I'm in favor of limits, but I think they should be imposed on dollar amounts, not on number of grants. Why should somebody with three small grants get penalized over somebody else with one large one?

I wrote about AI in academia. "PhD-level thinking", LLM bias, grunt work, alignment, AGI, data center water use, AI politics -- something for everyone.

My book "The Evolution of Biological Information" is 50% off at Princeton University Press with the code "Spring50" press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Ok then @aaas.org, 2026 edition is telling it like it is, with a signed update from CEO Sudip Parikh: "Member Update | Power grab by OMB Director" "This attempted power grab disregards what has made America the world’s R&D leader for generations... www.aaas.org/news/aaas-st...

A bit thin on detail and understated in tone, but at least reporters are starting to take notice of last Friday's proposed changes to federal funding regulations. Gift link.

5️⃣/🔟 In Scientific Reports, 5 of the top 10 most cited articles have an article number of 1. 5️⃣/🔟 In Nature Communications the same: 5 of the top 10 are article 1s. Coincidence? 👇 scirate.com/arxiv/2511.0... I think not.

very helpful, just submitted mine

Read this. Then provide feedback on the proposed policies. Please.

“In all cases, NIH recipients should report foreign co-authorship to the funding Institute or Center as soon as they are aware of it to determine what steps, if any, need to be taken.”

A theoretical framework for how ecological interactions between microbes affect mutant fitness https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.22.727324v1

Random Fitness Landscapes are Highly Navigable https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.22.727193v1

How predictable is evolution? Replicated C. elegans experiments show environmental differences and population bottlenecks jointly shape the repeatability of adaptation doi.org/10.1093/evle... Image credit: Wikimedia

In #G3journal, @skryazhi.bsky.social and colleagues investigated how the presence of a #CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive element or the Cas9 gene without a dedicated gRNA in the genome affects the rates of loss-of-heterozygosity events and new mutations in #yeast. 🔗 buff.ly/xH7MHke

This is a terrible tragedy - we are so much better than this, San Diego. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A theory to explain global epistasis in microbial communities

Last year, I made a pair of pie charts to help folks visualize research funding priorities between the NIH (medicine) the NSF (all other sciences), the NEA (arts) and the NEH (humanities), with and without defense research spending:

1/23 New preprint! Been thinking about the origin of cellular life. Specifically, how protocells (or *any* compartments) just aren't enough to support the evolution of increasingly complex cells. You gotta de-Darwinize the parts! The ribosome/genome do this. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Late, I know, but if you are @ucsandiego.bsky.social today, I'm giving a lecture in the Moores Cancer Center on some recent work from my lab in leveraging large language models for cancer prediction and diagnostics. Do stop by - noon Pacific in Leichtag 107! calendar.ucsd.edu/event/struct...

From diminishing returns to entrenchment: a unifying theory of epistasis along adaptive walks revealed by Fisher's geometric model https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.07.723117v1

New book "A Primer for Experimental Evolution" with coauthors Michael Rose, Margarida Matos, and Joe Graves. www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook... A compact primer for students and colleagues interested in planning and designing experiments to address questions in evolutionary biology.

Very excited to share our new paper out in Nature. Congrats to Xiaoqian (Annie) Yu and all the coauthors. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New #ecoevo paper @pnas.org: Evolution of species’ range and niche in changing environments. I show that feedback between evolutionary and population dynamics can create a tipping point where genetic variance erodes, and species’ ranges contract or fragment www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #popgen 🧬🧪 🌎

Excited that this has officially come out! Smith et al. (including @joannamasel.bsky.social ): "Why are there so many definitions of fitness in models?" academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Ok, hearing from multiple (very believable) NSF sources that this slowness is due largely to transitions and budget shutdown but that they’re moving a bunch of money out (all the money) by end of fiscal year

Simons Graduate Fellowships in Ecology & Evolution are open! Our lab is open to hosting applicants. We link cell-level decision making to ecological outcomes and evolutionary trajectories in microbiomes. Interested or know someone who might be? Let's chat! www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons...

