These killer flies zigzag in flight to escape their cannibal mates. Learn more: https://scim.ag/4xdEB9K

Very cool pair of papers demonstrating little link between amount of additive genetic variation and amount of nucleotide variation within species: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Levels of additive genetic variation vary substantially between species

Adaptive potential determines how populations respond to environmental change. This study compiles evolvability estimates from over 170 multicellular species, revealing substantial variation across th...

journals.plos.org

New paper out in Phil. Trans. B! We set out to understand how seasonal migration evolves by combining a common garden experiment and scATAC-seq of the hypothalamus in ancestral migratory and derived resident populations of the Eurasian blackcap. 1/n

Differential epigenetic regulation underlies evolutionary transition of seasonal migration

Abstract. Seasonal migratory animals can evolve residency through adaptation. The threshold model of quantitative genetics predicts that residency evolves

doi.org

For those of you at #ISBE2026, I will be presenting some of my work tomorrow (Friday the 24th) at 13:15, in the Auditorium Agnelli. Would love to see you there!

Hi #plantbio2026! My amazing student Angelique will give a fascinating talk on Tu. be sure to check it out!🌱🪴 She’s also flying solo at the conference so please say hi to her! 🤗 We are very grateful for the @aspbofficial.bsky.social Recognition Award that provided a full ride for her attendance! 💚

Amazing to see @kli.ac.at friend, @libertysevers.bsky.social, presenting in Tübingen about her fascinating work on slime molds! 🎉🎉

How do aerodynamic constraints and evolutionary pressures shape the diversity of flight in true flies? By integrating wing shape, wing motion and #aerodynamics, this study uncovers similarities as well as striking divergences in flight performance. 🧪 #AcademicSky #evolution plos.io/4b4LMbJ

1. A bit of evolutionary biology. I'm really intrigued by a new perspective piece from Steve Frank that explores connections between how natural selection creates systems that generalize and recent work in machine learning about the surprising capabilities of massively overparameterized systems.

Generalization as the great leap in evolvability: insights from machine learning

Abstract. Natural selection encodes learned information in the genome. Learned solutions may be tuned specifically to past challenges, failing in altered e

academic.oup.com

I am excited to tell you about our new study led by Tyler Audet and in collaboration with Stefan Lüpold's group. Below you see two species. On the right is Drosophila melanogaster. On the left, Drosophila prolongata. Notice the highly exaggerated legs of the males in D.p! doi.org/10.1093/evol...

#SMBE2026 I will talk about **evolutionary roles of non-genetic variation**. If you care about expression noise, developmental instability, microenv. variance, or selection experiments (or if you don't believe in genetic determinism), come join me in S20 "mapping fitness landscapes" (17:30, Pjerrot)

Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution@official-smbe.bsky.social · 2mo ago

#SMBE2026 S20: Mapping fitness landscapes with mechanistic models, machine learning and experiments 🗓️ Wed Jul 1, 3:50pm 🔗 smbe2026.org/programme

Fun paper illustrating how serendipity can lead to new discoveries. Jay Hirsh et al sought to map a mutation that modifies a behavioral trait in Drosophila, using a modernized form of mapping by recombination. In Drosophila's early days mapping of X chromosome visible markers was very precise 1/n

1/3 🚨New Perspective🚨 (@genetics-gsa.bsky.social) "When evolvability meets constraint: reflections on empirical fitness landscapes after Weinreich et al. (2006)" 20 years after a seminal study, I discuss the forces that both constrain evolution + make it possible academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

When evolvability meets constraint: reflections on empirical fitness landscapes after Weinreich et al. (2006)

Abstract. In 2006, a manuscript appeared with a provocative title: “Darwinian evolution can follow only very few mutational paths to fitter proteins.” Twen

academic.oup.com

Paper alert!🧬🐦💻 Divergent selection is the textbook explanation for narrow inversion clines. Our blackcap inversion cline doesn't fit: it is wide, and the inversion is always the rarer arrangement. We show that negative frequency-dependent selection shifting between populations underlies this!

Shifting Balancing Selection Underlies an Inversion Cline in Eurasian Blackcap

We investigated what factor contributes to a cline of a chromosomal inversion of the Eurasian blackcap, which differs from typical inversion clines maintained by divergent selection. Using a simulati...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

New paper out @pnas.org: We explore why fly wings evolve along "lines of least resistance" and reconcile the "rate paradox" between population variation and divergence. Check out how a low dimensional model of selection on size explains it all: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

🔥 Published today, and just in time for summer conferences, here are your guidelines for presenting badly www.nature.com/articles/s41... rdcu.be/fqa92

Tomorrow Thursday May 21st! Come and enjoy!

