Tom Wenseleers

FYI @andygardner.bsky.social @stuwest.bsky.social - feel free to forward to anyone you think who might like to take up the challenge :-)

For those not so familiar with the whole controversy two nice overview papers by @birchlse.bsky.social giving a nice and balanced overview of the current state of affairs here: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.... academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

Mathematica notebook with our analytical popgen solution can be found here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/h7ery... Or if you don't have Mathematica, PDF here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/sbkm4...

(PDF) Early-season helping yields increasing returns to scale at the onset of eusociality PDF | The evolution of eusociality, characterized by cooperative brood care, reproductive division of labor, and overlapping generations, represents a... | Find, read and cite all the research you nee...

Now that the Epstein files are apparently also bringing up the old Nowak inclusive fitness controversy - here a fun challenge: show me how to derive our recent eusociality model www.researchgate.net/publication/... using inclusive fitness methodology! A crate of Belgian beer awaits those who can!

Time to publish responsibly: DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology Abstract. The current economics of scientific publishing reveal a profound imbalance: academia pays prices far exceeding the actual costs of publication. R

A super handy database to help support academic society journals and other ethical publishing. academic.oup.com/jeb/article/...

Where is AI showing up in the productivity data? Signs of its effects are already starting to peek through

Where is AI showing up in the productivity data? - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @FT

From the Epstein Files, the stated goals of Nowak's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics: "curing the world of cancer, infectious disease, selfishness, and inclusive fitness theory." www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

What struck me in this is that Robert Trivers decided not to sign the reply to the Nowak et al 2010 paper based at least in part on that email he received from Karl Sigmund (who also appeared a bit critical of the statistical version of inclusive fitness theory) : www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

When was the last time you tried LLMs btw and what model was that? Insane to truly believe they are not useful for coding... The theoretical modelling projects of my students ar overall much better and ambitious than before...

If bad quality science ends up published then it's human slop & bad judgement on the parts of authors, reviewers and editors, not AI slop. Like sending in an unedited paper of a student without a thorough check.

This was about learning new skills not about efficiency gains in getting the job done: that's at least 39% more efficient - see paper below. And for me: writing roxygen2 R package documentation: 10x faster with LLMs... papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Yes exactly it has ChatGPT integrated. That's why I could paste in a ChatGPT written manuscript and ask to have it typeset in Latex...

I have much more positive experience with LLMs: allowing me to crack problems that even domain experts couldn't... There will be pros and cons, sure, but overall I can only see it massively lift science to new levels... Code is also relatively easy to check...

Prism | A free, LaTeX-native workspace for scientists Write, edit, and collaborate on scientific documents in LaTeX with Prism—a free workspace integrating GPT-5.2 into research and writing.

Oh sorry it is free for all in fact, you just need a ChatGPT account, but a free one is OK, see openai.com/prism/. It is a separate tool, not a ChatGPT extension.

Why so negative? It's just a tool to make your work easier. The responsibility for the final text lies with the authors, as always. I look as critically at AI output as I look at say a first draft of a student... What's the difference?

OpenAI just released Prism, prism.openai.com, an Overleaf replacement to collaboratively edit Latex documents. Any ChatGPT subscriber can use it & freely invite as many collaborators as you like. Below it typeset a ChatGPT generated paper for me. With inbuilt Zotero integration!

Merry Christmas to you all! As a nerdy Christmas card I had Google Gemini Canvas code a Christmas-themed Galton board, to entertain my stats students (it is 1000 lines of JavaScript code)! :-) gemini.google.com/share/15f33a...

Merry Christmas to you all! As a nerdy Christmas card I had Google Gemini Canvas code a Christmas-themed Galton board, to entertain my stats students (it is 1000 lines of JavaScript code)! :-) gemini.google.com/share/15f33a...

A young PI here in Mainz has a fabulous PhD position that will be filled soon! By you? Keywords: Social insects, ageing, gene expression. www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb10-evoluti...

Also to the IUSSI officers who helped make this work: Heikki Helnterä as president, @adriatica.bsky.social as secretary, @chrisleduck.bsky.social as treasurer and @davidjnash.bsky.social as webmaster.

A huge thank you to our secretary Conny Coeckelberghs and everyone from my team for the fantastic organisation - Viviana Di Pietro, Helena Mendes Ferreira, Anneline Mattens, @kdebeuckelaere.bsky.social and @anvandoren.bsky.social.

Congrats also to Dylan Thatcher and Alexis Gkantiragas for winning the prize for best student talks and to Cassandra Uthoff and Annie Joseph for the being awarded with the best poster prizes.

The @iussi-nwes.bsky.social that we organised this week in Leuven (18-19 December, www.iussi-nweurope.org/meetings) was a success! @rmash.bsky.social and @patrick-kennedy.bsky.social delivered fantastic keynote talks and there was a great set of contributed talks and posters.

🚨 Tenure-track professorship at Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany, with a focus on evolutionary ecology of social hymenoptera 🐝🐜

Initially for 6 years:
www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/pr...

(Here is a Mathematica notebook of the model: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8qqeg...)

Thanks Stu! Glad you liked it! This was a talk I gave about that study this week: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4w3hw...

I didn't manage to do an inclusive fitness version of this model btw (and @andygardner.bsky.social also didn't know how to do it)! Would you know how to do it?

Talk I gave about our recent Evolution Letters paper, in which we quantified the benefits of helping at the origin of eusociality using a combination of experiment & theory, at the @iussi-nwes.bsky.social winter meeting in Leuven this week! Powerpoint here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4w3hw...

POSTDOC ALERT🚨

Two exciting social evolution postdoc positions live today!

We're looking for two excellent field biologists. Join us to explore the evolution of sociality in wasps across Africa. Apply by 11th January.

Collaboration with
@dustinrubenstein.com

@bristolbiosci.bsky.social

@patrick-kennedy.bsky.social talks about so many fun social evolution dramas at @iussi-nwes.bsky.social winter meeting #wasplove

@rmash.bsky.social from @ucl.ac.uk opening @iussi-nwes.bsky.social winter meeting in Leuven! #CareAsACapacitor