jeffspear.bsky.social

A tool to quickly match taxon names between a dataset and a phylogenetic tree, built for folks doing phylogenetic comparative analyses: github.com/spearw/phylo...

For years, 💀MorphoSource💀 has given researchers, educators, and students 🚨free access🚨 to 3D data on museum specimens from around the world. 🔆Now it is asking for some help to continue its work🔆 www.morphosource.org/donate/

New Study Shows That Bones Are Incredibly Cool

African apes--still quite informative about the ancestral hominin anatomy, despite persistent rumors otherwise. Our new paper out now led by the talented Dr. Laura Hunter.

Can any phylogenetic comparative methods folks help me understand why the Adams & Collyer RRPP method exhibits better statistical power than BM-based permutation methods (e.g. Garland et al. pANOVA)? The permuted approach makes intuitive sense to me and RRPP being better feels like dark magic lol.

... (2) most things, even those considered 'well known' are vastly under-tested, even non-tested entirely. There's SO MUCH to do on the data we already have. Part of me thinks I should call this out at every opportunity, flag it as needing attention. But I can't: wordcount is always an issue.

this is amazing, will be using this to teach about social construction of colors in my philosophy class #philsci moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...

An impressive tour de force on how evolution came to be accepted by the scientific community. We often learn about great discoveries but rarely how consensus gets built. Highly recommend watching if you have... uh... four hours to spare?

Well dang. One more mystery in Rising Star (although I feel like I've had this in the back of my mind for some time... Was there a rumor about this floating around before?). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I hope people are doing research on internet video learning and I wish there could be at least half the resources devoted to online video education as to AI in education.

I have three initial thoughts on this: 1) Amazing fossil! Exciting to see our knowledge of apes in Africa expand geographically 2) That is a very questionable use of ASR 3) Come on, Science, seriously no methods whatsoever in the main text!?

Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us

Dental Formulas xkcd.com/3213/

This is great. It's not as in depth as the suggestions here, but at my JC in grad school we always asked two questions at the end: "What is the most valuable thing we can take from this paper?" and "What's the next step we would take related to that most valuable thing?" It was fantastic.

A great question about the context of Sahelanthropus from @fossilhistory.bsky.social. Figured I'd share it and my best attempt at answering it, rather than letting it linger in replies.

Professional anatomist here. I label this diagram "Job Security."

This kind of simple, robust, hypothesis-driven test of our existing assumptions is so important for our ability to interpret fossils. We need more of it!

This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for people who put their data on Morphosource.

Paleo folks: Please recommend researchers (incl yourselves) interested in phylogenetic reconstruction in deep time, molecular clocks (discord w/ fossil clocks), foundational/methodological issues in phylo/paleo-reconstruction & who'd be interested in hanging w/ historians & philosophers of science ⚒️

Angela Collier is fantastic, and this is possibly my favorite of her videos. Highly recommend a watch for a fascinating story about the discovery in insulin and who gets the credit.

Curious whether anyone knows if authors of scientific papers are members of this Class, or whether we signed that away to the publishers? Regardless, it's interesting to see which of my papers were used.

First official postdoc paper out in @jexpbiol.bsky.social! We compare different approaches to studying kinematics in a macaque ankle and note that the talocrural joint seems to contribute minimally to dorsiflexion of the foot during stance phase. journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Buried in the regime's political takeover letter of the Smithsonian is the worst bit. Unlike exhibits, which are non-destructive towards primary materials, temporary in nature, and reversible, the foundational collections are irreplacable. They want to be able to throw stuff out.

I am no constitutional scholar, but I can't help but feel that "the President gets to dictate what every university can teach and what every television station should broadcast" is closer to what the founding fathers were worried about when it comes to free speech than trigger warnings on syllabi.

www.popehat.com/p/the-fourth...

One of the marvelous things about the United States - something it shares with Rome, I might add - is that American identity is fundamentally legal in definition and almost totally binary. Regardless of my politics or his, Zohran Mamdani, naturalized in 2018, is every bit as much an American as me.

Using ancestral state reconstructions to generate hypotheses about primate evolution and testing them against the fossil record. urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=htt... This has been in the works a long time and I'm really pleased to finally have it out! Thanks to all who contributed.

Musing: one side effect of constantly defending (eg an institution or a political party) against disinformation and bad faith criticism is that you can become habituated to ignoring all criticism (as bad faith), which makes it difficult to learn, adapt, grow, and address your actual weaknesses.

Population wide supplementation as a public health intervention is not new and has yielded incredible health benefits through the years don't let the misguided attacks on fluoridated water fool you. Why do you think iodide is added to table salt? Since we are intent of forgetting history here is a 🧵

“And I’m like, what do you mean, you ‘do your own research’? You running a double-blind study in your living room, dawg?” - A guy walking ahead of me with his friends on a NYC sidewalk in 2021, also my favorite overheard dialogue of the entire pandemic

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

TLDR: the administration wants to remove habitat loss from the definition of "harm" for endangered species, which will effectively gut the ESA. I just commented. If you're in any way interested in ecology, nature, and the protection of endangered species, you should, too. Free daily action!

New paper on evolvability in apes, and whether it can help us make sense of the messy evolution of locomotion in that group. My results suggest a feedback effect between integration and the response to selection. We need more research on how integration evolves! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

This is how I tend to think about our history, to be honest: the story of American greatness is a story of overcoming the flaws in our republic. And there are periods of retreat and backlash, but in the past, we've always renewed the quest for that more perfect union.

If you let them do this to immigrants - again *legal* immigrants - you will have *no way* to know when they start doing it to citizens. They'll feed you the exact same lies and refuse to disclose the identities of the people disappeared (as they're doing now).

Letter to leadership of universities being targeted, to run in Chronicle tomorrow. Academic friends, pls sign if you are a US citizen and tenured (ie it’s safe for you to do so) “We Must Leverage the Strength of Our Institutions and Stand Together” Text in replies docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

🧪 The NSF director is lying to you. Let’s fact check 7 claims from yesterday’s letter to the community, while pointing out 3 critical omissions. 🧵

As JFK famously said, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. Unless they have the gall to say facts to my face. Then f*** 'em."