Dr. Brendan Anderson

The US could see a 30-40% decline in new international student enrollment, resulting in nearly $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer American jobs. https://www.nafsa.org/fall-2025-international-student-enrollment-outlook-and-economic-impact

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

Headline from Harvard Crimson: "Harvard President Garber Tells Faculty He Is Not Considering a $500 Million Deal With Trump."

Text of story: Harvard prez Garber says report of a deal "was apparently leaked to the press by White House officials." NYT ran with it as a story.

Important details from this story:

1) Yet another news-break by student journalists (this time @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social) www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

2) Harvard saying "see you in court," not "let's make a deal."

3) Per Garber, WH/MAGA leaked news of a "deal." NYT then ran with it.

This is what is happening right now.

Day98 of photoshopping @lastweektonight.com's John Oliver with fossils in the hopes that he helps save the Paleontological Research Institution

Of course we would still love you if you were a worm(-snail) John, why not help us out?
Fossil is Vermicularia recta, comedian is H. sapiens. #SavePRI ⚒️🦑

Photoshopping @lastweektonight.com's John Oliver onto fossils until the Paleontological Research Institution secures their funding!

Modern specimen of the sclearactinian coral Eusmilia fastigata from Sand Key Reef, Florida Keys, FL (PRI 76767). Comedian is H. sapiens. Not to scale.

🚨Ring quietly lets police access your footage without a warrant, claiming “emergency” exceptions—no judge, no consent, just corporate discretion. And with a new Axon deal, those requests now happen behind closed doors. Your front door cam? It’s watching for them too.
www.theverge.com/news/709836/...

Day 97 of photoshopping @lastweektonight.com's John Oliver with fossils in the hopes that he helps save the Paleontological Research Institution

John (H. sapiens), thanking the stromatolite Collenia versiformis from the (Cornell botanical col) for all algae have done oxygenating the air #SavePRI

Keep sciencing. We are living through a time when looking at a rock and wondering how old it is qualifies as an act of resistance.

sketch of an opabinia on a light green background, a cambrian invertebrate with a long snout with a chompy mouth at the end, 5 bulbous eyes on stalks, a worm like body with two flippers on each sides, and some spikes on the tail.

Day 2 of #AugArthroAwe - Opabinia

not even the weirdest Cambrian critter

#invertebrates #SciArt

I'm a visiting Professor in the SUNY system and I study evolutionary responses to marine environmental change, including both large patterns of extinction/body-size/niche evolution and, in individual/species lineages, how heterochronic mechanisms generate new forms using isotopic sclerochronology

Introduction | Marvelous Mollusks — Museum of the Earth

Exhibit is open now in Ithaca, NY; the online exhibit is still being updated but is live: www.museumoftheearth.org/marvelous-mo...

Day 96 of photoshopping @lastweektonight.com's John Oliver with fossils in the hopes that he helps save the Paleontological Research Institution

Today John is visiting the museum's Marvelous Mollusks exhibit. With over 400 fossil and modern specimens who knows what (or whom) you might find #savePRI

No AP News alerts, no Union-Tribune alerts or articles, no emails from UC either. I work at a UC and I would not know that UCLA lost all grant funding last night if I wasn't on Bluesky or in union group chats.

Self-preserving silence and general complacency are becoming more common.

Thanks to @nilese.bsky.social and Gould for getting all this fun started and @bruceslieberman.bsky.social, @pegyaco.bsky.social, Donald Prothero, Linda Ivany, & Patricia Kelley for organizing the special session/special issue

Photoshopping @lastweektonight.com's John Oliver onto fossils until the Paleontological Research Institution secures their funding!

John(s) at the PRI’s John W. Wells Rare Book library!

Humans & Mollusks — Museum of the Earth

Bivalves have been important parts of human food and culture for as long as there have been humans! (although I am partial to snails @dantheclamman.blog and @spissatella.bsky.social would be happy to dish out more bivalve love)
www.museumoftheearth.org/marvelous-mo...

Nassarius fossatus public domain. photo by Steve Lonhart (SIMoN / MBNMS) - http://www.mbnms-simon.org/other/photos/photo_info.php?photoID=2847; photo credit requested

it's a hermit-John :)

The shell is a fossil Scalanassa snail, a type of Nassariid snails (mudwhelk/dogwhelk). some hermit crabs like them for after-market use

and we should not limit our understanding of the foundation of biology to a single, arbitrary, and ultimately ephemeral point in time.

