Oh this thread!

Of course they are.

Why isn't there a TV show of improvised comedy in people's houses? It could be called Home Improvment.

Corporations should be abolished and their operations sold off to mom and pop concerns, so that the market is freer and more efficient... ;-)

Eugenics never went away. Nor has it ever answered the question: who has the right to determine what is unfit, when in nature those that are more successfully breeding are fitter than those that aren't?

Listening to Steven Pinker being interviewed on Radio 4 ahead of his Orwell Lecture "set up to shine a light on brave writing", and reflecting on why a handful of people receive criticism for their views on race and intelligence while others are celebrated despite facilitating the same views 🤔

When an ICE agent fired the tear gas canister, it hit 55-year-old nurse Vincent Hawkins in the face, shattering his glasses and concussing him. As he was rushed to the emergency room, he wondered if he'd ever see through his left eye again.

New and recent Darwin and evolution books ~ thedispersalofdarwin.wordpress.com/2025/11/28/n... #HPS #histsci

Volume 10 (yes 10!!!) of our book series “Emergence of Natural History” @degruyterbrill.bsky.social @dgb-history.bsky.social is out #OpenAccess : @dvantrijp.bsky.social ‘s fascinating history of #fish studies / #Ichthyology Congratulations, Didi! #HistNatHist #HistSTM brill.com/display/titl...

The chemical element category and classificatory norms: better understanding how science works Matthew J. Barker & Matthew H. Slater Foundations of Chemistry #philsky #philsci link.springer.com/content/pdf/...

I taught (and co-taught) a course on human population genetics from 2000-2024. Having retired, I'm now making all the course materials public: github.com/alanrogers/p... #popgen #evbio

Can anyone recommend a good and reliable text on mineral classification from Mohs to the present day? #philsky #philsci

So there's this essay, which is broadly correct but historically shallow. We could add a host of examples: Various crusades, the Thirty Years war, the Reconquista, French Wars of Religion, and that's just the internecene wars between Christians. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Damn this hits home

Paleo folks: Please recommend researchers (incl yourselves) interested in phylogenetic reconstruction in deep time, molecular clocks (discord w/ fossil clocks), foundational/methodological issues in phylo/paleo-reconstruction & who'd be interested in hanging w/ historians & philosophers of science ⚒️

In the latest issue of #HOPOS Jacob McDowell notes the surprising fact that Thomas Kuhn endorses "aspects of the causal theory [of reference] in several later essays while maintaining the possibility of incommensurability". Link to the article: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

On top of how ridiculously invasive this is, the sheer number of distinct things they are testing reeks of p-hacking to me. If you test every possible thing that could be wrong with something without adjusting for the number of tests you're doing, you'll end up finding SOMETHING by pure chance

New on the Archive: Lean, Christopher and Latham, Andrew and Sandrussi, Annie and Rogers, Wendy (2025) De-extinction and the risk of moral hazard. [Preprint] https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27257/

One of the best-known proponents of string theory, Brian Greene, explains why it remains the most comprehensive theory for understanding the fundamental laws of nature. But can it even be tested? It’s Skeptic Check: String Theory on @bipisci.bsky.social. 🧪 Listen here: buff.ly/SOmv0qH #podcast

Documenting the diversity of all living organisms.. #NHM #Systematics #Biodiversity

To celebrate the 85th SVP Meeting 2025, we've curated a special open access collection of landmark vertebrate palaeontology papers. Next highlight: Phylogenetic relationships of procolophonid parareptiles with remarks on their geological record 🦎 Cisneros (2008) buff.ly/kaZ20P1 #PaleoSky #2025SVP

I believe Chuck D explained all that in his book. The Formation of Vegetable Mould, 1881

Great video from @pbseons.bsky.social about Darwin and his work on barnacles: www.youtube.com/watch?v=plYu... #histsci #HPS

yep. and while it isn’t the whole reason Schumer and Gillibrand also share this belief

It's always eugenics....

This is a terrific talk by Jon Ablett on the Linnean Society's shell collection, replete with a delightfully rude account of sequential hermaphroditism in Crepidula fornicata involving cheap sperm and Roman prostitutes (there are pseudopenises too!). Well worth watching . . . 🌈🐚 #queer #sex #nature

Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro: “I ordered the militarisation of the entire country starting at 4pm by land, sea, and air.”

A 1953 draft story described two collaborative teams (the experimentalists Wilkins-Franklin; the theorists Watson-Crick), with Franklin as an equal partner in testing the model. The draft was discovered by Cobb and Comfort in the archives and represents contemporary evidence... 🧪 #histsci 1/4

Deeply disappointed to see a convincing case made that a foundational work in social psychology that I've read many times was falsified.

Is this true? Linnaeus’ groups are explicitly artificial. So IT is more like the 18th century notion of a natural method.

Something for everyone to hate here! Plenty to agree with, but also strawman arguments, conflating preregistration, replication and Registered Reports, attacking Jussim as preregistration advocate but promoting his anti-wokeism…

"I’m actually biased in favor of the intuitive value of preregistration; but things that seem intuitively sensible can turn out to be wrong anyway. Increasingly, I’m wondering if this is one of those things."

This.

Who offers one or two year visiting scholar grants in Europe to retired Australian academics? #academicsky Preferably in German speaking countries.

I’m 88 and haven’t had to take this test yet.

* after being kicked off the team. The "why" of the suicide is easily traced to its origins if you don't elide the facts.

If you are in crisis, please call, text, or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

Written before I got ill but never posted: Three more books on the history of medieval Islamicate culture #histsci thonyc.wordpress.com/2025/10/25/t...

New on the Archive: Zach, Martin (2025) On Representation and Similarity: The Case of Mouse Models of Cancer. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. ISSN 00393681 https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27018/

Have we been misled about genetics? | https://bit.ly/48QElEr Gregory Radick shows how critiques of Mendel's experiments, which ignored environments' role in traits, were side-lined by accident, not evidence. This let the flawed idea of genes solely determining traits persist. #philsci ⚛️ 🧪

uh, that’s not “reimagining” the novel. that’s…the novel.

I'm so sick of discourse from supposed allies about where trans people went wrong. Where we "went wrong" is that billionaires spent unimaginably large sums to attack us repeatedly and major media outlets have spent a decade piling on.

ICE is stockpiling arms, including chemical weapons, guided missile warheads and explosive components. The spending dwarfs anything we've ever seen in the agency - a 700% increase. The President is building an army to attack his own country.

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10... Perhaps they could listen to the aboriginal people who did fire farming for around 60k years here?

America! Your expats and your friends are *always* with you! Sending you love and courage and #NoKings solidarity and frog costumes from Melbourne, Australia. Make fascism history again!

No one will remember anything Linda Reynolds did in politics, but we will remember this forever. What a piece of sh#t.

Linda Reynolds launches bankruptcy proceedings against a young woman who a court of law found to have been raped in her office by a Linda Reynolds staffer

Linda Reynolds will be remembered for her character, which seems to consist of nothing but distilled, ossified spite.

Got it! I like this version of the interwubs. Can we keep it please?

In recent decades, scholars have examined various facets of Avicenna’s #logic. But how did Avicenna himself conceptualize logic—its definition, status, and purpose? PhD student Shahab Khademi explores this question in a new paper! 👇📃 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... #philsky #histphil #HPS