I’m looking forward to presenting my project on the puzzles of fly wings evolution at the Evol-Mut-Circle seminar Tuesday, May 19th at 11:00 AM EDT/3:00 PM UTC molevol.org/2025/12/08/e... DM me for the Zoom info, or reach out to Arlin Stoltzfus (evolarlin@gmail.com) to sign up for the email list!

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 6mo ago

A pleiotropic hitchhiking model recapitulates alignments between fly wing divergence and variation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.19.706930v1

Barbara Fischer (KLI Group Leader for Evolutionary Biology) was interviewed for an episode of a podcast by Springer Medicine Vienna with the title “Evolutionärer Pfusch? Die enge Passform bei der menschlichen Geburt” 🎧 Listen (in German): springermedizin-hoergang.podigee.io/316-evolutio...

Evolutionärer Pfusch? Die enge Passform bei der menschlichen Geburt

In dieser Podcast-Episode erklärt die Evolutionsbiologin Dr. Barbara Fischer die spannende Herausforderung der menschlichen Geburt: das Verhältnis von Kopfgröße Neugeborener zum mütterlichen Becken. O...

springermedizin-hoergang.podigee.io

💐 Congratulations to our Postdoctoral Fellow Marcelo Domingos de Santis on his new publication! 👏👏👏 "On 'Hennig’s Dilemma' and the Post-Systematics Wars" www.kli.ac.at/en/the_kli/n...

🚨 Why can’t mammals regenerate limbs like frog tadpoles or salamanders? In our new paper in @science.org , we show that species-specific oxygen sensing acts as a gatekeeper for initiating limb regeneration 🐭🐸 🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #EvoDevo

Wrote a news article about our recent study on thermal limits🌡️

The Conversation Africa@africa.theconversation.com · 4mo ago

Rising temperatures could quietly wipe out tropical insects—with ripple effects far beyond the bugs themselves. theconversation.com/insects-in-t... #Climate

Excited to share my first preprint from my PhD w/ @justinmcrocker.bsky.social. We show that cell type-specific regulatory dominance promotes robustness and evolutionary innovation through interallelic transcriptional hubs, potentially expanding the mutational paths available to diploids. (1/18)

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Interallelic cis-regulatory dominance promotes robustness and evolutionary innovation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.17.712157v1

What if our assumption that regulatory networks are highly conserved is wrong? And every accession, individual, subspecies, etc does things very differently using the same tools?

Take from it what you want, but it's remarkable that the Greens in Baden-Württemberg, who just won the federal state elections, are considered, at the same time, 1. the most conservative Greens in the country 2. the most consequential on environmental policies 3. the most successful on the ballot

Nancy Knowlton@nancyknowlton.bsky.social · 5mo ago

plastics are a hard problem so successes are welcome. My news to me good news for Mar 11 #EarthOptimism #OceanOptimism reasonstobecheerful.world/tubingen-ger...

The Stochastic Pacemaker: Cumulative Behavioral Noise Drives Morphological Plasticity in Pea Aphids https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.09.709630v1

New Perspective form Rory Maizels & me: "Gene regulatory networks: from correlative models to causal explanations" Gene regulatory networks are supposed to give us mechanistic explanations of development, so why are we drowning in 'hairballs' of statistical correlations? rdcu.be/e7zx7

Gene regulatory networks: from correlative models to causal explanations

Nature Reviews Genetics - In this Perspective, Maizels and Briscoe discuss the limitations of current models of gene regulatory networks and outline solutions to harness data abundance without...

rdcu.be

Applications now open for the Graduate Research Excellence Grants! These provide evolutionary biology research funds for early and advanced Master’s and PhD students. Proposals due May 18. www.evolutionsociety.org/content/soci...

Society for the Study of Evolution

Site description

evolutionsociety.org

🌟📣We are happy to announce another new publication on the obstetrical dilemma, co-authored by Barbara Fischer and Philipp Mitteroecker: "Over the edge: Empirical evidence for the cliff-edge model of obstetric selection" www.kli.ac.at/en/the_kli/n... Congratulations to the authors! 👏👏👏

Martí-Gómez et al. developed gpmap-tools, integrating models for inference, phenotypic imputation, and error estimation from multiplex assays of variant effect data or natural sequences in the presence of genetic interactions. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag023 #evobio #molbio #compbio

Inference and Visualization of Complex Genotype–Phenotype Maps

Abstract. Understanding how biological sequences give rise to observable traits, that is, how genotype maps to phenotype, is a central goal in biology. Yet

doi.org

Postdoc @eawag.bsky.social apply.refline.ch/673277/1341/...