The perspective gained from paleobiology
on the mode of morphospecies origins and how trends in
disparity or ecospace occupation arise cannot be inferred by extrapolating from neontological data alone without scrutiny of the fossil record,

Alternative ways clades may have explored morphospace through deep time. A, Phyletic gradualism. Movement through morphospace primarily takes place anagenetically, and the overall trend is a result of a directional trend present in the majority of each constituent lineage’s evolutionary history. B, A clade where the clade is in overall stasis because species approximate stasis and speciation is both non-directional and not associated with substantial displacement in morphospace. C, A clade that is exhibiting increased variance, but no net change in morphology, where most evolution takes place through phyletic gradualism. D–G, Cases showing punctuated equilibria (PE). Note that while the lineage histories are shown as solid lines these represent lineages exhibiting minor fluctuations about a mean morphology or non-directional change, and in these depictions, speciation events take place over timescales below the resolution of analysis. D, A clade exhibiting increased variance, but overall stasis in average position in morphospace, where PE is the pattern of morphological evolution. Each lineage may exhibit fluctuations through time under close examination, but no net change is observed. Note that cladogenesis is the dominant mode of species origination, as determined by persistence of ancestor. E, A clade-level morphological trend generated under PE due to a bias in the direction of species origination only. Where cladogenesis occurs in this case, it is more likely that the descendant lineage occupies a position in morphospace to the right of the ancestor rather than to the left. F, A clade-level trend generated under PE due to increased rates of extinction (shorter species durations) in one portion of the tree. G, A clade-level trend generated by increased rates of speciation in one portion of the tree. Species on the right side of the line vs. the left would result in increasing proportions of species having the state on the right side of the line over time

Explanations of long-term evolutionary trends are incomplete without reference to the possibility of hierarchical processes such as sorting operating at higher levels of the taxonomic hierarchy and that a paleontological perspective is essential for a full understanding of how evolution operates.

We conclude that any attempts at understanding how diversity became unevenly distributed across the tree of life, or what resulted in the morphological trends observed in the fossil record must therefore grapple with the fossil record, PE, and hierarchical expansions of evolutionary theory

PE is not dead. Core aspects of the theory remain valid 50 years after Eldredge and Gould’s paper including:
1 most species do not exhibit directional change in morphology through their evolutionary histories &
2 the mode by which most morphospecies originate is cladogenesis rather than anagenesis

Taxa with better fossil records also consistently had higher rates of cladogenesis (marine vs. terrestrial, hard parts vs soft bodied)

When species from the same time interval were considered as co-existing (a still conservative but plain-reading approach), ~80% of morphospecies were found to have arisen by cladogenesis

In examining 3 years worth of published species-level phylogenies with stratigraphic information from Paleobiology, Journal of Paleontology, and the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology and a conservative approach we found the majority of species had to have arisen via cladogenesis, consistent w/ PE

We can test for mode using "persistence of ancestor" the concept that if 2 morphospecies coexist at the same time one of them cannot have turned in to the other without lineage splitting (not always an ancestor, sometimes a sister, but this is a preexisting term)

A schematic of different patterns (“models”) of tempo and mode that may be observed in the fossil record. A, Phyletic gradualism: A lineage moves through morphospace, and intermediate forms (gray) are difficult to assign to either named morphospecies at the beginning or end of the lineage’s history. B, Punctuated anagenesis: Morphospecies 1 is in stasis, then moves rapidly through morphospace to a new position that is easily distinguished and is named morphospecies 2, but no cladogenesis took place. C, Punctuated equilibria (PE): Little morphological change takes place at cladogenesis. Species 2 rapidly appears (at the level of resolution of the analysis depicted, itmay appear to arise in a single time step), co-occurs in time with its ancestor, and both species do not exhibit substantial net change through their respective histories. Cladogenesis is not associated with a categorically larger step in morphospace than between time steps for either lineage during its period of stasis. D, PE: The cladogenetic event was also associated with unusually large morphological change. E, A case where cladogenesis occurs, but most morphological change in each lineage occurs independent of speciation. In this example, each species (color-coded) is distinguished by a feature other than the feature represented on the morphology axis. While species 2 may not have undergone significant displacement in morphospace through its history, species 1, 3, and 4 and the clade as a whole have consistently moved through morphospace independently of cladogenetic events. This is an example where PE is not the model that best fits the pattern observed, because stasis is not the dominant pattern of morphological evolution for each species. Instead, each species is displaced in morphospace more along its own evolutionary history than any movement in morphospace at the time of speciation.

A variety of evolutionary possibilities for the relationship between morphological evolution and speciation can and do exist, including gradual change, punctuated anagenesis (periods of rapid change), PE (stasis with small or large change at branching) or change not timed with speciation

We clarify that evolutionary mode - cladogenesis vs. anagenesis in Simpson's definition - is an important part of the theory of PE that has been less studied and widely misunderstood due to broad usage of the phrase "tempo and mode" to mean things Simpson, Eldredge, and Gould did not.

2 panel figure with an illustration of a hypothetical fossil record where most morphospecies arose via anagenesis. A, The evolutionary history of a group as recorded in the rock record. For simplicity each species (labeled A–G) is represented as in stasis and occupying a distinct portion of morphospace. Thin black lines represent genetic connections unrecorded at the level of resolution of the fossil record. Inferred evolutionary mode is noted at the origin of each morphospecies. In this case four to five species arose by anagenesis and one to two species arose via cladogenesis. B, A cladogram corresponding to the history recorded in A. Note that if C evolved into both B and D, then the position of C in the polytomy is not a result of failure of resolution, but due to C actually being equally related to clade A–B and clade D–E–F.

PE is not only a model of evolution including stasis but also a model that states that most species should arise via cladogenesis (speciation) not anagenesis (changes without branching).
The idea that most species arise by speciation is not actually tautological when deep time is considered!