Wayne Maddison
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waynemaddison.bsky.social
Wayne Maddison
@waynemaddison.bsky.social
4.1K followers 970 following 440 posts
Raw pu-erh in the morning; oolong in the afternoon. Chocolate: dark milk. Would rather be drawing spider genitalia, usually. Looking forward to the next field trip. Thinking about getting a pottery wheel. Father of two amazing adults. Emeritus Prof @ UBC
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waynemaddison.bsky.social
Does Mesquite's phylogenetic adventure game look familiar to anyone? 🧪 #evolbio
Screenshot of Mesquite's log window, saying: "ZoL: The Great Phylogenetic Adventure! Level 1 You are standing in an open field. In front of you, to your surprise, is an organism. You recognize that it is a Kelp (Ochrophyta). There is a small mailbox here."
October 29, 2025 at 6:32 PM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Mesquite 4.02 update released! It fixes a few bugs and adds Codon Alignment and various other improvements. Also, much faster with genomics files with 1000s of loci. www.mesquiteproject.org 🧪 #evolbio
@bembidion.bsky.social
Mesquite's two icons, one against a black background, and one against a sun on a sky blue background.
October 25, 2025 at 12:37 AM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Update! — Mesquite 4.01 released, fixing a few small and one substantive bug (for details see response post). New: NINJA (for neighbour joining), new merge taxa options, node spots, Google Earth mapping. www.mesquiteproject.org 🧪 #evolbio
@bembidion.bsky.social
Two versions of the Mesquite icon. At left is a Mesquite tree leaf against a black background. At right is leaf against a blue sky and sun.
July 10, 2025 at 3:05 AM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Mesquite 4.0 released! A major update — many new features, small and large (phylogenomics, visualizations, workflow management, &c). Check out the trailer video: www.mesquiteproject.org.

Come discuss in our new Google Group (groups.google.com/g/mesquite-project). @bembidion.bsky.social ‬🧪 #evolbio
The two Mesquite logos. At left, a mesquite tree leaf is against a black background. At right, a leaf is against a blue sky and sun.
June 27, 2025 at 11:16 PM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Mesquite 4.beta2 released! Much faster reading of files with thousands of matrices. New features since 4.beta include Trace All Changes (known from MacClade) and Import GenBank Numbers. www.mesquiteproject.org & discuss at groups.google.com/g/mesquite-p...
‪@bembidion.bsky.social ‬🧪 #evolbio
Two icons of the Mesquite program, with leaves of the mesquite tree against a black background (first icon) and against the blue sky and sun (second icon).
June 8, 2025 at 5:27 PM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Spider taxonomy refreshes my soul. After being distracted by other things for months, I joyfully got back to drawing spider genitalia. Here are this week's drawings. Mostly Habronattus, with one Pellenes. 🧪🐡
Scans of 31 pencil and ink drawings of the male palps and female epigynes of Habronattus and Pellenes jumping spiders.
May 29, 2025 at 6:06 PM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Nope, not blinking.
May 25, 2025 at 6:04 PM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Mesquite 4 beta released! Many new features, esp. phylogenomic. Check out the trailer and longer video on the home page: www.mesquiteproject.org, and use the download link there to get a copy.

Feedback welcome! Ask and discuss on our new Google Group (groups.google.com/g/mesquite-p...).
The Mesquite icon shown, as a Mesquite leaf against a black background, and as a leave against the sun and a blue sky.
May 23, 2025 at 12:04 AM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Quote post with a picture you took in a National Park.

Masoala National Park, Madagascar, November. Cycads by the sea.
February 25, 2025 at 6:40 AM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
If you see this, quote with a bridge from your gallery.

Foot bridge made of vines woven together, land of the Hewa, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea.
A footbridge made of vines woven together stretches across a creek in the tropical rainforest of highland Papua New Guinea. It had been made years prior by an elder of the Hewa people.
January 26, 2025 at 6:03 AM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
We are working on a major update to Mesquite, version 4! We welcome any suggestions for features or fixes. A major emphasis will be phylogenomic data. We may not have time for more big features, but please suggest small features for data maintenance or editing that could make your lives easier.
An image of the icon for Mesquite, a modular system for evolutionary analysis (http://www.mesquiteproject.org)
January 17, 2025 at 4:47 AM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Yes and no. Hull's, Simpson's, Wiley's, de Queiroz's concepts are similar to each other, and might appear like ours. But ours has a key difference. Theirs span or are ambiguous about time frames. Ours places species in an explicit time frame, which we contend is critical. Here is a snippet.
Quote from Maddison & Whitton 2023: "To resolve how biologists should best see and describe a species lineage as it passes through the present moment, in the evolutionary flash-bulb of contemporary research, time frames must be considered carefully ... If a species had an essence, a kernel of identity that endured unaffected, then clarity about time and verb tenses would be unimportant: it was, it is, it will be. It is too easy to slip into thinking that a species does have such a kernel, to look at a line in a phylogenetic diagram and imagine its persistent essence of identity. But there is no essence, just genes and bodies tumbling through time. They have no commitments to one another, no agreed alliances, just qualities that affect the likelihood of interactions moment by moment. These qualities derive from events at varying points in the past, while the fates of descendants in future generations depend on multiple processes unfolding at different rates. Confronted with multidimensionality, biologists seeking to explain, understand, or predict need to choose a species concept whose time frame is suitable for their purposes. What statements a biologist can correctly make about a living species, and what methods should be used to infer its boundaries, depend on how this ambiguity in time frames is resolved."
December 16, 2024 at 5:33 AM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Here is one of our key arguments against operationalist concepts. They were tried by pheneticists and pattern cladists, and (in my view) both failed for the same reason.
A part of section 2.2 of Maddison & Whitton 2023, quoting: "The root of the problem with operationalist species is that there are many ways to build clusters (UPGMA? PCA? NJ? DBSCAN?). Do biologists choose one method arbitrarily and stick with it forever? Cluster methods vary in their ability to reflect the patterns predicted by different processes. As biologists’ understanding of population genetic processes advances, unchanging cluster methods would fail to track that understanding. Their clusters would become less and less relevant to evolutionary biologists, and more and more evidently inadequate for synthesis. But, if the clustering methods change in order to adapt to new understandings of process, then the paradigm implicitly has a process-based species concept hiding behind the curtain, directing, justifying, and thereby accompanying species delimitation."
December 14, 2024 at 4:17 AM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
😢 Two holes visible (one small, by seam), independent. Big rip had no known cause. No fall, big scrape, nothing, just sat down and was surprised to see the rip. Only 2 weeks of field use! Thank goodness for duct tape, needle, and thread.
November 26, 2024 at 7:37 AM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Our field work in Madagascar was greatly facilitated (and made much more enjoyable) by the help of our guide/logistics expert Elysée Velomasy, and his lodge at Masoala.

