iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

In 1983, a colleage at SUNY-Albany had me lecture to his cultural anthropology class on evolutionary ecology. Another prof was doing cultural ecology the same day. The first prof explained that "these are the two parts of anthropology that take it for granted there is a real world."

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Thank you for posting this. I think the report is well done. Henrich marshals several forms of evidence, each of which has weaknesses (which Henrich acknowledges), but which are mutually supportive. I found the piece convincing.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Thanks to you both. In the end, I drew my own diagram in PicTeX, which I do NOT recommend.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Sorry to hear this. When I was a kid, I used to send fossils to Dr. Horace G Richards of the Academy of Natural Sciences, who would identify them and send them back. At the age of 12, I had no idea what a privilege this was.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

There's even a typo in my retraction. $7.4 thousand, not $74 thousand

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

You're right. Correct answer is $74 thousand rather than $7.4 million. Thanks for the skepticism.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Don't T and grip strength both decline with age? I'd have thought that would generate a positive correlation in this graph. Or are they controlling for age but not telling us?

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Logarithmic history just published an essay about the 80:20 hybridization event that formed the ancestral population of modern humans: logarithmichistory.wordpress.com

logarithmichistory.wordpress.com

Logarithmic History

The history of the universe -- from the Big Bang to the end of the year -- day by day

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

It seems to have had gears, a mug holder, and (maybe?) an ignition key. Also I don't remember that cars had center consoles or cup holders in the 50s. Maybe we just didn't have the right cars. Or maybe this isn't real.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Primary ref seems to be Neigel and Avise. 1986. "Phylogenetic relationships of mitochondrial DNA under various demographic models of speciation".

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Avise et al use the term in 1987, citing Neigel and Avise 1986: "Phylogenetic relationships of mitochondrial DNA under various demographic models of speciation"

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Google scholar has citations from 1992.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Does anyone know who coined the term "incomplete lineage sorting"? It wasn't Pamilo and Nei 1988.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

solutions become suboptimal. The lucky few have arrived at solutions that are generalizable. Over time, group selection increases generalizability. But the groups would need to be species with limited gene flow. Otherwise, the process would face the usual problem with Wright's shifting balance model

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

This could work under group selection. Overparameterization allows different groups arrive at different but equivalent solutions to the adaptive problem. (Just as, in statistics, it allows many sets of parameter values to have equal likelihood.) Then the environment shifts, and most of these

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

"the genetic foundation for extended adrenarche is shared between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and may have deeper hominin roots" www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...

biorxiv.org

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

When reviewers disagree, the editor has to choose. I wouldn't read too much into this.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

The Frost/Harpending article was published in spite of at least one negative review--mine. I initially declined the review request, because Henry H was my thesis advisor. But the editor wanted my views anyway. My review was similar to Kevin's. No idea why the editor decided to publish anyway.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

PSMC estimates of Ne now reach back not merely 2 My but more like 8. Estimates from humans, chimps, and bonobos share a peak between 3 and 6 Mya, which may reflect a complex speciation event separating hominins and panins. mcb.peercommunityin.org/articles/rec...

mcb.peercommunityin.org

Genetic Estimates of Population History Reach Even Farther into ...

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Reposted by Alan Rogers

Bryce Anderson @475nm.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

They keep saying that renewable energy "locks in" fossil fuels. This looks like a lockout to me.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

What bothers me is the fact that N is essentially 0 for the last 2e5 y, or 8000 generations. That is enough to get rid of nearly all variation, so there should be almost no power to detect a larger N (or a more structured population) before 8000 generations ago.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Will the International Society for Biomolecular Archaeology (@isbarchaeology.bsky.social) be meeting in 2027? Their website still lists the "upcoming" meeting in 2025.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

All kaput. Haven't seen a turkey in weeks. I understand the city trapped them. Presumably they went to live on a farm.

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Reposted by Alan Rogers

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

The genome of the Pacific acorn barnacle provides insights into the evolution of extremely large populations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Do you think that boulder is a glacial erratic?

