Marc Robinson-Rechavi

The unlikely group being just the Epstein class

During the NoFakeMed movement, your were at the forefront of fighting bad faith arguments, which might have also colored your expectations? I waded into those waters only much later in my career.
And probably indeed philosophers working with MDs and scientists have a better training for this.

I think there are degrees of bad faith. I've seen scientists completely unprepared for the assault of bad faith from pseudoscientists on agronomy.
But thanks for calling me out, it is certainly true that the experience of academia is very different according to gender (and other characteristics).

My point was rather generalising about our difficulty in managing bad faith interactions when we expect good faith. Which is something I've seen repeatedly on topics such as GMOs, climate change, homeopathy, etc.

Sorry, I answered without having seen the rest of your replies.
So yes, sexism does mean that men have an easier time in academia. And it's something we must recognize and continue fighting to change.

To be clear, I don't mean "not ready to prepared to deal with a sexual creep" (although it does take more time for men to learn this, because we are less confronted to it), I mean "not ready to deal with bad faith".

Then scientists don't know how to manage the interaction because we are trained to (and used to) disagree in good faith

Meet three scientists who said no to Epstein The warning signs included a web search, a mother’s doubts, and inklings of a “sexist attitude”

I think this is an important point from the recent article on scientists who said no to Epstein.
I saw this a lot when I was trying to do SciComm, when scientists would interact with bad faith pseudo-science or anti-science activists.

Meet three scientists who said no to Epstein The warning signs included a web search, a mother’s doubts, and inklings of a “sexist attitude”

«“Academics tend to have this way of interacting with people that works really well when there is mutual good faith,” Aaronson says. “But it breaks down when that doesn’t exist. And I think a lot of academics were just not prepared to deal with someone like him.”»
www.science.org/content/arti...

Silverfish live for years, practice elaborate courtship dances, have big bristly beards, and are covered in shiny, feathery scales. They move like they're liquid and they can eat basically whatever. Best fish. (Sorry, cuttlefish.)

In the spirit of fish discourse, vote for the best fish:

a. Jellyfish
b. Starfish
c. Cuttlefish
d. Silverfish

Let's continue recruiting diverse tenure-track assistant professors in Swiss universities!
"More than half of assistant professorships with tenure track positions are held by women (53% of total)"
www.swissuniversities.ch/en/news/chan...

Phylogenetic distribution of egress direction during moulting and ecdysial suture position across major arthropod lineages. Left, simple phylogeny of athropod groups, with red dots indicating occurrence of taxa characterised by a domed and pronounced horseshoe-shaped head shield in Radiodonta, Trilobita, Xiphosurida, and Brachiopoda. Right, table of occurence of traits of egress direction and of ecdysial suture position.

The new observations, coupled with collaborations with the teams of Allison Daley and @chipman-lab.bsky.social, show trends of convergence among species similar head shields.

Another exciting preprint by @nextstrain.bsky.social, with one of the coolest animals out there, the horseshoe crab!

Evidence of Unreliable Data and Poor Data Provenance in Clinical Prediction Model Research and Clinical Practice Clinical prediction models are often created using large routinely collected datasets. It is essential that prediction models are developed with appropriate data and methods and transparently reported...

Much of my work in meta-research is on finding problems in research, so I've seen a lot of bad practices. However, even I was shocked by hundreds of researchers publishing papers using data that is faked and has no data provenance. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6.... Amazing work by my student Alex.

Morphological characterization of moulting in the Atlantic horseshoecrab Limulus polyphemus: phylogenetic conservation amongchelicerates and evolutionary convergence of ecdysis linked to headshield patterns https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.27.708456v1

Very nice learning paths at @sib.swiss: www.sib.swiss/training/lea...

Intergeneric chromosomal transfer in yeast results in improved phenotypes and widespread transcriptional responses - Nature Communications Transferring genetic materials between distantly related yeasts, presents technical challenges but can yield industrially interesting phenotypes. Here the authors establish a method to transfer indivi...

Happy to share a recent publication to which I contributed as a corr. author:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This work is in collaboration with Dr. Yao Yu at Fudan University, where the team managed to transfer S. cerevisiae chromosmes into K. marxianus, a species diverged from Sc ~114 mya. (1/4)

The transgressive expression is indicative of lineage-specific cis-trans compensatory evolution, which has been shown to be prevalent in previous studies, but our data show that it holds for really distantly related species (sample size is ~100 genes, though). (3/4)

Happy to share the beautiful manuscript of Leonard Herault: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

They committed outright fraud to get this study approved. My god.

🧬We are launching STRiVE, a @eseb.bsky.social Special Topic Network on the evolutionary role of structural genomic variation.

🗓️Std:
29/04: Online seminar w/ L. Rieseberg
8-10/07: Kick-off in Porto

Join us: structuralvariantsstn.github.io #Evolution #Genomics #StructuralVariants #Biology #PopGen

From our project on arthropod moulting, see also this great paper
bsky.app/profile/rmwa...

Congratulations to @nextstrain.bsky.social for this great paper! Studying the evolution of moulting beyond insects has been challenging, and we are starting to see how moulting is both deeply conserved and evolving differently in pancrustacean lineages.

Mark Blaxter from @sangerinstitute.bsky.social describes the ambition of the @ebpgenome.bsky.social to #Biology26 in Switzerland

The reason why it's so hard to get through to anyone steeped in Creationism pseudoscience at any level isn't just that their conclusion is pre-decided in advance and the arguments back-formulated to fit it, it's that *they think that's what everyone does*.

Moulting combines deeply conserved metabolic and developmental pathways with lineage-specific gene modules related to exoskeleton formation, potentially facilitating adaptation of the exoskeleton to lineage-specific ecological contexts.
6/6

This lineage specific signatures are highly expressed in the middle of the moulting process exhibiting an inverse hourglass pattern. Mid-moult stages recruit younger genes related to:
•Cuticle development
•Pigmentation
•Sensory structure formation
•Chitin-based extracellular matrix components
(5/6)

Despite recovering a conserved set of genes majority of the DEGs during ecdysis are lineage specific.
(4/6)