Charles C Roseman

How does development affect the evolutionary process?

Join our symposium at www.evodevoconference26.com
in Glasgow this June. We have a strong lineup of invited speakers, chaired by me and @milocco.bsky.social

Submit your abstract before Thursday! ⏰

Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre‐Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea We use topological data analysis to reveal a persistent morphological gap in a major group of songbirds (superfamily Passeroidea). The gap remained unoccupied for millions of years, even though nearb....

This looks like it might be particularly interesting to folks in #hpbio e.g. interested in niche concepts or some of Lewontin's arguments. "Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre-­Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea" by Chia et al. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Philosophy #FAQ Ontology: what the fuck? Causality: why the fuck? Epistemology: how the why the fuck? Phenomenology: the fuck.

My new paper is out!

lnkd.in/d7QhdqVD

Publishing on racism against people racialised as Eastern Europeans and its impact on health is not easy. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who supported me throughout this process.

#philsci #racism #health

​I don’t think using large language models is unethical. I also don’t think it’s a good idea to use a nail gun as a toothbrush, even if the nail gun company runs late night television ads that say “makes a great toothbrush!”

Eternal vigilance.

AI-produced material online threatens to ‘erode the foundations of democratic life’ Director of Trinity College Dublin’s AI Accountability Lab says tools such as ChatGPT and Grok are a ‘social disaster’

I absolutely concur with @abeba.bsky.social AI-produced material online threatens to ‘erode the foundations of democratic life’

www.irishtimes.com/politics/202...

The gendered and racialised dynamics of people (of course it's mostly men) telling women like @emilymbender.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social @timnitgebru.bsky.social in the last couple of days, that their work and efforts against AI are not radical enough or other cryptogyny (gendered theft) 1/n

one reset I'd personally appreciate: behind the insistence that we must offer the electorate a little bigotry is the idea that commoners are more bigoted than the richer and more educated, who can be appealed to with high minded policy. but then you Ctrl+F "phrenology" in the Epstein files

Comic. Bad Map Projection #216: Zero Declination. A cylindrical projection distorted so that up is *magnetic* north. Distorted map with red arrows around the edges pointing different directions.

Bad Map Projection: Zero Declination

xkcd.com/3207/

Hello Bluesky!

Does Nₑ really explain mutation rate (μ) or genome size (GS) in vertebrates?

We find the apparent Nₑ–μ link in Bergeron et al. (2023) is a “back-door” path via generation time, and GS is decoupled from both Nₑ and life-history traits.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

#evobio #PNAS

The billionaires' eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science Edge - Jeffrey Epstein's favourite intellectual salon - was sold to me as a gathering of the world's finest minds, writes Virginia Heffernan. The files reveal it was something far darker: a decades-lo...

MUST READ:

The best synthesis I have seen so far of things I knew or had put together from various sources but had not really seen pulled together 🧪

Importantly, I don’t think these academics were an aberration. I think a lot of scientists would have entered these circles, given the option.

Weaponised correlation is causation, as usual

Anything for the money, that bunch.

What are some concrete examples of left-wing bias in science? A few named examples would be very helpful here.

As always, happy Valentine’s Day but more importantly happy birthday to Frederick Douglass who modeled love for liberty, for his people, and for himself.

Consider tho... To their opponents, they look like they're all business when setting up for tackles and like they're partying when they've broken away and are running free for the try.

Here, @philipcball.bsky.social sums up the whole ugly Epstein mess and why it matters (along multiple dimensions). Reading it was therapeutic.

Yes it’s Valentine’s Day. But it’s also the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass who was born in 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. He escaped from slavery & rose to become the most eloquent and forceful voice for the abolition of slavery & for Black voting rights in the U.S.

If you study evolution, human variation, or anything that is natural historical, it is an important read. In the address, Douglass argues against the pronouncements of Black inferiority made by race scientists of his day, including Agassiz and Morton. It's still relevant today.2/2

The title page to the original printing of Frederick Douglass' 1854 commencement address to Western Reserve College (now Case Western Reserve University)

🧪🧬 Today is the observation of Frederick Douglass' chosen birthday. I say "chosen" because he was robbed of the knowledge of the exact date of his birth by those who enslaved him. Today is a good day to read his 1854 commencement address to Western Reserve College.1/2

tile.loc.gov/storage-serv...

Official government website of the Illinois General Assembly Welcome to the Official government website of the Illinois General Assembly

Our friends at @hsrail.bsky.social are supporting HB 4279, which would require planners throughout Illinois to assume much higher future minimum train frequencies between Chicago and cities throughout the Midwest (and beyond, in some cases). Bill's in committee on Tuesday. ilga.gov/Legislation/...

The bill calls for state-/local-level planning (not funding) for eventual hourly trains from Chicago to:
🚆 Milwaukee
🚆 Madison and St Paul
🚆 Rockford
🚆 St Louis
🚆 Champaign
🚆 Louisville
🚆 Cincinnati
🚆 Columbus
🚆 Detroit
🚆 Moline (every 2 hours)
🚆 Peoria (every 2 hours)
🚆 Galesburg (every 4 hours)

I'd add that there has been a considerable synthesis of quantitative genetics and evodevo (Hall, Atchley, Riska, Cheverud, Rice, Wolf, etc.). It tends not to be recognized by EES proponents. It's a little frustrating.

I agree. A good chunk of my research program is about exactly this and @edhagen.net will agree that I'm no adaptationist. I'd point out that all of the theory that is used in the linked analysis is pretty conventional qgen and evodevo, which have a long history of synthesis. It just gets ignored.

Myth of the Genetic Blueprint | Broadcast Life isn't constructed along pre-drawn plans. It grows.

Myth of the Genetic Blueprint - Life isn’t constructed along pre-drawn plans. It grows. pioneerworks.org/broadcast/ge... - Super article by the always on-point @elisecutts.bsky.social

Ben and I are talking about adaptive evolvability. An organism (a group of them, really) having the ability evolve adaptively because it was adapted to do so.

It’s a different matter from evolving in one set of contexts and then being able to deal with novelty as a correlated response.

I get very worried about talk of directed evolution toward distant beneficial ends in humans. Starts to get a bit eugenical. The lighter slightly less intentional version seems t be sewn together from the remains of Lamarck and Spencer. Not much of an improvement.

Bringing weight to the composition.

Thanks. I appreciate you saying that. Reviewer 3 wouldn't agree with you.