iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Logan Roy explaining Brownian motion

Logan Roy: "Everything everywhere is always moving forever"

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Jorge Luis Borges did the "tears in rain" spiel before Blade Runner did

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

6. Does it really matter if you win or lose the genetic lottery? www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

5. The Genetic Lottery is a bust for both genetics and policy massivesci.com/articles/gen...

In her new book, The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden, professor of psychology at University of Texas at Austin, attempts the seemingly impossible task of showing that, despite a history of abuse, behavioral genetics is not only scientifically valuable but is an asset to the social justice movement.

In this attempt, she fails twice. For the first half of the book, Harden tries to transform the disappointment of behavioral genetics in the years following the Human Genome Project into a success that proves that genes are a major and important cause of social inequality, like educational attainment or income levels. In the second half, she tries to show that this information is not a justification for inequality, rather it is a tool to use in our efforts to make society more equitable and cannot be ignored if we wish to be successful. To say the least, this section too falls short. Harden refuses to engage with the history and trajectory of her field, and ultimately the science fails to uphold the idea that not considering genetic differences hinders our attempts to create a more equitable world.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

4. Why Biology is not Destiny www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

You must know the parable about the frog that sits in a pot of water being gradually heated, allowing itself to be boiled alive: because the change happens gradually, it never realizes it should leap out. Reading Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality is a similar experience, as the author ingenuously points out. “Like a frog being slowly boiled alive,” she observes, readers follow her argument “from an uncontroversial premise to a highly controversial one.” Harden’s “uncontroversial premise” in this case is that siblings raised in the same family share a childhood environment and 50 percent of their DNA randomly assigned at conception, and are therefore like subjects in a controlled study of genetic differences. Ask anyone with a sibling whether their own childhood environment was the same as their sibling’s and you’ll quickly disprove Harden’s claim that her premise is uncontroversial. But putting that objection aside and sitting patiently as Harden increases the heat, we’ll arrive at her “highly controversial” assertion that “if siblings who differ genetically also have corresponding differences in their health or well-being or education, this is evidence that genes are causing these social inequalities.”

Harden is a dedicated frog boiler. She introduces many comfortably room-temperature premises: measurement is essential to science; people differ genetically; genes caus

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

3. Why DNA Is No Key to Social Equality: On Kathryn Paige Harden’s “The Genetic Lottery” lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-...

Yet in her effort to convince readers that genes matter, Harden overstates the degree to which they matter. She tells readers that, “in samples of White people living in high-income countries, a polygenic index created from the educational attainment GWAS typically captures about 10–15 percent of the variance in outcomes like years of schooling, performance on standardized academic tests, or intelligence test scores.” She compares this figure to that for household income, which accounts for 11 percent of the variance. What Harden doesn’t tell readers is that much more of the variance is explained by parental education: about 17 percent when only one parent is considered and over 20 percent when both are. The polygenic index for educational attainment therefore captures an underwhelming amount of variance in educational attainment and other socioeconomic outcomes — certainly not enough to justify putting it at the center of policy solutions.

Harden expects that, as GWAS samples grow, the polygenic index will become more predictive, but exactly how it predicts educational attainment is not at all straightforward. Consider how Harden chooses to present the 10–15 percent figure, making it account for educational attainment through biological mechanisms. She tells her readers that the genes involved are expressed preferentially in our brains, where they increase the bearer’s intelligence, executive function, grit, and perseverance — the cognitive and non-cognitive skills rewarded in our educational system and labor market. What Harden doesn’t tell us is that these genes are also “expressed” in our environments. People with higher polygenic indices for educational attainment are both more likely to be raised by parents with higher socioeconomic status and to go to well-funded schools. A study of adoptees suggests that about half of the effect of the polygenic index operates through these indirect mechanisms. Harden acknowledges this complex

