My book 'The Tree of Life' will be available in Spanish translation in October. Other languages coming too. (Uk version here... www.amazon.co.uk/Tree-Life-So...)

We are looking for new colleagues to come join us in Galway as group leaders (Junior and Senior). The Centre for Chromosome Biology is a great place and it is a good time to join. Please reach out if you want to chat about the opportunity!
www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Viator’s Bridge of Izaak Walton fame at Milldale in the Peak District

Wildflowers

That’s what I always thought until I moved to Sweden where they fly around my summer house!

Cephalanthera longifolia (narrow-leaved helleborine) and Cypripedium calceolus (Lady’s slipper orchid) on Gräsö.

Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) - Daily Nous Alasdair MacIntyre, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and Duke University, well-known for his work in moral and political philosophy, has died. Professor MacIntyre wrote...

Very sorry to hear of the death of Alisdair MacIntyre. ”After Virtue” was never more apposite. dailynous.com/2025/05/22/a...

Here is our attempt at summarizing the state of the evidence for the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis. The paper is part of a special issue of Paleobiology celebrating the 50th anniversary of the PE Hypothesis. Work led by Gene Hunt. @lhliow.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Sponges, ctenophores and the statistical significance of syntenies Shared fusions between ancestral chromosomal linkage groups have previously been used to support phylogenetic groupings, notably sponges with cnidarians and bilaterians to the exclusion of ctenophores...

New entry into the sponge/ctenophore debate.... Have the chromosome fusions separating ctenophores from all other animals been given too much weight? Beautifully clearly written paper covering complex arguments from @rcply.bsky.social.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

It's publication day of my first book: The Tree of Life. The tree of life is a time machine that can take us back 4 billion years to meet our most distant ancestor. It is the magic that lets us tell the origin stories, beginning with this ancient relative, of everything from mushrooms to man.

Published today!

It’s actually cool!

I am seriously becoming of the opinion that there should be a (ideally permanent, but at least a few years) moratorium on publication of molecular clock papers. This would allow authors to reflect on the idea that their results invariably involve “event x happened 10s - 100s Myrs before we thought”.

I thought you reviewed it! :)

Animal Evolution: Are Phyla Real? A recent study compares developmental gene expression among very distantly related animal species and interprets the results as providing biological justification for phyla. Several problems in the design and interpretation of the study call this conclusion into question

Another issue is that this view depends on the “phylum hypothesis” ie the view that there is a quantitative difference between the lineages that led to the modern phyla compared to all others. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Animal origins: The record from organic microfossils Accumulated records of organic microfossils span billions of years of Earth history. The majority of this record consists of prokaryotes plus eukaryot…

Actually this happened with the exploitation of “small carbonaceous fossils” www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In addition it uses the Lantian as its ultimate backstop age for metazoans at around 602 but it also argues that the younger Weng’an biota (587) also shows no evidence for animals either. This also creates a bias towards older ages.

Two Notorious Nodes: A Critical Examination of Relaxed Molecular Clock Age Estimates of the Bilaterian Animals and Placental Mammals Abstract. The popularity of relaxed clock Bayesian inference of clade origin timings has generated several recent publications with focal results considera

This paper has the same problems with prior specifications that we discuss in our 2024 paper in systematic biology academic.oup.com/sysbio/artic.... So it’s still biased against the accuracy of the record.

Ghosts, salt and an unfortunate run in with the vikings at Maldon, Essex.

I think it’s partly built from Purbeck marble quarried from Worth Matravers if I recall correctly

www.facebook.com/share/r/mE85...

Nor me!

Have you ever seen the famous Ballard Down Fault? Only visible from the sea!

Where my ancestors come from!

We have in part already. However you describe them as illogical and speculative in the present paper!

I do have views on this paper of course.

Gräsö in the late autumn sun