waynemaddison.wordpress.com/2024/11/25/m...
Gazebo between beach and forest at Elysee Masoala Lodge, northeastern Madagascar.
November 25, 2024 at 5:32 PM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
This hotel accommodates all belief systems.
On wall, two toilet paper dispensers, one oriented over the top to the front, the other to the back.
August 12, 2024 at 3:58 PM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
This is what their bodies look like. (©2024 W.Maddison, under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license)
Male jumping spider, preserved in alcohol. Female jumping spider, preserved in alcohol.
August 2, 2024 at 11:25 PM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
After a 7 month hiatus, it's so good to be drawing again. Drawings of jumping spider genitalia, day 25. Palp, epigyne, and vulva of a new Habrocestoides. 🧪🐡 (©2024 W.Maddison, under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license)
Ink and pencil drawing the male palp of a species of jumping spider. Ink and pencil drawing the female epigyne of a species of jumping spider. Ink and pencil drawing the female vulva of a species of jumping spider.
August 2, 2024 at 11:24 PM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Beautiful and powerful talk by @edyong209.bsky.social and panel discussion by other heroes-who-would-rather-not-have-been-heroes of the pandemic, at SFU Vancouver tonight. #longCOVID #MECFS
Ed Yong standing at podium (masked) with screen showing the title of his talk, and accompanied to his side by panelists Kayli, Katy, Maryanne, Hiten, and Kaylee.
April 5, 2024 at 5:37 AM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
BlueSky is open; quote one art to promote yourself.
Illustration of male jumping spider in courtship pose (Habronattus calcaratus maddisoni). Coloured pencil, paint, and ink. 1976.
February 7, 2024 at 5:39 AM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
A confession about our paper on species concepts (w/@jeannettewhitton.bsky.social). BullSocSysBio requires figure parts to be marked a), b), etc., but I detest unbalanced parens, so I placed the letters on a disk whose shadowed edge could be interpreted as a parenthesis — but isn't 😜. #evolbio 🧪
A portion of Figure 2 from our paper (https://doi.org/10.18061/bssb.v2i1.9358) showing the "a" to mark the figure part, with a crescent beside it that looks like a right parenthesis, but is actually the shadow of a disk.
January 16, 2024 at 5:54 PM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Drawings of jumping spider genitalia, day 24. Vulvae of three female Pellenattus. These simple outline drawings illustrate that two species can be distinguished by the number of coils of the spermatheca, which correlate with the different lengths of the embolus of the males of the two species. 🧪🐡
Outline sketch of vulva of Pellenattus female. Outline sketch of vulva of Pellenattus female. Outline sketch of vulva of Pellenattus female.
December 21, 2023 at 6:14 AM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Drawings of jumping spider genitalia, day 23. Epigynes of three species of Pellenattus, two undescribed and the third rarely seen. The P. longimanus (found by @apsciencebydan.bsky.social — thanks!!) is only the second female I have seen. It has helped me understand variation in the species. 🧪🐡
Epigyne of female of undescribed species of Pellenattus Epigyne of female of undescribed species of Pellenattus Epigyne of female of P. longimanus
December 19, 2023 at 1:40 AM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
Along the way, I had to let go of expectations of theoretical completeness and control. I had to learn how to listen better (to others, including my co-author, and to Nature). Here is a snippet from my blog post.
The scientific process must be lit by the harsh glare of evidence and logic, but it must be accompanied by grace: an offering of open attention towards Nature. The reductionist programme would have us believe that all understanding comes from shattering into pieces and parameters. I might accept that ideas, as they mature, should resolve towards crisp logical abstractions, but we cannot forget that they are our brass rubbings, not nature’s original art. As nature is being explored, as possibilities are being conceived and tested, science must dare to look outward to the untamed, to look beyond our inner dialog, to listen rather than to speak. This is natural history. Science would be barren if it looked only inward to our mental constructs. It would be impoverished if it did not take advantage of the old and deep ability that humans have (some more than others) to grasp flow and collision, form and movement. [more but cut off; see reply post]
December 9, 2023 at 8:06 PM
waynemaddison.bsky.social
A new view of #SpeciesConcepts by @jeannettewhitton.bsky.social and me, clarifying time frames while unifying interbreeding, genealogy, and traits. A general-purpose species should be a reproductive community (bound by cohesive processes) viewed retrospectively (RRCC).  doi.org/10.18061/bss...
Image of first page and an illustration from our paper titled "The species as a reproductive community emerging from the past".
December 9, 2023 at 7:49 PM