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

Morez Jacobs et al used 45k genomes to localize Neandertal haplotypes w/i the British; used these to infer the SFS of the introgressing Neandertals; and then inferred population history parameters of the introgressing pop. Also lots about selection. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.org

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Population replacement in Neolithic France at the end of the megalith period. scholar.google.com/scholar_url?...

scholar.google.com

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Reposted by Alan Rogers

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

The Neanderthal population history and the introgression landscape inferred from the UK Biobank www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…

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Kat Abughazaleh @katmabu.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

This is the most delightful thing I’ve ever read

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Reposted by Alan Rogers

Katerina Douka @katerinad.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

A few years ago, using palaeoproteomics, we identified a tiny hominin bone from Denisova Cave and named it Denisova 17 (D17). A rather unremarkable sliver. At the time, I wondered, could it be Denny’s sibling (the Neanderthal/Denisovan hybrid we had just reported)? Well, turns out: no. 🧵1/4

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Reposted by Alan Rogers

John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

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Reposted by Alan Rogers

Cedric Boeckx @cedricboeckx.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

“Human ancestors interbred with two distinct populations of distant relatives” nice new preprint by @alanrogers.bsky.social @colinmbrand.bsky.social @timwebster.bsky.social showing that “archaics” & “moderns” interbred with two distinct “superarchaic” populations 🧪🧬💀

biorxiv.org

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Can anyone tell me what software makes graphs like this (from Cousins, Scally, and Durbin 2025)?

Graph showing history of human population size, separation, and gene flow over past 1.5 Ma.

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Reposted by Alan Rogers

Eric Holthaus @ericholthaus.com · 09/01/2026

Welcome to Minnesota, fuckers. Also this is super disturbing because the ICE agent's assault rifle appears to fire as he falls down. This was filmed by a friend near Chicago and Lake last night.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

"Trump’s National Security Strategy made one thing brutally clear and that is that the United States is no longer fully shaping its own foreign policy. The document reads like parts of it were written in Moscow and stamped in Washington." www.dailykos.com/stories/2025...

dailykos.com

BOMBSHELL: Russia Was Planning a Massive Terrorist Attack on Europe and the U.S. in 2024

Shocking new story out of The Financial Times (paywalled) that supports a BBC report from last year: Russia has been conducting a terror war against the rest of Europe for years. Assassinations, acts ...

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

I often restrict sample of loci to those with identical alleles in reference genomes of two outgroup species, chimpanzee and gorilla. But if N of species A is large, different individuals should differ in difference to B.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

@peercommunityin.bsky.social is one solution to this problem. We should all support it. #peercommunityin

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

Here's a link to the website of this course as hosted by the University of Utah: content.csbs.utah.edu/~rogers/tch/...

content.csbs.utah.edu

Biol 5221: Human Evolutionary Genetics

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

I taught (and co-taught) a course on human population genetics from 2000-2024. Having retired, I'm now making all the course materials public: github.com/alanrogers/p... #popgen #evbio

github.com

GitHub - alanrogers/popgen: A course on population genetics

A course on population genetics. Contribute to alanrogers/popgen development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

Maybe so. The estimated rate of M>N gene flow is lower than that in the other direction, but it would surely contribute.

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

How much phylogenetic information is in a small sample of proteins? Pastramanis et al answer this question and also discover a puzzle: each protein added to an analysis of modern and archaic humans increases support for a single implausible hypothesis. evolbiol.peercommunityin.org/articles/rec...

evolbiol.peercommunityin.org

Measuring the Phylogenetic Information in Proteins

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Chuck Schumer @schumer.senate.gov · 03/08/2025

The Art of the Deal.

A post from Donald Trump reads: “Senator Cryin’ Chuck Schumer is demanding over One Billion Dollars in order to approve a small number of our highly qualified nominees, who should right now be helping to run our Country. This demand is egregious and unprecedented, and would be embarrassing to the Republican Party if it were accepted. It is political extortion, by any other name. Tell Schumer, who is under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the Radical Left Lunatics, to GO TO HELL! Do not accept the offer, go home and explain to your constituents what bad people the Democrats are, and what a great job the Republicans are doing, and have done, for our Country. Have a great RECESS and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

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Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

Troff came before TeX, at least in my life. But yes, it was wonderful.

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