Dems are not beating the controlled opposition allegations

Nice thread to balance things out! There are good researchers doing the hard work to treat evolutionary hypotheses of human psychology with the seriousness and rigor they deserve. Testing assumptions and, if necessary, shedding zombie theories is how a field progresses and improves

So, lots of people picking up Kevin's post to declare all Evolutionary Psychology/ists misogynistic pervs. And I get why but look: I trained in Evo Psych. I trained in Behavioural Ecology too which maybe helps but I came into academia an enthusiastic researcher of sexual selection. 1/

New research from #ProcB: Confounding Fuels Misinterpretation in Human Genetics royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... | #Behaviour #Evolution #Genomics

Evolutionary psychology makes a big to-do about their finding that sexual selection favors a "feminine body type" that "signals fertility/reproductive potential", including some rather... silly research. Turns out, those traits don't seem to signal reproductive success. Oops! doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

A fantastic piece. Fascinating that Watson was another victim of The Bell Curve and became entrenched by his undeserved arrogance and hubris

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

A political message all branches of the tree of life can get behind

bring back maligning racism as the mark of a stupid person. prejudice is the mark of an idiot. if you believe that shit i bet you also don’t wipe your ass

apropos james watson’s death i had an idle thought today about how stupid race/iq stuff sounds. “buh if your skin is darker you are biologically less smart” is a thing only a dumbass can believe

FIRE are a really shitty rightwing org pretending to care about free speech.

Very glad to see this important paper published at last

We're excited to share the final version of our paper, where we demonstrate how confounding remains a thorny problem for claims about causal genetic influences on human behavioral and socioeconomic outcomes. (w/ @jedidiahcarlson.com @oliviarxiv.bsky.social Ruth Shaw @arbelharpak.bsky.social) 🧵👇

Hey folks, as news of Watson's demise spreads, please don't set aside his weighty legacy of misogyny and racism. He was truly among the worst of us. www.vox.com/2019/1/15/18...

The President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is one of the most coveted & prestigious positions for UC graduates. It gives a hiring incentive to campuses who hire recipients for a tenure track position. What a DAMN travesty. This is capitulation to Trump's demand letter & anti-diversity agenda.

Same! I’ve preprinted every paper I’ve led, but I’m far less keen on biorxiv if they’re facilitating AI slop like this.

disappointed that @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social is implicitly endorsing the use of LLMs to replace scientific thought @richardsever.bsky.social this is a short-sighted move and a net negative for science

Every tech company eventually either reinvents the bus or reinvents phrenology

bro are you fucking kidding me

Vital piece of investigative reporting from Sky. They've uncovered the X algorithm which feeds users extremist right wing material from the moment they join the site. It is a far-right radicalisation engine, by design. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

Another recommended read from Andrew Winston: “I show how post-WWII neoliberals and libertarians could employ ideas of “innate intelligence” to promote the reduction of government funding of social programs….IQ data could also be employed in the fight against “egalitarianism.”

🌱Check out this new #AJB Review!🌱 The #polyploid continuum & the landscape of polyploid genomic variation By Alex Twyford, Justin Conover, Jeff Doyle, Annaliese Mason, Douglas Soltis, Pamela Soltis & Jonathan Wendel doi.org/10.1002/ajb2... #botany #plantscience #polyploidy @soltislab.bsky.social

absolutely insane to see leftists now clowning on the harvard story and being like 'everyone was always over-reacting.' you people have rocks in your brain. you have no idea what college campuses have become in the last decade lmao

Carole Hooven has contacted me to object to this characterization. For the sake of respecting private communication, I will not reveal any further details, unless she violates my request not to contact me again.

Dick Cheney taught me it was ok to be weird

Now in Evolution: academic.oup.com/evolut/artic... This paper started when @3rdreviewer.bsky.social, Mike, and I had a lunch at which there was a lot of, "What do you mean when you say X?" Fun to spend time thinking about when terms get too muddy, and great work by Drew to pull it all together!

I think democrats should stand for environmental consciousness and equitable education

Not mentioned in the article, but the exact same reasoning applies to things like race science.

“Science deniers undermine scientific integrity when they fail to recognise the expiration date on valuable misunderstandings. Once the hard work of generating & testing other hypotheses has been done, we might ask whether repeatedly responding to the same dissent or misunderstanding is valuable”

💡 The takeaway: Democracy needs competition—especially in "symbolic" institutions. When established parties neglect these elections, they become vulnerable to populist mobilization. Link to study: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... (3/3)

🗳️ New study (w @jessicakuhlm.bsky.social) on AfD success in integration council elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany: AfD achieved significant results in councils elected exclusively by voters with migration backgrounds. It's not about economics—it's about political competition. (1/3)

Oh my god there’s a plant one! 🍀 Plant #766 🍀 I figured it out in 3 guesses! 🟧🟨🟩 🔥 2 | Avg. Guesses: 6.5 flora.metazooa.com #metaflora

KCFtools: Rapid alignment-free method for introgression screening and GWAS using k-mer profiles https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.01.685998v1

Delineating Mutation Bias and Selection during Plant Development https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.01.686053v1

⚠ Inadequate Methods ⓘ Hallucinogens are not an appropriate method for structural biology

"Why don't people support welfare programs?" Racism. More specifically, anti-Blackness. White folks asked about who welfare serves overestimate the number of Black people on welfare. Not only that, but just the mere THOUGHT of who welfare supports led less white people to support it. #blacksky

Aww, some twitter nazis are mad that my papers are being used to clean out race science from wikipedia

Every time she comes up, I remind you all that Pamela Paul killed a pro trans paragraph in a review I wrote for the New York Times, lied about it in the press, then when I confronted her with receipts, said “Let’s keep this to ourselves.”

UC Provost Katherine Newman has announced plans to defund this program, a preemptive capitulation with the feds that has not been ordered and should not occur. Newman has done this with zero consultation with campus-level leadership and none with any faculty — mentors or former fellows included.

The President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, PPFP, has been a jewel in the crown for faculty development and recruitment at the University of California for years and the results have been an expanded faculty with almost 100% tenure rates — unprecedented success.

The welfare state is about dignity, equality, and making people not poor, but as @itsafronomics.bsky.social says/cites here, it’s often also an investment that more than pays for itself

This right here, this exact sentence, is THE problem in American political journalism. The IRA *was* cheap energy and good jobs! That was the whole bill! Democrats did precisely what political pundits are telling them to do and the pundits just ignore it.

Saying this was considered so beyond-the-pale overtly racist it made Enoch Powell a pariah in the woke cancel culture of 1960s Britain.

So, I hate to be this guy, but as the director of Yale’s new program on attribution science (!?), uh, most of the commentary on Bluesky about Hurricane Melissa and climate change has been… not quite right

The "everyone is 12" theory remains undefeated

one of the things i think is that policies answer the question of “what will you do” but they don’t answer the question of “why should i vote for you” and i think there is a tendency in this broad conversation to equate the two

Exciting things coming soon...

Colin Wrong strikes again!