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⚡️🔩Felsenstein's Monster🔩⚡️

@josephwb.bsky.social

2.5K followers 450 following 3.2K posts

Comp. evol. biol., fake ornithologist, LFHCfs, Luddite, CSH I get down methodically Without regard to my soul tinyurl.com/G00gleSch0lar HHGG bot: @whalepetunias.bsky.social pfp: Chickens exposed to natural beard hair on a mannequin hdr: socks & sandals

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⚡️🔩Felsenstein's Monster🔩⚡️ @josephwb.bsky.social · Dec 28

I made this over the break. Why would I do such a thing? Am I some sort of #phylogenetics dork? Well... yes, but that's not why. To fully explain I'll have to do one of those sewing-strings-wrapped-around-a-spool dealies. 1/ 🧪

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⚡️🔩Felsenstein's Monster🔩⚡️ @josephwb.bsky.social · 10m

Dang that cover rulez

FishEvo Zuzana Musilova @fishevo.bsky.social · 11d

Our Special issue on Visual Ecology in Challenging Environments is out: #coral reef & #deep-sea fishes, #reindeers on polar daylight, #bioluminescence, non-visual #pigments & life in dark caves. Happy to co-edit with Sara Stieb + thks to all contributors! See in Functional Ecology: buff.ly/z5AYxZQ

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Dr. Elizabeth Santos @lizmillermacroevo.bsky.social · 18h

New paper on deep-sea fish diversity out now in @sse-evolution.bsky.social, with @cmartinez.bsky.social and @sarahtfried.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

Distinct evolutionary signatures underlie body shape diversity across deep sea habitats

Abstract. The deep sea is known for extreme biological conditions such as high pressure, little-to-no solar light and cold temperatures. Despite these chal

academic.oup.com

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Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra @jrossibarra.bsky.social · 7h

Sweet pdoc fellowship! Would be really excited to work with someone interested in applying ancestral recombination graphs to messy, real-world data in plant genomes. Happy to chat if you might be interested!

Simons Postdoctoral Fellowships in Plant Biology

Simons Postdoctoral Fellowships in Plant Biology on Simons Foundation

www.simonsfoundation.org

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Shelly Gaynor @shellygaynor.bsky.social · 12h

Updated tutorials for nQuack today. Want to predict ploidy level of sequence data? See this new tutorial on how to process and model data faster: mlgaynor.com/nQuack/artic...

a little boy is driving a red toy car on the street .

Alt: a little kid is driving a red toy car on the street.

media.tenor.com

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⚡️🔩Felsenstein's Monster🔩⚡️ @josephwb.bsky.social · 15h

Judging books by their covers actually has a pretty good success rate.

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 1d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

⚡️🔩Felsenstein's Monster🔩⚡️ @josephwb.bsky.social · 16h

Gail would be a shoe-in for the Ig Nobel Prize, which aims to "honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think."

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Sean A. S. Anderson 🍉 @seananderson.bsky.social · 19h

Now available in Systematic Biology, a new paper (and R package) in which we outline an approach to account for non-independence in comparative analyses of lineage-pair traits academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

The Comparative Analysis of Lineage-Pair Traits

Abstract. For many questions in ecology and evolution, the most relevant data to consider are attributes of lineage pairs. Comparative tests for causal rel

academic.oup.com

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Angela Collier @acollierastro.bsky.social · 20h

how do I get smart people to hate me instead. I'm tired of reading dumbass comments.

Did I hear right? You got a flu and covid vaccines? Why? A young and healthy adult is at exactly zero risk from either flu or covid.
The only thing that can make you sick is the vaccines themselves - case in point, that's what happened. Jeezus. So dissapointing. I feel an urge to unsubscribe.
PS I now wonder if you can tell what a woman is...

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⚡️🔩Felsenstein's Monster🔩⚡️ @josephwb.bsky.social · 22h

youtu.be/z1cP4xKd_L4?...

The 35th First Annual Ig Nobel Ceremony (2025) FULL SHOW

YouTube video by Improbable Research

youtu.be

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The Palaeontological Association @thepalass.bsky.social · 23h

🦕 For #PalAss members:
Are you planning to participate in #PalAss2025? 🌍
Don’t forget to check this option ✅

💡 All information can be found here ⬇️
🔗 palass.org/palaeontolog...

#palass #conference #bursary #possibility #apply

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Josef Uyeda @pseudacris.bsky.social · 23h

More on rate-scaling in phenotypic evolution, pointing toward biological explanations, from Brune Kinneberg & Voje. Lots of debate about this pattern, but comes down to how we define "noise" vs. "biology" as represented in models. Important philosophical discussion.
academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

Rate-time scaling in phenotypic evolution: Limitations of current models in capturing temporal dynamics

Abstract. Evolutionary rates correlate negatively with time, which makes it complicated to compare rates across lineages that have diversified on different

academic.oup.com

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⚡️🔩Felsenstein's Monster🔩⚡️ @josephwb.bsky.social · 23h

I ditched spotify during the whole Rogan thing. Been using Tidal ever since, and have no real complaints :)

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Andrew Hipp @andrewlhipp.bsky.social · 1d

A clear illustration of at least one reason why inferences from macroevolutionary (Ornstein-Uhlenbeck) adaptation models don't reliably predict microevolution.

