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...

We suggest that a combination of traditional and machine learning methods make measuring selection on the transcriptome an achievable task-- even in the field, at manageable sample sizes. paper link: academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

Gentle reminder that John Odling-Smee, who is now in his 90s (!) published his big update on #NicheConstruction last year. It's open access and can be downloaded here: direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon... ( #pleasecite )

Researchers use partitioned local depth (PaLD) to search for patterns within time series transcriptome data academic.oup.com/insilicoplan... #Arabidopsis #GRN #PlantScience

SMBE2026 Symposium 12 | Reconstructing the deep Tree of Life: challenges and new approaches 📨 Abstract submission smbe2026.org/abstracts 📋 Programme details smbe2026.org/programme #SMBE2026

1/28 New preprint up, which I think is the best theoretical idea I've ever had. We asked a simple question: what are the costs of investment into non-reproductive somatic cells? Turns out these costs decrease with the *logarithm* of organism size! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Un artículo de revisión del 2000 que concluye en que el glifosato no representa un riesgo para humanos ha sido retirado recientemente. El artículo sí debía ser retirado y espero que se más esfuerzos se enfoquen en revisar los aspectos metodológicos de estudios con claro conflicto de interés.

"...enhance models, highlighting opportunities such as incorporating time-varying connections, adaptive topologies, and multilayer structures to better represent the temporal dynamics and multilevel interactions characteristic of biological systems." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧪 #EvoBio

Adaptation is less accessible through mutations in promoters than in coding sequences when large effect sizes are needed https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.09.675213v1

Lineage-specific evolution of regulatory landscapes in polyploid plant and its diploid progenitors https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.04.692133v1

Check out this new #AJB On the Nature of Things essay! #Pangenomes as a framework for adaptive radiation, speciation & adaptation By @nicolo-tellini.bsky.social , Ole Tørresen, David Edwards, Loren Rieseberg, Kjetill Jakobsen & José Cerca doi.org/10.1002/ajb2... #botany #plantscience #evolution

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/...

I'm excited to present this new model to detect positive selection on regulatory sequences, which has been 3 years in the making! Thanks to Alexandre Laverré and @Phylogenetrips for their amazing work on this project. 😃 https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.26.690685 #bioinformatics #MolecularEvolution

Submit an abstract to our symposium "S20 Mapping fitness landscapes with mechanistic models, machine learning and experiments" 🧬 - organised with @meikewortel.bsky.social

Bat Friday

And while I'm at it, just because a genomic loci is transcribed, it does not follow that it is a gene! (yes, I'm looking at you lncRNA people!) THANK YOU.

How do new centromeres evolve while staying compatible with the division machinery? Discover it in our new Nature paper! We show centromeres transition gradually via a mix of drift, selection, and sex, reaching new states that still work with the kinetochore. 👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09779-1

An inspirational example of 𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲, 𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐨𝐫: Chemiosmosis remains one of the most striking examples of originality in modern biology. At a time when biochemical dogma insisted on high-energy intermediates, Peter Mitchell proposed & rigorously articulated the radical ...

Miss Universo nunca me había parecido tan interesante, hasta el día de hoy.

"We review the highly expanded range of departures from the standard genetic code, highlighting previously unanticipated code forms and their molecular underpinnings."

Our friend Kunihiko Kaneko published his new amazing book! "Universal Biology: The Physics of Life through the Macro-Micro Consistency Principle" An insights into biology from physics perspective providing picture of the universal characteristics of living systems across scales

Treating emergent traits of the microbiome like quantitative genetic traits of the host reveals how environmentally acquired symbionts can contribute to hosts' adaptation

OTD in 1859, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. He’d been working on a long treatise titled “Natural Selection,” but learning that Alfred Russel Wallace had developed a similar theory, he shifted toward a shorter “abstract.” 🌱🐋🧪 #histSTM #evobio

"The discovery pushes the boundaries of our knowledge of just how small and simple cellular life can become, as it evolves even into forms that are barely alive."

