Will Booker

me with a blue funnel like hat, with a stick out the top holding a red ball on a string. I have on a red capelet and am carrying a letter with calligraphy and a seal in my crooked beak. I've got a badge with a symbol on it

the guy from the original painting that's got on my outfit except it's wearing tan turnshoes

it's me, unnamed critter from bosch's triptych of the temptation of anthony!

good lord what was the prompt engineering to get this outcome?

I buy this argument and you all know I'm very critical about studies about the effect of using AI but this one makes a ton of sense. The design of total ease and agreeableness has always been bad for our rigorous thinking. It is bad when it comes from people too!

Simple scaling laws control the genetic architectures of human complex traits Genome-wide association studies have revealed that the genetic architectures of complex traits vary widely. This study shows that differences in architectures of highly polygenic traits arise mainly f...

Why do complex traits differ in their genetic architecture?
In our new PLOS Biology paper, we will try to convince you that two simple scaling laws drive differences in the number, effect sizes and frequencies of causal variants affecting complex traits.

Thread:
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

A close-up image of a yellow insect with textured, bumpy skin perched on a bright yellow flower. The background is blurred, highlighting the details of the insect and petals.

Arthropod Photo of the Week: October 22, 2025
Jagged ambush bug
Phymata sp.
Hemiptera: Reduviidae
By Tom Astle (@tjalamont.bsky.social), Montana, USA
#arthropodPOTW

We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT

Potentially some stuff from Molly Schumer's work in swordtails on this too, and maybe introgression of DMI loci but I can't remember the details

Does mitochondrial capture count? In my PhD I found evidence repeated introgression of mitochondria from diploid to polyploid lineages of gray treefrogs as the polyploids expanded academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

YouTube video by Deathwishinc Greet Death "Emptiness Is Everywhere"

very much enjoying this new greet death song about greeting death

is your friend jesus?

this is beautiful

did it come with the costume or do you buy those and switch them out

Barren Planet (Part 1) - Sopranos: The Next Generation #startrek #sopranos #edit

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA

10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply."

me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually

www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

Friends: I'm recruiting at least one PhD student to join our lab in Atlanta in the Fall of 2026. Information about our research can be found at the link below. Please pass along to any students interested in the quantitative study of speciation, secondary contact, and the build-up of biodiversity!

This is truly an incredible breakthrough IMO. Really exemplifies what you get when deep domain expertise (popgen/evolution/disease genetics in this case) fuses with cleverly crafted ML. What u get r sleek, well thought out architectures that absolutely destroy the behemoths. Wow!! 1/

Good lord what a garbage piece of writing

Colin Wright @SwipeWright X.com Convincing my left-wing former close friends on Facebook that Charlie Kirk wasn't a Nazi or a fascist is completely futile because I can't even convince them that I'M not a Nazi or a fascist, and many have known me since early grade school. 1:20 PM • 9/15/25 • 850K Views

truly one of the most unintentionally funny things i've ever seen someone post online about themself

Oh goddamn hell yea they got the dome-a-dillo

Not technically what the post is discussing but using this opportunity to bring up the end credits song for Deep Blue Sea, a rap from the perspective of the mutant shark that goes incredibly hard youtu.be/6cYcdBVQ8NM?...

Petroglyph of a weird wicker man many legged looking thing that apparently is a deer in a net

Guy who allegedly saw a deer captured in a net:

Top left: Results of genome-wide association study (GWAS) for sex in E. caeruleum, E. radiosum, and E. spectabile showing sex chromosome turnover has occurred repeatedly. Top right: Phylogeny showing sex chromosome turnover in darters and non-darter percids. Chromosome 9 is the putative ancestral sex chromosome, shared by Perca flavescens and multiple members of the orangethroat darter complex (e.g., E. spectabile, E. pulchellum). Bottom: Schematic depicting repeated turnover of sex chromosomes as a mechanism to resolve mitonuclear conflict and promote speciation.

First pop gen paper from our lab! We find repeated evolutionary turn over of sex chromosomes in darters contributes to reproductive isolation. Turnover may be an escape hatch to resolve mitonuclear conflict & neo sex chromosomes evolved via a rare recessive mutation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Just catching up – good grief. This man is unfit for office, as he has been since Cassidy voted to put him into it.

Please call your congresspeople about this – this kind of nonsensical waffling on life and death matters, with no attention whatsoever to facts, will cause needless death & suffering.

Bistable Mutation-Selection Equilibria and Violations of Fisher's Theorem in Tetraploids: Insights from Nonlinear Dynamics Polyploidy and whole genome duplication (WGD) are widespread biological phenomena with substantial cellular, meiotic, and genetic effects. Despite their prevalence and significance across the tree of ...

New Preprint! This one led by Sam Gibbon, an outstanding undergrad I've worked with for the past year. We take a look at whether segregation patterns in tetraploids (disomic v polysomic) affects mut-sel dynamics. We found some surprising results, and some subtleties: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The cool thing is their pee

Beneath the surface of the sum When genetic interactions matter and when they don't

I wrote about gene-gene interactions (epistasis) and the implications for heritability, trait definitions, natural selection, and therapeutic interventions. Biology is clearly full of causal interactions, so why don't we see them in the data? A 🧵:

GhostParser: A highly scalable phylogenomic approach for the identification of ghost introgression A growing body of empirical research shows that interspecific gene flow is a widespread biological force that shapes evolutionary histories across the Tree of Life. Computational approaches designed t...

My very first post on here.
I am stoked to share lab's latest paper led by @ethantolman.bsky.social. Ethan developed a highly scalable pipeline to differentiate between various gene flow models, including ghost introgression in phylogenomic datasets. Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thank Zenithar it's Fredas