Luke Holman

Exciting PostDoc and RA opportunity with two lovely supervisors!

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...

Some more bizarro ant genetics www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you work on the internal conflicts, do consider proposing a paper for our upcoming special issue in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

More info here: internalconflictsstn.wordpress.com/special-issue/

We’re offering a fully funded 4 yr PhD position to work on Sexual selection in complex environments at the @uv.es. Co-supervised by @dbergerbiol.bsky.social. Find details below 👇

debugging some slim code, and these flashing haplotypes are mostly gratuitous, but the closest I'll ever get to the matrix I think

Har du rotter på loftet, det er superfantastisk

Multiplexing gene drives have high homing efficiencies

Excited to be a part of this new paper with Alphey Lab- out in pre-print.
Multiplexing overrides resistance for #genedrive in Anopheles stephensi
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Postdoc opportunity in disease ecology at @uniexecec.bsky.social with the excellent @btschirren.bsky.social and @andyyoung.bsky.social in evergreen Cornwall UK.

I just got the notice that all the FlyBase people at Harvard, including me, will be laid off on October 12. I'm devastated.

Come work with my amazing new colleague!

Whole-genome sequencing of 490,640 UK Biobank participants - Nature A study reports whole-genome sequences for 490,640 participants from the UK Biobank and combines these data with phenotypic data to provide new insights into the relationship between human variation a...

In another milestone for human genetics, the world's largest set of whole-genome DNA sequences now encompasses data from nearly half a million people, described in this new @nature.com paper from @ukbiobank.bsky.social: 🧪👇

We are looking for a Postdoc (up to 5 years) who wants to study neural mechanisms of spatial memory in honeybees.

This includes tetrode recordings in behaving honeybees.

Application Deadline is 1st of October 2025.

More details:
www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/services/...

Two (!) ongoing Academic (Research and Teaching) positions in Ecology, here at Monash University in Melbourne. Closing in a little over a week! Please share widely! Both at Lecturer/Senior Lecturer level (similar to Assistant Professor) careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/jo...

An ongoing Academic (Research and Teaching) position in Genomics, here at Monash University in Melbourne. Closing in a little over a week! Please share widely! Lecturer/Senior Lecturer level (similar to Assistant Professor). careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/jo...

The 1st author is here too: follow @tom-is-kean.bsky.social ! His clever idea was to highlight similarities between meiotic drive and inbreeding's "automatic transmission advantage". We ask: given structurally identical(ish) problems, why is what is viewed as paradoxical so different between fields?

Expression Divergence in Response to Sex-biased Selection Abstract. It remains debated whether greater degrees of sexual dimorphism would evolve if not for intersexual genetic constraints. Here, we used experiment

Out now in @molbioevol.bsky.social with Michelle Liu (co-first), Ryan Frost, Matthew Lindsay, Malak Bayoumi, Martin Brengdahl, @ruxmolnar.bsky.social and @aneil-agrawal.bsky.social, we evolved ~40% of the D. melanogaster genome under male-limited inheritance, ...

academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Figure 1. Unbeatable sex allocation strategy of unconstrained females (r*) as a function of proportion of constrained females (p) under local mate competition with two foundresses colonising the patch. Shown are the result for Godfray’s (1990) erroneous diploidy solution (dashed grey line), our corrected diploidy solution (solid grey line), and our haplodiploidy solution (solid black line). Overlaid are results from individual-based simulations (discs).

New paper: "The consequences of constrained sex allocation in diploids and haplodiploids under local mate competition", with Chedhawat Chokechaipaisarn:

doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

@jevbio.bsky.social

A new paper by my academic grandchild @ewanflintham.bsky.social, now out in @jevbio.bsky.social:

I probably won't have time to make a video out of this.

But the materials are available online, and should be pretty self-explanatory.

Hope this is useful to some people.

privefl.github.io/statgen-cour...

Toward more sustainable research: reducing the environmental impact when working with Drosophila Abstract. The ever-increasing amounts of plastic waste and greenhouse gas emissions worldwide threaten our environment. Biomedical laboratories across the

Now proper out: doi.org/10.1093/gene...

That's why I am helping the European Society for Evolutionary Biology @eseb.bsky.social organise a hub conference in 2027 instead of a regular 1 site congress. 4 hubs across Europe so most can travel by train/bus and still meet colleagues in person (website at eseb 2027.org live in August)

#Evol2025 was for me maybe the most important meeting I have ever been to. My science will be drastically improved by my interactions over the past week. It was bittersweet due to the current situation and the people who weren't there, but I'm optimistic that we are strong enough to overcome this.

Long running project in the ant community finally out!

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1929

Selection Shapes Diverse Animal Minds: our special issue of @royalsocietypublishing.org Phil Trans B on the diverse evolutionary processes underlying cognitive evolution is out today. Thanks to all our contributors! royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

The three academic positions (Lecturer/Senior Lecturer) in the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University are now advertised. Details here:

Ecology:
careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/jo...

Genomics:
careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/jo...

Congrats to @emilyroycroft.bsky.social on receiving this year's Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize. Fantastic work! #Evol2025

Sex ratio theory for facultative parthenogens: from fortuitously optimal stick insects to the origin of haplodiploidy in Hymenoptera Abstract. Sex ratio theory usually assumes obligate sex; rare exceptions with facultative sex typically consider idiosyncratic cases of cyclic parthenogens

Why did bees become haplodiploid & birds didn't? And why are stick insects perfect just the way they are? This is probably the coolest paper from @koraklein.bsky.social‬ 's PhD thesis (though there's Colias butterfly work in the pipeline which I shouldn't diss...)
academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

So NERC have quietly announced this afternoon that they're delaying/cancelling/suspending, whatever 'not launched at this time' means, their 2025 Independent Research Fellowship round. After announcing it 34 days ago.

Flip-flopping like this is really detrimental to early career researchers.

UNSW School of BABS Special Seminar Peer review meltdown Carl T. Bergstrom, University of Washington Host/Chair Prof Mark Tanaka Monday 23 June 2025 1pm-2pm Mathews Theatre C You’ve seen it yourself. Peer review is coming apart at the seams. Editors face a mighty struggle to recruit reviewers. Researchers are overwhelmed with review requests. Authors wait months or longer for low-quality reviews of their work. In this talk, I present a series of simple mathematical models to illustrate what is happening and why. (1) An elite journal relies on peer review to identify the top papers; knowing the quality of the peer review process, authors self-screen and send only their best work to this journal. But when the reward from publishing in the elite journal increases, submission volume increases. (2) When submission volume increases, review quality drops as the most qualified reviews are no longer available — but we prove that when review quality drops, submission volume necessarily increases as more authors try to sneak in undeservedly. This feedback process swamps the journals with submissions and erodes the quality of review. (3) We next consider what happens as elite journals proliferate and show that, paradoxically, as the number of elite journals increases, researchers self-screen more assiduously, but the review load continues to increase. To illustrate the consequences, we consider welfare measures for authors, reviewers, and readers. (4) Finally, we explore the way in which aggressive desk rejection policies can partially check this peer review meltdown. 

Australian friends!

I'm going to be visiting Sydney in just over a week. I'll be at UNSW on June 23-25th and Macquarie on June 26-27th.

I'd love to catch up with people in person, and also will be giving (at least) two talks at UNSW.

The first is science-of-science modeling talk, on June 23: