Excited to announce my first resource publication “Correcting for Bias in Estimates of Watterson’s theta and Tajima's D From Missing Data in Next-Generation Sequencing” out now in Molecular Ecology Resources! Article linked below in short thread 👇

Order of the Sinking Star, the massive puzzle adventure from @Thekla_Inc and @Jonathan_Blow (director of Braid & The Witness) is OUT NOW on Steam, Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation 5! 🧩 Get it today: orderofthesinkingstar.com

Claus Wilke has a good rebuttal article to Noah’s doomer take: open.substack.com/pub/clausw…

Prizes, citations, etc. may have some use in sorting when there’s so much research and they obviously influence who gets jobs but it’s still unfortunate how much some people care about them. The researchers laypeople can name aren’t known for prizes. The work should come first.

This would be a funny case of pejoration if it became commonplace. Made me think about the fact that genetics was originally the "study of heredity", so one could think "hereditarian" and "geneticist" have the same meaning but to my knowledge they never have.

This is false, scientific consensus refers to majority judgment. E.g. all known bacterial cells have DNA (evidence). The consensus is this is due to common ancestry of all bacteria (judgment). Good sci comm explains the two instead of making assertions as this guy regularly does.

"We all need to attend less to what angers us and far more to our loves. That means not watching CNN or MSNBC or Fox News every night nor scrolling our favorite hate-feeds dunking on those idiots on the other side" - Mering, No Contact, p. 206

This is well-intentioned but wrong. The vast majority of academics in my field have no social media presence, express zero political views at work, and spend their day trying to understand and cure disease and train others to do so. Their apolitical truth-seeking is not, however, seen as a counter-balance to politicization of academia. It is simply not seen *at all*. The public has no idea who they are, and forms their opinion about academia based on random social media scandals, congressional hearings, or interviews that go viral (usually because the academic being interviews was particularly clueless). The upshot is that it does not take much to change individual perceptions. U Chicago and MIT have shown that people will form strong opinions about which schools are truth seeking based on a handful of symbolic gestures by the president, described in the right language. Better media training and thinking more strategically about visible academic positions would go a long way.

I have a biological update here 😄

Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), Fisher's Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930), and Huxley's Modern Synthesis (1942) all do this (screenshots in order). I think Darwin always did it (Gutenberg Project) but Fisher was pushed to for GTNS by a colleague.

These companies often document clearly what they mean by their population labels (e.g. spatial and temporal boundaries). “Independent” is relative as all people share a common ancestor and therefore are never totally independent. Also, PCA is sometimes used to make these labels

postdoc alert 🚨! NIH-funded postdoc in my lab to work on Ancestral Recombination Graphs in space. Please spread the word widely, and please reach out if you're interested! (2-3yr position, start date flexible, pay/benefits good!). details:careers.umich.edu/job_detail…

Perhaps a good start on reading would be understanding that “Darwinism” is a vague term comprising multiple ideas (e.g. 5 listed here): darwin200.christs.cam.ac.uk/… and only one (common descent) presents notable problems in the interpretation of Scripture

Yep and many other high-altitude (even Tibetan specifically) mammals also have mutations in this and EGLN1, such as macaques academic.oup.com/evlett/arti…

Acknowledgments confirmed my suspicion. Amazing song.

A little late but how about when Tomoko Ohta DESTROYED adaptationism with FACTS and LOGIC in 1973

I've imaginatively wondered if similar tests could apply to evolutionary DNA/protein LMs. For example, could a model trained on coronavirus genomes/proteomes prior to 2019 predict SARS-CoV-2? @eryney_ok @yun_s_song @pdhsu @ebetica

Our work unifies two historically disparate fields: phylogenetics & protein language models (pLMs). Classical phylogenetic models provide a rigorous treatment of time and quantify the effects of mutation & selection, but assume site independence & require aligned sequences. 2/n

Which AI pro subscription should I get for advanced technical/scientific research?

I've been trying to put this together and its proving trickier than I thought... lots of publications on these and others, some redundancy, different terms, some qualitative differences...