I am no constitutional scholar, but I can't help but feel that "the President gets to dictate what every university can teach and what every television station should broadcast" is closer to what the founding fathers were worried about when it comes to free speech than trigger warnings on syllabi.

The Fourth Of July, Rethought Can Any Nation So Conceived Long Endure?

www.popehat.com/p/the-fourth...

One of the marvelous things about the United States - something it shares with Rome, I might add - is that American identity is fundamentally legal in definition and almost totally binary.

Regardless of my politics or his, Zohran Mamdani, naturalized in 2018, is every bit as much an American as me.

Using ancestral state reconstructions to generate hypotheses about primate evolution and testing them against the fossil record. urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=htt...
This has been in the works a long time and I'm really pleased to finally have it out! Thanks to all who contributed.

Musing: one side effect of constantly defending (eg an institution or a political party) against disinformation and bad faith criticism is that you can become habituated to ignoring all criticism (as bad faith), which makes it difficult to learn, adapt, grow, and address your actual weaknesses.

Population wide supplementation as a public health intervention is not new and has yielded incredible health benefits through the years don't let the misguided attacks on fluoridated water fool you.
Why do you think iodide is added to table salt? Since we are intent of forgetting history here is a 🧵

NYT headline: “Kennedy Advises New Parents to ‘Do Your Own Research’ on Vaccines” Subheader: “In an interview with Dr. Phil, the health secretary offered false information about vaccine oversight and revealed a lack of basic understanding of new drug approvals.”

“And I’m like, what do you mean, you ‘do your own research’? You running a double-blind study in your living room, dawg?”
- A guy walking ahead of me with his friends on a NYC sidewalk in 2021, also my favorite overheard dialogue of the entire pandemic

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

TLDR: the administration wants to remove habitat loss from the definition of "harm" for endangered species, which will effectively gut the ESA.

I just commented. If you're in any way interested in ecology, nature, and the protection of endangered species, you should, too. Free daily action!

Integration, Modularity, and Homoplasy in the Forelimbs of Apes - Evolutionary Biology Covariation constrains and biases the evolution of morphological traits, leading to similar phenotypes appearing repeatedly in certain clades. Here, I test whether this phenomenon can explain the evol...

New paper on evolvability in apes, and whether it can help us make sense of the messy evolution of locomotion in that group. My results suggest a feedback effect between integration and the response to selection. We need more research on how integration evolves! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

We do know it struggles on Windows computers without administrator privileges, but other than that while it's bare bones it's working as intended as far as we know. So curious to send it out into the world and see what people think!

I can't really say it's under 'active development', but if you find bugs or have feature suggestions, let me know and we'll add them to our list!

GitHub - spearw/phylo-match Contribute to spearw/phylo-match development by creating an account on GitHub.

A tool to quickly match taxon names between a dataset and a phylogenetic tree, built for folks doing phylogenetic comparative analyses: github.com/spearw/phylo...

But operationalizing this for species is a headache, to put it mildly. And it is borderline impossible to think about species in the fossil record as anything other than fuzzy sets of morphological variation (i.e., to give them morphological definitions).

This approach is easier to take with higher taxa when we can mostly assume there is no gene flow between groups. In this case we can simply 'define' a it as 'the last common ancestor of X and Y and all of its descendants' or 'all species more closely related to A than to B'.

If taxa are 'defined' by morphology, etc., then individuals can cease to be a member of that taxon, which is nonsense from a phylogenetic perspective. Snakes are still tetrapods, even if they no longer have four limbs, because four limbs is a tool to diagnose tetrapods, not the way we define them.

Definition and Diagnosis in the Phylogenetic System on JSTOR Timothy Rowe, Definition and Diagnosis in the Phylogenetic System, Systematic Zoology, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 208-211

It's worth mentioning the distinction between definition and diagnosis of biological taxa: Taxa must be *defined* by their ancestry, but can be diagnosed (i.e., recognized) with specific characteristics and morphology. See Rowe (1987) for a concise review: www.jstor.org/stable/24132...

I didn't believe it even for them, but it seems true (data from ustr.gov/countries-re...):
(143.5-438.9)/438.9 = -0.673 (China, 67%)
(370.2-605.8)/605.8 = -0.389 (EU, 39%)
(13.1-136.6)/136.6 = -0.904 (Vietnam, 90%)
(42.3-116.3)/116.3 = -0.636 (Taiwan, 64%)
(79.7-148.2)/148.2 = -0.462 (Japan, 46%)

This is how I tend to think about our history, to be honest: the story of American greatness is a story of overcoming the flaws in our republic.

And there are periods of retreat and backlash, but in the past, we've always renewed the quest for that more perfect union.

If you let them do this to immigrants - again *legal* immigrants - you will have *no way* to know when they start doing it to citizens.

They'll feed you the exact same lies and refuse to disclose the identities of the people disappeared (as they're doing now).

Letter to leadership of universities being targeted, to run in Chronicle tomorrow. Academic friends, pls sign if you are a US citizen and tenured (ie it’s safe for you to do so)
“We Must Leverage the Strength of Our Institutions and Stand Together”
Text in replies

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Long letter from NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, available here: https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/Letter-to-the-Community.pdf

🧪 The NSF director is lying to you.

Let’s fact check 7 claims from yesterday’s letter to the community, while pointing out 3 critical omissions. 🧵

As JFK famously said, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. Unless they have the gall to say facts to my face. Then f*** 'em."

Congrats to Eva on her first paper! Thanks for involving me in this research. The big takeaway is that, unfortunately, it is a lot harder to predict lower back length from pelvis measurements than we'd like it to be, complicating interpretations of fossils: authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Obviously one analysis of one element is not definitive. But I'm intrigued and excited by the potential implications, and happy to see the paper come out and hope folks enjoy it! Huge thanks to my co-authors as well as our editors and reviewers.

2) Consensus on the early stem ape Ekembo is that it was highly arboreal. The fact that its vertebra resembles highly terrestrial monkeys is therefore surprising, possibly supporting a recent controversial argument that early apes were more terrestrial than previously thought.

1) The main locomotor behavior shared between spider monkeys and gibbons is brachiation, but the hypothesis that Miocene apes were brachiators is very much out of favor. So Pierolapithecus and Morotopithecus falling in the same shape space that brachiators converge upon is potentially surprising.

For those not terminally in tune with debates about Miocene ape locomotion, our results are potentially surprising/controvertial for two reasons.

We also identify a previously unpublished qualitative trait--a pars interarticularis pillar--that seems to be a shared derived trait of apes, including the very early diverging Ekembo.

A three-dimensional geometric morphometric study of Miocene ape lumbar vertebrae, with implications for hominoid locomotor evolution Miocene apes represent snapshots in time of key transitions in hominoid evolution. While all extant apes are adapted to orthograde posture and suspens…

New paper doing a GM analysis of lumbar vertebrae in Miocene apes. Short version: Morotopithecus and Pierolapithecus fall into the overlap between gibbons and spider monkeys, while Ekembo falls with terrestrial papionins like baboons and short tailed macaques. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...