#OnThisDay in 1859, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was first published. Much of the original manuscript was used as scrap paper by Darwin's children. On the back of this painting of a house is an original manuscript page from Origin! #CambridgeUniversityLibrary (DAR 185)

🔆 #OTD Nov. 24th, in 1859 Darwin's evolutionary (and revolutionary) book is published, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" It changed our view of life... "Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution." - T. Dobzhansky Darwin Online 🧪 darwin-online.org.uk

#OnThisDay in 1859, Charles Darwin's landmark book 'On the Origin of Species' was first published. The work is one of the foundations of evolutionary biology, and one of the most important scientific works of the 19th century. #HistoryOfScience

"Quantitative geneticists acknowledge residual confounding as an unsolved problem. However, in practice, researchers face incentives to publish their inferences of genetic associations that are vulnerable to confounding."

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

Read the linked News & Views commentary by Manolo Mischler & Olivier Tenaillon 👇 Deep mutational scans clarify the record of evolution www.nature.com/articles/s41... Free to read: rdcu.be/eQ5HU

Essential to life and threaded through deep time, phosphorus has been mined and disrupted by human activity. This essay traces its journey from ancient soils and riverbeds to industrial farms, and explores how we can restore the phosphorus cycles that have sustained life for aeons

Grandchamp, @drdomain.bsky.social et al. publish a new Review on commonly used methods for de novo gene detection, address the limitations of nomenclature and detection methods, and establish a de novo gene annotation format to standardize reporting 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf197 #genome #evolution

The concept of "fitness" is central to evolutionary biology but it's not entirely worked out. There are multiple definitions, doubts about predictive power, problems with internal consistency. Here's a paper from last year attempting to solve some of these problems. doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Happy to share that our paper ‘a formal theory of group-level adaptation for obligate eusociality’ (with @andygardner.bsky.social) is now out in @jevbio.bsky.social advances. doi.org/10.1093/jeb/... #OpenAccess #Eusociality #GroupAdaptation #FormalDarwinism

Thrilled to finally share the magnum opus of my PhD that focuses on the genetic basis of evolutionary change! Specifically, we know we can map the genetic basis of a trait, but can we tell which genes will underlie the trait shift when it evolves? doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Modestly, we decided to review a century's worth of theories of balancing selection :) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

About today’s “GenZ protest” in Mexico: foreigners please be aware that this was not rooted in the movement that originated in Nepal, this was a narrative takeover by the Mexican far-right. Not a protest, not a social movement: a display of the political rot within a deeply disenfranchised society.

Si todo sale bien, es posible que el próximo me embarque de nuevo en el mundillo académico.

"Derecha tradicional" = su abuelo estaba en el wehrmacht

Phase transitions, bifurcations, thermal vents, exoplanets and their interactive maps, as well as pointers to a whole special issue just published in @royalsocietypublishing.org about origin of life. With Spotify and Apple podcasts as usual. What do you need more? CC: @ricardsole.bsky.social

Brasó-Vives et al. publish a new Perspective in GBE, highlighting underexplored dimensions of genomic variation that contribute to phenotypic diversity beyond the DNA sequence, contributing to our understanding of genome evolution. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf204 #genome #evolution

"Here, we review how population size and its dynamics shape speciation mechanisms and the generation of biodiversity across evolutionary scales."

btw these people have a podcast that is recorded currently. The Origins Podcast which is part of the Origins Project which received 2 million dollars (at least) of seed money from Epstein. So yeah.

For brave biologists/ecologists with a penchant for venturing beyond the boundaries of the intellectual comfort zone, I strongly recommend Jan Baedke's recent monograph "The Organism" in the series "Elements in the Philosophy of Biology". An absolute conceptual treat. doi.org/10.1017/9781...

Please join us for this exciting new conference on the emergence, function and evolution of biological collectives - unpacking the wonderful world of self-organization: www.embl.org/about/info/c...

An adventurer, a biologist, a maverick and philosopher. 100 years after Rupert Riedl's birth, biologists at #univie are reflecting on how his systems theory of life contributed to evolutionary biology. 🎂⤵️

10 years ago : blockchain is the future of banking. if you don't understand you're an idiot 5 years ago : you're a dumbass if you dont get in on the ground level of the nft-do-not-copy.jpg Now : you don't understand the stock market. NVIDIA can only grow until it's the only company in the world

New: The current “AI race” media frenzy, whether framed as productivity revolution, Chinese competition, or AGI salvation, is either largely myth-making or missing the most crucial point. So let me challenge that frenzy with a different story. 1/ open.substack.com/pub/protagon...