Joe Baker

Genetics of human handedness: microtubules and beyond Handedness (i.e., the preference to use either the left or the right hand for fine motor tasks) is a widely investigated trait. Handedness heritability is consistently estimated to be 25%. After decad...

Great review on The Genetics of Human Handedness: Microtubules and Beyond www.cell.com/trends/genet... - handedness is such an interesting phenotype!

Genetics of human handedness: microtubules and beyond

Genetics of human handedness: microtubules and beyond. Check out this review by @ocklenburg.bsky.social published in @cp-trendsgenetics.bsky.social http://dlvr.it/TNjZCR #ASHG25

The love of reading is an endangered species.

Just 16% of Americans do regular leisure reading—down from 28% in 2003. Only 41% of UK parents read daily to their toddlers—down from 64% in 2012.

Books aren't merely a source of flow. They're a gateway to empathy and lifelong learning.

Multiple headlines about the first CRISPR 2.0 personalized genome editing and photo of the baby treated

This week's genome editing triumph is a big deal.
Here's why
erictopol.substack.com/p/the-first-...

Looking forward to this coming out soon. In the paper, we propose a hierarchy for how different psychological constructs affect behaviour in athlete development contexts.

The genetic basis of human height www.nature.com/articles/s41... (read free: rdcu.be/egGQf) 🧬🖥️🧪

You’re welcome…

Psychological insights for judging expertise and implications for adversarial legal contexts

Review by Kristy A. Martire, Tess M. S. Neal, Fernand Gobet, Jason M. Chin, Jonathan F. Berengut & Gary Edmond

Web: go.nature.com/4ig3zhE
PDF: rdcu.be/edUS3

#psychology #psychscisky

Nice work, Ben!

The reproducibility of research and the misinterpretation of p-values | Royal Society Open Science We wish to answer this question: If you observe a ‘significant’ p-value after doing a single unbiased experiment, what is the probability that your result is a false positive? The weak evidence provid...

I think that this paper is not cited enough.

If you use p-values in your research, and you can't do otherwise, it would be desirable to at least quantify what is the false discovery rate for your sample size and chosen thresholds. It'd be surprising. 🧪

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Great day at the MIT Sports Summit connecting with sports industry leaders and tech professionals.

Just published!

"The problems with genetic essentialism, determinism, and reductionism."

karger.com/hde/article-...

Reminder that LOIs are due at the end of the month.

I feel like I'm getting predictable... In my defense, there is no better way to spend a week in February. #SpringTraining

Full-on eugenics, in its most rabid, racist form is oozing its way back into mainstream discourse.

Excited for this one to get out. Led by the amazing Jesse Korf. Coming soon!!

A tree can afford a human the actions of swinging from a branch, sheltering from the rain, or escaping a dangerous animal. Credit: Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel. https://philosophyofbrains.com/2020/02/18/affordances-and-motivation.aspx

James Gibson was born OTD in 1904.

His concept of the “affordance” dissolved the dichotomy between the organism and their environment. Each organism experiences its own environment: as things it can do or use, or barriers to its action or use.

🌱🐋 🦫🦋🧪🌎#philsci #psychsky #histSTM

How population stratification makes environments look like genes. A short 🧵:

TISS Research Accelerator Fund applications are open!

kpe.utoronto.ca/faculty-news...

The Genomic Code: The genome instantiates a generative model of the organism arxiv.org/abs/2407.15908 (revised version, following peer review)

What happened to the pursuit of truth? rupress.org/jgp/article/... - Eve Marder, on point...

Heritability: Five Battles — LessWrong This is an opinionated but hopefully beginner-friendly discussion of heritability: what is it, what do we know about it, and how we should think about it? I structure my discussion around five context...

New blog post: “Heritability: Five battles”. It’s a (very) long and opinionated but hopefully beginner-friendly discussion, structured around five contexts in which people study and argue about heritability. (1/7) www.lesswrong.com/posts/xXtDCe...

Does effort make life more meaningful? Was Sisyphus living the dream? In our new paper (now accepted in Cognition!), across 6 studies with nearly 3,000 participants, we found that more effortful tasks feel more meaningful 🧵

Eugenics, statistical hubris, and unknowable unknowns in human genetics A new paper just out in Nature , by Peter Visscher and colleagues (including bio-ethicist Julian Salvulescu) explores the idea of polygenic...

"“Let’s edit your baby’s genome and hope for the best” is not exactly a compelling marketing slogan. It’s certainly not a responsible medical attitude."
This is a typically first-class analysis from @wiringthebrain.bsky.social.
www.wiringthebrain.com/2025/01/euge...

Diagram of H.M.S. Beagle, from Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle, etc. (1890). Poop cabin is aft. Credit: Darwin Online.

OTD in 1831, HMS Beagle set sail from Falmouth on a cartographic mission in the service of British imperial and commercial interests.

On board as a supernumerary companion to the captain was a recent Cambridge graduate named Charles Darwin. He worked in the poop cabin.

#HistSTM #HPBio 🧪 #EvoBio

MLB pitching-injury study knows the causes, but solutions may be elusive A new report on pitching injuries released Tuesday by the commissioner's office confirms much of what we already suspected about the root causes of the sharp rise in elbow and shoulder injuries. It al...

MLB found days spent on the injured list by pitchers increased from 13,666 in 2005 to 32,257 in 2024. The study asserts that the pursuit of velocity and max-effort pitching are the "primary forces driving the long-term increase in pitcher injuries." thescore.com/mlb/news/316...

abstract of a scientific paper

Developmental noise is an overlooked contributor to innate variation in psychological traits pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36098433/ - just because the variation is not all genetic in origin, doesn't mean the rest is necessarily "environmental"

The tech bro fascination with eugenics is so on brand. The idea that you could make accurate, actionable predictions from individual genotypes (with all their complex, non-linear interactions) from averaged, linearly modeled population-level genomic statistics is just another big data fantasy

Thanks for the plug, Mark!

An evolutionary psychology perspective on athletic development and performance: Differences between proximate and ultimate explanations

rdcu.be/d2AIH