Mauricio González-Forero

Buribushi Fellowship

Independent researcher fellowships (non-tenure track) at OIST, with a focus on broadly defined theory www.oist.jp/research/bur...

We have an open PhD position (application deadline 9 January 2026) in "Theory of fitness landscapes" at @unibe.ch 🤓⛰️📊👩‍💻🎓: banklab.github.io/positions/

Please share widely!

#QueerInSTEM #DisabledInSTEM #BlackInSTEM #WomenInSTEM #CarersInSTEM #AcademicSky #HigherED

Zack on Bold Politics podium

I'm Jewish. I'm also Mancunian.

Every other national party leader was interviewed by Laura Kunesberg during their conference.

Maybe the BBC thought as someone who also supports Palestine - I had nothing to say?

Let's keep growing: join.greenparty.org.uk

Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.

A causal framework for the drivers of animal social network structure Author summary Behavioural ecologists ask mechanistic questions about behaviour—causal questions. When studying animal societies, these questions often concern the drivers of social network structure....

Are you studying animal sociality?

My (now published) first PhD chapter proposes a Bayesian + causal framework to infer the factors shaping the social relationships that animals form with one another.

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Transformation starts at the periphery of networks where pushback is less - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Transformation starts at the periphery of networks where pushback is less

Intervening on a central node in a network likely does little given that its connected neighbors will "flip it back" immediately. Happy to see this position supported now.

"Change is most likely [..] if it spreads first among relatively poorly connected nodes."

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Haven't read the preprint, but heritability of 0.3 doesn't mean traits are largely environmentally driven. The remaining 0.7 includes non-additive genetic effects. And the 0.3 heritability might include non-genetic effects (e.g., developmental noise). Interpreting heritability is hard.

Happy In Theory This is the short story of my long, 20 year search for a stable academic home. There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending.

New Substack post

It's very personal: my story of a 20-year academic career, and the many challenges of theoretical and cross-disciplinary work

As I put it in the subtitle: There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending

thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/happy-in-t...

I am excited to announce that the position of a senior postdoc (3 +3 years) in the field of theoretical biology is available in my group.

The position provides the opportunity to closely interact with experimentalists and develop own research projects.

Please RT.

Details 👇:
shorturl.at/iiiOv

Just got this book by one of my favourite anthropologists (and people) in the mail - if it's only half as good as the gushing advanced praise, this'll be an instant classic! Also, brilliant title, immediately putting to bed the notion that long lifespan is a new thing; we've evolved to live to ~70

The BBC: A People's History David Hendy describes how he went about writing 'The BBC: A People’s History', his authorised biography of the Corporation, published to coincide with its 2022 Centenary.

1/6 A plea to Lisa Nandy from a very concerned citizen & historian: I’m not so naive to believe that the BBC has or can ever be completely impartial. It has always been a site of struggle.
www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthe...

Search Jobs - University Affairs

Peter Taylor Professorship at Queen's University in any area of mathematics. The Professorship includes a fund to support mathematical scholarship, and educational and outreach activities.

universityaffairs.ca/search-job/?...

This should have been big news!

Ten funding agencies from eight European countries have pledged to support a public infrastructure that is poised to replace academic journals:
FWF 🇦🇹
RCN 🇳🇴
Forte 🇸🇪
ARIS 🇸🇮
SRC 🇸🇪
FCT 🇵🇹
CSIC 🇪🇸
DFG 🇩🇪
Formas 🇸🇪
ANR 🇫🇷
Only two of them issued press releases in […]

‘Almost unimaginable’: these ants are different species but share a mother Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.

Amazing! Full article here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“Other books teach you how to write beautiful sentences and paragraphs; Nunez tells you how to get your imperfect writing submitted and published.”

“Other books teach you how to write beautiful sentences and paragraphs; Nunez tells you how to get your imperfect writing submitted and published.”

Our article "Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience" (with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social, @kztwyman.bsky.social & Marc Feldman) is now published online.

We describe five factors that contribute to the spread of racism and suggest strategies for countering them.

doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

🚨 We're hiring!
PhD position in Evolutionary Systems Biology at Stockholm University & SciLifeLab

🎓 Focus: evolution, development, computational & mathematical modeling, prediction
📍 Stockholm, Sweden
🕒 4 years, fully-funded
🔍 Details: su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Please share!

Five 3-year Postdoc positions open at @ebdonana.bsky.social. I am happy to sponsor and mentor good candidates working in my field, but note that these are quite independent positions aimed at helping stabilize new researchers in the system. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4nqkq...

Excited to present at the Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology this Thursday! Find me at the Craniofacial Evolution Session-09 at 3.15 pm!

Quote in photo: “The goal is to change politics forever. When we have a government abetting genocide and waging war on its own citizens, and a far right gearing up to enter Downing Street, we can't deny the urgency. So I am ready to give everything to this fight. That's what I owe to my community and to my class. Now's the moment.”

The new left party must be different: member-led, shaped by the people it serves, honouring and learning from the past, and building the future.

Me in the New Left Review: newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

YouTube video by Garys Economics How to convince your friends to back wealth taxes

How to convince your friends, family and networks to support wealth taxes. A step-by-step guide

Revisiting the human sociobiology debate What have we learned 50 years on?

🚨 New, short article by myself, Clark Barrett and @kevinlala.bsky.social on the legacy of Wilson's 'Sociobiology: The New Synthesis', which was published 50 years ago.

@science.org #ehbea #histbiol #evobio #psyscisky

Revisiting the human sociobiology debate |Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The starvation of Gaza is shameful. Crippling sanctions on Israel are needed | Letters Letter: Thirty-one Israeli signatories express their shame, rage and agony over the plight of Palestinians and call for action from the international community

Happy to see some principled and courageous academics signing this letter. That said, I wish the list of signatories was much longer.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

This is amongst the most impactful two minutes of broadcasting I’ve ever seen.

By Emma Murphy, International Editor, ITV News. #Gaza

New publishing models will only work if authors embrace them Complaints about the broken academic publishing system have been around for years and are getting louder. A common theme is that with the r...

Here's a quick blogpost about alternative publishing models. You can bring a horse to water, and indeed wave the bucket temptingly under its nose, but it is likely to gallop off elsewhere. deevybee.blogspot.com/2025/07/new-...
@ec.europa.eu @wellcometrust.bsky.social

How can we beat the
Farage-Badenoch-Starmer axis of cruelty
in the UK?

A strong @greenparty.org.uk with a *fearless* leader is part of the answer.

Join the party now and make it happen by voting for @zackpolanski.bsky.social

Less than 10 days left!
join.greenparty.org.uk #BackZack

What Actually Counts as Interdisciplinary Research? A data-driven look at which funders support knowledge integration

Interesting analysis from @ersatzben.bsky.social on what makes good interdisciplinary research. UKRI doesn’t come out well. ‘Despite integration within single UKRI umbrella, UK government funding seems to remain unusually focussed on silos of activity….’ johnsonb.substack.com/p/what-actua...

Nice news piece giving a brief summary of our new paper posted in my current institution: www.kli.ac.at/en/the_kli/n...

The War on Gaza’s Children Without safe access to food, water, or medical care, survival has become a daily gamble for the region’s youngest residents.

"I’ve met more than a dozen children who lost everyone. I don’t mean mom and dad—I mean cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents." www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

The cellular substrate of evolutionary novelty Joseph Parker and Matt Pennell propose gene expression programs — sets of co-expressed transcripts that collectively encode cellular subfunctions — as fundamental entities from which novel organismal ...

Useful perspective incorporating GRNs & gene modules into theory of evolutionary novelty

Parker & Pennell emphasise gene modules, not individual genes, as fundamental units of phenotypic evolution

Provides a needed evolutionary lens for analysing scRNAseq & cell types

www.cell.com/current-biol...