Slightly diminish a book: War and Ceasefire

New results from our synthetic communities, antibiotics & resilience project: Eco-evolutionary dynamics and environmental detoxification jointly shape bacterial community response to antibiotic perturbation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Work led by @jcairns.bsky.social

I find it fascinating that folks like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are having 'Abundance' discussions about NIH while ignoring the pre-2025 state of play, self-critique of scientists, and the many ways in which American science is imperfect and yet (near) the best in the world (or was). 🧵

Two more weeks to submit an abstract for ***Theory across Biology***. Great speakers, no distractions, only the best ideas in their purest form. What's not to like?

check out our new work on the design principles underlying cytotoxic T-cell responses. how do trade-offs and cell economics shape immune decision making? led by Obinna Ukogu and in collaboration with Grégoire Altan-Bonnet. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I've been getting questions about this paper all week: www.cell.com/cell/abstrac... They make EXTRAORDINARY claims - fortunately, these are trivial to verify/falsify. Unfortunately, there's other concerns.

Thrilled to have my first PhD paper with @mmdesai.bsky.social out! @science.org Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Thread below: #mevosky #evosky #evobio #popgen #evolsky #ecoevo #molevol

RFK Jr is onto something: Trump math. Brilliant! 🤣

Finally! Here is our perspective on why cooperation maximizes diversity and how it promotes additional coexistence mechanisms that do not occur under competition journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1... This is a hard topic with strong opinions... Thanks @asn-amnat.bsky.social for publishing it! 🧵👇

I am hiring a popgen postdoc! Looking for a creative scientist to join us at USC to investigate recessive variation and complex traits in model or non-model species. The project is funded by a multi-year NIH grant, contract can be renewed. Job add & details 👇🏽 usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange...

Your favorite hybrid microbial ecology and evolution conference is back! #meehubs2026. I am hosting a Hub for the US West in Irvine, CA and there will be travel fellowships for some students. Abstract deadline extended to April 26th! meehubs2026.oa-event.com

MEEHubs2026 registration and abstract submission is now online! 🚨🦠✨ Join us Aug 3 - 5, 2026 at one of the 7 hubs or online. We are incredibly excited about our lineup of speakers, and hope that you submit an abstract to contribute too! More information and registration links at: meehubs.org

For an update on our preprint about the mysterious signature SBS5, see: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... New analyses throughout, but see Figure 5 in particular.

Reposting this old thread on the "Pervasive findings of directional selection" from ancient DNA. While the authors extended their results in various ways, I think many of these points still stand.

I thought it was an Onion article

It's looking increasingly likely that I'll be hiring a 3-year computational pop-gen postdoc/PhD-level scientific programmer to start this Fall (2026). If you or someone you know is defending soon, and looking for a position, please DM/write to me! Thanks!

Join us in Montreal for the Canada/US Northeast hub! I will give a talk and @gmdouglas.bsky.social @nagissa.bsky.social & Tim Blower will surely give *great talks* Opportunities for student talks and posters and a good time guaranteed!

Our paper is out m in BioEssays! We explore how a process-based view of biology, focusing on dynamic interactions rather than individual molecules, can reshape how we think about cell polarity, opening up new questions and ways of doing cell biology. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

It looks like there will be an open postdoc position in my lab soon. I'll be looking for someone with substantial wet-lab experience in microbiology / microbial ecology / evolution / physiology. If everything goes well, an ad will be coming. But if you know someone, ask them to reach out already.

I’ve been warned that by engaging in politics, I might undermine myself as a scientist. Or worse, reduce the trust that people have in me or scientists as a whole. This latter point is the thesis of a recent article by Byron Hyde: link.springer.com/article/10.1... I disagree for multiple reasons.

1/25 New paper out in PNAS! We show that the fitness costs of reproductive specialization, where somatic cells give up reproduction, scale inversely with organism size. Larger organisms can afford far more soma, removing a key barrier to multicellular complexity.

So, thing that is apparently better understood inside academia than outside of it: International students pay sticker price. Most domestic students do not. International students are subsidizing the education costs for domestic students, as per student governmental funding drops.