I didn’t even know they had walruses in space

Oh yay, evolutionary psychology now being cited by the UK’s far right party to justify their Handmaid’s Tale vision of the future www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Now there is a further wrinkle, and I hope all UC researchers with federal grants read this: This injunction may need to be enforced. UC FACULTY: If you see something where the federal government violating this injunction.... say something. Tell your faculty association, who can tell the lawyers.

You can’t even say sponges are sister to all animals anymore, because of woke

A story of how science should work: an issue with methodology is picked up in this paper, authors agree they made a mistake and retract: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Meanwhile, many papers using Richard Lynn's fraudulent National IQ data are still unretracted www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/r...

NSF Update Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit. Now by Directorate... 1/11

"Arguing intelligence & adjacent traits are biologically determined served a clear function for Epstein, who treated women as subordinate. It’s equally unsurprising that the powerful people he cultivated might come up with a natural, objective explanation for their perch at the top of society"

Transposable element activity and polymorphisms drive structural variability within and between individual in bivalves https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.10.705023v1

How do we know our research results are REAL? We replicate them! Most folks agree but lament on how hard it is to publish these replications. My dearest gentle reader, lament no more! Delighted to unveil: Replication Studies, a new section of Behavioral Ecology 1/ academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

Evil men like Epstein are, in the simplest form, obsessed with eugenics because they believe that their ill-gotten gains are the product of some innate superiority.

As a botanist, this isn’t funny. Plants are sessile and only do this when they’re in extreme distress

Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!

Hate-filled fake videos about London are everywhere. We've obtained a recording of a TikToker confessing to secretly filming Londoners in their homes for clicks. He says it's not political. He just wants to make money from far-right anger. Read what he says: www.londoncentric.media/p/london-tik...

Adrien Brody

Holy shit: it's an RFP for the NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology (PRFB). Hello old friend www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Look at what they’ve taken from us

Its a 1, its a 0. It'll never work. Or will it? Binary Rivalry

Really sucks that way back in 2015 when Claire Lehmann started Quillette, she was all over old ‘Human Bio-Diversity’ (HBD) (the rebranding of ‘race realist’) blogs about how Black people are inherently stupid, and this reactionary shtick continued literally every day for the next ten goddamn years

Hit dogs hollering over on X, the everything app

Maize genetic diversity is largely unstructured by human ethnolinguistic diversity in its center of origin https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.02.703385v1

Five classes you took in college: Writing and Rhetoric of memoirs Philosophy of Science Molecular and Network Evolution Epistemology Advanced Plant Genetics

*me campaigning for president in Minnesota* This country needs less Nazis and more Naz Reids

I think Traitors did a Gettier case

lol

Am I crazy or did they just redefine the trait to reduce a bunch environmental factors? How did this get into Science??

Directional heritability and the geometry of multivariate constraint https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.26.701879v1

GLADE: Accurate inference of Gains, Losses, Ancestral genomes, and Duplication Events for comparative genomics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.27.702036v1

Coleman Hughes?! LMAO

the real liberal fantasy of Harry Potter is that the only two jobs are Cop and Feckless Bureaucrat

One of my neighbors was murdered in the streets today by ICE agents motivated by this sort of race science propaganda.

Incredibly important story that everyone should read. These are not disorganized lone actors, but well-funded and powerful networks to be treated as serious threats. They are using our work to push a eugenicist and racist agenda that is scientifically invalid and morally reprehensible.

The StarTribune live blog is paywall free: - The man shot by federal agents this morning has died - Several witnesses have already been transported to the Whipple building. - ICE attempted to order local police from the scene, but O’Hara refused, sources said. www.startribune.com/ice-raids-mi...

They are executing unarmed people in the streets for trying to protect their neighbors with the full support of the federal government.

Everything old being new again all at once is not a coincidence

This is really a nightmare for scientific integrity and public trust. The reputational damage was there before Trump even took office & it's only going to get worse. How can you convince people to enroll in these kinds of studies to improve health & wellness if this is what can happen to their data?

Great piece in the NYtimes with quotes from @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social and @sashagusevposts.bsky.social. The misuse of NIH datasets with sensitive personal information for racist aims should be concerning for anybody interested in scientific integrity. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...

An excellent, bone-chilling story about a cadre of online racists who stole genetic data from studies on children so they could make specious arguments for the innate inferiority of non-white people, it's embrace by Elon Musk/twitter & how the Trump administration might make it easier to do again.

Fantastic article on the current state of race science (with a guest appearance from @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social)

It was perfect, but sadly everything else got way worse

🚨 New from me: Grant review at more than half of NIH's institutes could be frozen by the end of the year. That's because crucial NIH grant-review panels are slated to be empty at those institutes by Jan 2027. A wonky bureaucratic problem with big implications. A short 🧵

Gary Larson: In my cartoon I invented Cow Tools as a cautionary tale Cows: At long last, we have created the Cow Tools from classic newspaper comic Cow Tools

Cow Tools! We have lived alongside cows for nearly 10,000 years. We breed them and exploit them It is now, only now, that we have discovered THEY CAN USE TOOLS Here I describe our study (paper) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... in @currentbiology.bsky.social with @auersperga.bsky.social

The options are either Hanania was a genuine Nazi only up to now, or, he was a sniveling opportunist who went along as Nazis whipped themselves into a frenzy because he thought he could gain from the movement. Neither option makes him someone worth of a wider presence or voice

I don’t know how to cope with the fact that WWIII, the destruction of US democracy and hegemony, and modern world order may be caused by the subculture I beefed with on microblogging and forum sites.

In the first of what's likely to be many collaborations with @hebagowayed.bsky.social (and my @us.theguardian.com debut) we argue that abolishing ICE would be a good start.