:

Incredible piece on Oliver Sacks. If you were ever awed at his supposedly true stories (I remember being stunned by the account of the autistic twins who rattled off large prime numbers), read this. He told wonderful stories, but they were in large part fiction. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

1/2 🚨New paper In a collab b/w my group + @nathangrubaugh.bsky.social, led by a fabulous doctoral student, we synthesize the data on epistasis across several viral pathogen systems (e.g., influenza, HIV, SARS-CoV-2, tobacco etch virus, etc). academic.oup.com/ve/article/1...

I just did a little post about Schrödinger's cat. I get why it is culturally iconic, but in terms of quantum physics it isn't very meaningful. philipball86.substack.com/p/enough-abo...

How did DNA changes that alter protein structures impact evolution on the branch that led to modern humans? As we demonstrate today in Science Advances, biobanking initiatives offer ways to directly assess biological effects of rare archaic variants in living people, & (re)evaluate their roles. 🧬🧪

Paper out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com: 1) those groups (women, African Americans, lower SES, rural) that are underrepresented in science have been less trusting of science. 2) If you improve representation in science, you improve trust among those groups. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I wrote a piece for Marginalia Review of Books, based on a talk earlier this year, about the role of narratives in science - something that I think deserves more attention than it gets. www.marginaliareviewofbooks.com/post/theory-...

My first lead author paper is out with Ben Kerr and @alisonfeder.bsky.social! We found that making an antiviral too strong can sometimes make resistance easier to evolve. This has implications for how we design drugs, choose doses, and think about viral evolution in the face of treatment. (1/n)

Great to see this published: Fitting dynamical landscape models to single-cell data, creating interpretable maps of cell decision making & developmental logic Applied to neural tube patterning, we show how morphogen signals reshape landscapes and drive fate decisions www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New to RNA design? Please try pyFuRNAce! Looking forward to your feedback 🧬

What if complex life began when evolution hit a search bottleneck? Across 6,500+ species, 🧬 length follow a scale-invariant law. At eukaryote origins, proteins plateau while 🧬 keep growing as noncoding regulatory DNA. Phase transition? www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 👉 manlius.substack.com

Join us for an @smtpb.bsky.social workshop on Modern Coexistence Theory. We'll cover mathematical foundations, the theory of partitioning, and data-based applications. Featuring @swatipatel.bsky.social, Nick Kortessis, & Lauren Shoemaker. Zoom link here: smtpb.org/event-6426026

I made a video about my new paper. I hope you enjoy it! vimeo.com/1113132836?s...

Science is what America did best for 8 decades, causing the US economy to dominate world markets and utterly transform the world’s understanding of itself. All that has come to a senseless and “shattering” end. www.statnews.com/american-sci...

This story took many months, and the expertise of many folks (thanks, @dberrett.bsky.social and @danbauman77.bsky.social). I hope you’ll give it a read and RT the first skeet in this thread. DMs/Signal are open for tips about what’s happening on your campus. (14/14) www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

After sitting on faculty hiring committees where profs & staff spend *days* of wasted time processing 100+ candidate dossiers into a 10K-foot view spreadsheet of candidates, @aaronclauset.bsky.social and I built the thing we always wanted: a computational pipeline to get the job done in 5 minutes...

I wrote about missing heritability, "missing environmentality," and why I still think twin studies are interesting and valuable: kathrynpaigeharden.substack.com/p/twins-are-...

Grim. Scientifically illiterate, and the techniques they are selling will be largely ineffective anyway. See my book, Control: the Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics.

On scientific "style" for @undark.org: "[Style] is a positive feature of science that facilitates different routes to solving problems.....We can embrace differences in our approaches while still promoting rigor and clarity." undark.org/2025/12/04/o...

Historian of eugenics here. I don't normally like to retweet bad arguments, but this is such a fundamental misunderstanding of eugenics, I think it's important to point out. I don't have time to debunk all of the ways this is inaccurate, but I'll highlight a few things and then recommend some books🧵

I have never heard of this Hans Eysenck guy, but it seems he was kinda a big deal in personality psychology? If I were going to read one (short!) thing to understand the position and importance of his work, what would it be? Asking out of genuine interest.