Schluter D. 2024. Evolutionary Journal of the Linnean Society 3: kzae016.

doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Figure 3. A, a hypothetical adaptive landscape with multiple adaptive peaks (+) oriented along a corridor, some of which are occupied by species (grey ellipses). Contours represent population mean fitness as a function of population mean in two traits. The direction of maximum genetic variation within species (gmax) is indicated by an arrow. The heavy dashed line indicates the major direction of the corridor of adaptive peaks. I assume the hypothetical species occupying the landscape are broadly sympatric (otherwise adaptive peaks from different regions would need to be superimposed somehow). B, the OU stationary distribution or ‘surface’ estimated from the means of the five species in A superimposed on the same adaptive landscape. Species means are indicated by filled circles. Contours indicate probability density of the fitted bivariate Gaussian OU distribution. The grand mean is indicated by θ. The stationary distribution was estimated using the mvMORPH package (Clavel et al. 2015) in R 4.3.2 assuming a random phylogeny for the five species.

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⚡️🔩Felsenstein's Monster🔩⚡️ @josephwb.bsky.social · 1d

I love me a good "shan’t". Not to be overused, for sure.

⚡️🔩Felsenstein's Monster🔩⚡️ @josephwb.bsky.social · 1d

I happen upon them far too rarely, but every time is with glee.

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Tharusha Wijewardena 🐢 @turtleecology.bsky.social · 1d

Green Herons are such beautiful birds! And I love this photograph I took in Florida couple of days ago.

Could have been a delicious snack if the dragonfly was caught. 🤭

Green Heron staring at dragonfly on the end of the branch.

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Steve McKerrall @photosteve.bsky.social · 1d

Narcissus the Black-necked Stilt
#birds

A black-necked stilt bending down with its bill just touching the water, its image is perfectly reflected in the water beneath it.

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⚡️🔩Felsenstein's Monster🔩⚡️ @josephwb.bsky.social · 1d

Data available upon request

Marjorie James Keenan @unenthusiast.com · 2d

In honour of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand.

rm -rf ~/

hammancheez @hammancheez.bsky.social · 2d

"The chancellor approved it"

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Barry Butler Photography @barrybutler9.bsky.social · 1d

Rolling Out The Red Carpet. Today at the Chicago Marathon.

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Karen Masters @karenlmasters.bsky.social · 2d

Jess Wade is amazing, and it's my absolute honour to be one of the more than 2000 women in STEM whose wikipedia page she started: mymodernmet.com/jessica-wade... 🧪🔭👩‍🔬

Meet the Physicist Who Wrote Over 2,000 Wikipedia Biographies for Women in STEM

After noticing a lack of entries on Wikipedia for incredible women throughout history, this incredible woman decided to take matters into her own hands.

mymodernmet.com

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Poorly Drawn Lines @poorlydrawnlines.bsky.social · 3d

second floor

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⚡️🔩Felsenstein's Monster🔩⚡️ @josephwb.bsky.social · 2d

_Dang_ that episode title is a deep cut

#StarTrek #LowerDecks

Opening image of a Star Trek: Lower Decks episode. Two federation starships are orbiting a red/orange gaseous planet. In blue font in the upper right of the screen is the episode's title "Parth Ferengi's Heart Place". This is a play on the show "Garth Marenghi's Darkplace".

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Nils Chabrol @nilschabrol.bsky.social · 5d

First post here to show a bit the work I did with Joëlle Barido-Sottani and Hélène Morlon on phylogenetic diversification models with heterogeneous rates in a Fossilized BD Framework
🦴:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
The paper is still under review but the method is already available in BEAST 2 !

The Fossilized Birth Death Process with heterogeneous diversification rates unravels the link between diversification and specialisation to a carnivorous diet in Nimravidae (Carnivoraformes)

Bayesian phylogenetic inference uses more and more complex diversification models as tree priors to test new macroevolutionary hypotheses. However, those models are usually developed in a neontologica...

www.biorxiv.org

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Tristan A.F. Long @thelonglab.bsky.social · 3d

Gave my poster for the annual @laurierbiology.bsky.social #BI499 thesis proposal poster session a Hallowe'en makeover! #SciArt

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⚡️🔩Felsenstein's Monster🔩⚡️ @josephwb.bsky.social · 2d

Fun watching how Wet Leg is evolving youtu.be/zIEZdq_25bs?...

Wet Leg - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

YouTube video by KEXP

youtu.be