Ian Dworkin

go.bsky.app/C14uXVa

Society for the Study of Evolution Site description

Are you a grad student attending #Evol2026? Submit your talk for the SSE Hamilton Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Presentation! Finalists will present their talks during the virtual portion of the meeting. Apply during registration. Deadline April 15! shorturl.at/qDIP4 @evolmtg.bsky.social

Society for the Study of Evolution Site description

Are you interested in receiving light-touch English language editing for your next @journal-evo.bsky.social or @evolletters.bsky.social manuscript? Check out our Evolution English Language Support program to learn how to receive free support! www.evolutionsociety.org/publications...

Society for the Study of Evolution Site description

📢 Now accepting proposals for the Graduate Research Excellence Grants! These provide evolutionary biology research funds for early and advanced Master’s and PhD students. Applicants must be members of SSE. Deadline: May 18, 2026
www.evolutionsociety.org/content/soci...

The distribution of fitness effects of new mutations in regulatory regions of the D. melanogaster genome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.01.708907v1

I will let my funding agency know immediately.

MBE | The role of society journals in protecting the scientific record

MBE Editors-in-Chief Claudia Russo and Brandon Gaut publish a new editorial on the role of society journals in protecting the scientific record.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag022

#evobio #molbio #societyjournal

@claurusso.bsky.social @bsgaut.bsky.social

This was so damn funny. I was laughing out loud. Thank you for writing it. I hope everyone reads it and gets the point.
kudos @russcd.bsky.social !

The core-pivotal index: a geometry-first approach to academic impact The defining goal of the academic endeavor is to establish a single perfect value that completely summarizes entire careers’ achievements. Such an index wo

@russcd.bsky.social ushers in a new era of academic metrics with the core-pivotal author index, which assigns all credit to authors that occupy the exact center of the author list, while non-central peripheral authors receive no credit whatsoever.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag026

#evobio #molbio

Oh no.. Counting bristles.. Definitely me..... My PhD was basically counting bristles on flies (and then some QG).

Sometimes my weekend laziness bites me in the behind....

As @bbolker.bsky.social points out, this is incorrect! My AI overlords lied to me!!!

I also don't understand how threads work on this. I am never sure if my reply is going to one person or everyone on the thread. Maybe it's best if you just take my laptop from me...

"Embryologist E. E. Just complained that genetics and selection could explain why populations of flies had more or fewer bristles on their backs, but it couldn't explain how a fly constructed its back in the first place (Harrison 1937: 372; Gilbert et al 1996: 361)

Quote is attributed from Amundson R (2005) The Changing role of the embryo in evolutionary thought: Roots of Evo-Devo.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (Google books screenshot → Harrison, Ross G. 1937. “Embryology and Its Relations.” Science 85 (2207): 369–74 (JSTOR screenshot)

Ernest Everett Just - Wikipedia

I think your AI overlords are bullshitting/hallucinating. See the other part of thread on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_... (who sounds like a true badass BTW ...) [off-topic: is there something I can read to update my mental model of BSky threading, which I don't get at all?]

Ha. Not shocking, but good to know. Sorry.

and the original quote may have been....

"It's not the hairs on a fly's back that matter, but if it had a back to begin with"

My AI overlords suggest the following:

This quote is a variant of a famous, often-attributed line by the English writer and philosopher G. K. Chesterton, or sometimes attributed to the philosopher Alan Watts when commenting on Chesterton's style.

I don't know that quote, but I like it!

Maybe someone like Tom Kaufman?

Ah, got it.

yes. I agree that there needs to be some follow through on checking this. When I am an AE on papers I do detail what I specifically expect to see in the repository.

Sorry, for clarification. Is there not a DOI for the data on dryad (or figshare or zenodo etc..), and does it not contain the raw data?

Or you don't like to have to access the data via dryad/etc...

If paleobiology falls in your interest area, check out the “Paleobiology Database” at paleobiodb.org#/ . This database is well-resourced with more than 94,000 references, 517,852 taxa, 276,576 collections, and ~1,000 contributors. #Paleobiology #Organisms #HistoricalGeology

Body size, wing area, and wing loading follow a pattern of trait conservatism in Drosophila https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.12.705663v1

Now I need to learn a new language... Gen Z.

I think these papers may be relevant here

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

www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Tl;dr, the idea is that a wide class of functions exhibit “simplicity bias” when the inputs are selected randomly from a uniform distribution, and that this effect biases biology to simplicity.

banner of the EED meeting showing the university Glasgow main hall and a tartan

🌍 Exciting news! The Euro EvoDevo 2026 conference is coming to Glasgow, UK, from June 9–12. 🔭 Registration just opened—secure your spot now! 👉 www.evodevoconference26.com #EvoDevo2026 #Glasgow #PlantScience

Nice to get a shout out as a reviewer of a paper. Thanks!

Great new paper from Agathe Puissant's PhD in Ecology Letters: predation‐driven adaptive syndromes combining wing shape and colour patterns in Swallowtail Butterflies onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

A new paper on the genetics of fluctuating asymmetry... An old collaborative work finally published!! Thanks to Fred Peronnet and co and reviewer Ian Dworkin academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

SAVE THE DATE: The Atlantic Canada Regional Cell & Developmental Biology Symposium will be held on June 26th, 2026 at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. @anatomyorg.bsky.social @brchfx.bsky.social
#devbio #DevBio
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