1/12 🚨🚨 I am so excited to share chapter 1 of my dissertation, now preprinted here: biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We ask if are their fundamental, shared mechanisms that stop us from inferring the relationship of species and their timescale of divergence #biology #science

Please join me next Tuesday at 3:15 PM (Room 21) at #Evol2026 to learn about the complex history of complex trait loss, extinction, and evolutionary radiation in extreme ecosystems in a clade of thousands of fishes!

1/10 🚨🚨🚨 New paper on dinosaur evolution! Chris Griffin and I look at why we can't seem to figure out how the major groups are related! It might be a hint about how dinosaurs came to be! Photo: Anchisaurus @yalepeabodymuseum royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Glad to see our work @tjnear.bsky.social being covered in Nature! I look forward to both preprints being published, and I want to add that it appears genomes AGREE with morphology, and REFUTE the mtDNA-based hypothesis that was controversial when it first appeared! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

No such thing as a shark? Genomes shake up ocean predator’s family tree

Sharks might not be a natural biological group, with most species potentially closer kin to rays than to an oddball group of sharks.

nature.com

40-44 (GOP combined) in MTG's seat. Republicans are COOKED in November god DAYUM

1/10 ⏰⏰ New stuff from me & @tjnear.bsky.social ! We show that sharks themselves might not be a natural group ... it depends on what spots in the genome you analyze! Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/16 🚨🚨 New paper!! I am thrilled to share our study that uses fossils, genomes, and a bit of geology to investigate how many times cavefishes evolved, and how they can help us figure out the ages of caves themselves! Link: academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

Checking genbank for an obscure clade

Pulling up to #Evol2025

Anytime a fish has stripes or spots, they all have to be painted on at the end, after I’ve nearly completed the painting. It always makes me nervous! This is Percina caprodes, the common logperch. #teamfish #sciart

A large proportion of these canceled awards are focused on broadening the participation of underrepresented groups in STEM, which NSF was mandated to do by Congress. At what point does Congress plan to act to restore the balance of power?

Dr. Diaz Eaton up to Good Trouble@mathprofcarrie.bsky.social · last yr.

NSF just released a public list of terminated awards. It’s linked on the bottom of the FAQ page at: nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities#termination-list

Connecticut has long been a cash cow for the federal government. But now the federal administration is threatening to withhold funds we are legally entitled to - in defiance of court orders. If they do, we should return the favor and stop collecting money for the feds.

Awesome new paper from @prosanta.bsky.social, Melanie Stiassny, et al! academic.oup.com/sysbio/advance-article/doi/10.1093/sysbio/syaf032/8129685?login=true

Phylogenomic and Population Genomic Analyses of Ultraconserved Elements Reveal Deep Coalescence and Introgression Shaped Diversification Patterns in Lamprologine Cichlids of the Congo River

Abstract. Understanding the drivers of diversification is a central goal in evolutionary biology but can be challenging when lineages radiate quickly and/o

academic.oup.com

Immigration policy in my two countries, 2025: 🇺🇸No longer give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, only white people who didn’t like that apartheid ended 🇬🇧Stay away all of you squalid strangers

Even the Trojans weren't stupid enough to get IN the horse.

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · last yr.

nothing to worry about here at all

Diary of Anne Frank, January 13, 1943 These words, though written during one of the darkest chapters in human history, echo eerily in our modern world. 💔A timeless reminder of the consequences of indifference and the necessity of standing up for humanity.

So weird that they're just letting everything fall into the sea - the NHS, universities, people with disabilities, civil rights. They've locked in their own failure. There absolutely was coming back from 2010, 16, 19. Then they got elected and nailed shut their own coffin from the inside.

I am outraged by the unjust arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka earlier this afternoon outside of Delaney Hall in Newark. I am calling for his immediate release by federal law enforcement.

85% of political scientists say antisemitism not a major problem in their campus - in line with the results of our MESB survey - and over 90% see pressure on universities over it as a threat to democracy abuaardvarkghost.ghost.io/antisemitism...

Antisemitism crisis on campus? 85% of political scientists say no.

Plus, a rich new weekly roundup of scholarship on the Middle East. As regular readers know, Shibley Telhami and I have for several years been tracking the views of Middle East academic experts about ...

abuaardvarkghost.ghost.io

These #fish paintings were created for a research paper led by @chasedbrownstein.bsky.social and published this week in Science Advances. It's always a pleasure painting fish for Chase and his co-authors! Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Phylogenomics establishes an Early Miocene reconstruction of reef vertebrate diversity

Phylogenomics reveals a younger-than-expected age of reef fish diversification.

science.org

This is how I feel, too. I think a large part of how we got here is that test-based K-12 education is so deeply flawed. There is almost no reading or writing compared to when I was in school. Then, when students hit college they've never practiced those skills, so of course turn to LLM's.

Bethany Brookshire@beebrookshire.bsky.social · last yr.

This is just so incredibly sad to me. It's not just that people think they are clever for hacking their way through school without work. It's that they don't WANT to learn new things. They don't WANT to improve skills. They don't WANT EDUCATION. nymag.com/intelligence...

RESULT: Voters in Mansfield, Texas, have ousted three conservative members of their local school board tonight. This is a school board that has been at the frontlines of book-banning in Texas, as you can see here: fortworthreport.org/2025/03/19/m...

Coelacanths illuminate deep-time evolution of cranial musculature in jawed vertebrates. By Aléssio Datovo & G. David Johnson Sci. Adv. 2025 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Coelacanths illuminate deep-time evolution of cranial musculature in jawed vertebrates

Revised coelacanth cranial muscle anatomy reveals previously unknown evolutionary innovations and redefines gnathostome muscle evolution.

science.org

This is a good time to talk about what an absolute beast the measles virus is. Remember the R0 score during the pandemic and how we tried to push it below 1 in order to curb the spread? Measle’s R0 goes up to 18. You can catch measles by stepping into an empty elevator. That vaccine was a godsend.

The New York Times@nytimes.com · last yr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will direct federal health agencies to explore potential new treatments for measles as the U.S. faces its largest outbreak in 25 years. Experts fear the decision could have grave consequences, as studies show the existing vaccine is 97% effective in preventing infection.

Just to be clear, this is a violation of the fundamental ethical principle in clinical trial design called "equipoise." Equipoise means that no-one is exposed to excess risk just to test the therapy. That's specifically *why* vaccine trials don't use placebo arms. Ethical violation as POLICY.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr will require all new vaccines to undergo placebo testing, WaPo reports

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr intends to shift the way vaccines are tested, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing a spokesperson from the HHS.

reuters.com

Freezing *ALL* science funding? What a way to make a country great. This seems a precursor to something bigger. Total elimination of the NSF and public funding of science? Like with international aid (USAID)? 🚨Speak up, we can't allow this to happen.

Dan Garisto@dangaristo.bsky.social · last yr.

BREAKING: NSF has frozen all grant funding, as of yesterday. It's unclear when they will resume funding awards, or why the pause has been put in place. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

i will say again that given the trajectory of the white house so far, strident opposition a la 2017 would have absolutely been the most prudent and effective decision and the absence of that opposition in the first two months made things demonstrably worse.

Something uplifting: yes, I had an NSF grant cancelled yesterday, but I spent today at (via zoom) a @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop where a dozen brilliant colleagues discussed how biological systems acquire, process, store, and transmit information in order to deal with environmental uncertainty.

Meeting Synopsis

Recent years have seen significant theoretical and methodological advances in understanding how environmental information is encoded within genetic, sensory, and immune systems. However, much of this ...

santafe.edu