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

2. Luck, Lottery, or Legacy? The Problem of Confounding. A reply to Harden gcbias.org/wp-content/u...

she does, and moving from ancestry groups to racial labels, she describes a near future in
which we will have a polygenic score “that is as strongly related, statistically, to academic
achievement in Black students as it is in White students.” [p. 191] (This conflation of an-
cestry and race is particularly consequential when considering Black Americans, who vary
greatly in their proportions of recent African and European ancestries, in ways that are
correlated with both geography and economic opportunity (e.g., Micheletti et al., 2020;
Baharian et al., 2016).) Harden warns the reader, however, that such comparisons be-
tween Black and White Americans would be “scientifically and ethically wrong” [p. 192]. To
explain why comparisons of genetic effects between groups are invalid, and will remain so
even when polygenic scores have been constructed for both, she refers to statistical issues
that arise from confounders and the lack of environmental homogeneity. But as we outline
in our review, similar problems, differing in degree rather than in kind, apply to the move
from within-family studies to standard GWAS.
Harden interprets our charge that she is trying to have it both ways as somehow related
to polygenic scores being “simultaneously meaningful. . . and limited, by virtue of their con-
textual dependence and imperfect portability” , adding “As the author Maggie Nelson wrote:
‘There is a lot to be learned from having it both ways’ ”. In reality, we were making the
point that she cannot overlook the effects of confounding when interpreting polygenic scores
within European-ancestry GWAS individuals–let alone within the racial grouping of “Black
Americans"–only to resurrect them when seeking protection against the implications of her
claims for between ancestry-group comparisons. The truth is that polygenic scores for ed-
ucational attainment are also confounded within ancestry groupings, in ways that greatly
complicate interpretatio

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Given that Harden has a new book out that is largely a repeat of her first book, The Genetic Lottery, here's a list of critical reviews of that book. 1. Lottery, Luck, or Legacy: gcbias.org/wp-content/u...

In our view, these instances reflect a more general tension in the book, which arises
from trying to have it both ways: to argue that PGS for educational attainment provide
interpretable and meaningful predictions of inter-individual differences that reflect under-
lying genetic causes, yet to claim that they have no validity beyond hypothetical ancestry
group boundaries. As we have laid out, we believe instead that current PGS for educational
attainment are neither interpretable nor particularly meaningful. GWAS undoubtedly cap-
tures some causal genetic effects, i.e., more than confounding alone, and there is interesting
science to learn from these initial findings. But we currently understand next to nothing
about the causal paths from GWAS findings to educational attainment, notably the extent
to which they include analogs of Jencks-style “red hair effects” and the legacy of accumulated
indirect effects. That may not matter when PGS for EA are to be employed as a statistical
tool in the study of the impact of local social interventions, but it matters greatly when they
are used to elucidate, let alone redress, social inequalities.
Given these limitations, we do not see what the field of genetics has to add to the conver-
sation about redistributive justice, beyond confirming what has long been recognized–that
life outcomes differ for all kinds of reasons beyond people’s control–and we very much doubt
that overstating our understanding of the genetics of behaviors is going to increase empa-
thy. As the author appreciates, there is a history of this kind of practice, invariably with
nefarious consequences, yet every generation seems to believe that their technological twist
will help them to avoid the same pitfalls. Despite its engaging narrative, the Genetic Lottery
therefore leaves us unconvinced, and with the impression of genomics serving as a distraction
from much more exigent political conversations

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

I'm so happy that someone has finally described the game plan of this little cottage industry so clearly. It's one more example of the scam economy we all live under now.

Importantly, in order for polygenic scoring to become a profitable and transformative industry, it doesn’t need to work. That is, these metrics do not need to pick out a class of people with a genuine propensity for virtue or vice, nor does screening an embryo for higher scores need to improve intelligence or law-abidingness. This biotech grift could become the latest trend in conspicuous consumption simply because enough people believe it works. It’s a question of our faith in predestination.

An “ethics” industry has grown up around this prospect, focused on the fear that granting limited access to this technology (only to those who can afford it) will create a separate race of tall, athletic, beautiful, brilliant, and virtuous children, who would cordon themselves off from the dysgenic masses. The true function of such alarmism, as with discourses of “AI safety” and “existential risk,” is to reinforce the false inevitability of these technologies’ success.

In fact, the stratified society being prophesied already exists—the children of the wealthy already live in a world apart. Everything from their healthcare to their schooling and experiences with the criminal justice system are fundamentally different from the realities of those with fewer resources. At no point in the present or future will maintaining this stratification require the wealthy or their children to be inherently healthier, more intelligent, or more virtuous. Hierarchy is a function of power, amassed within social, historical, and political structures, and resistance requires challenging the belief that social elites are truly the Elect.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Yep yep yep. Really highlights how the cognitive dissonance at the heart of Harden's liberal friendly eugenics, which was apparent in 'The Genetic Lottery' too. Liberal eugenics just-so happens to be Not Racist for XYZ technical reasons, but conveniently XYZ reasons don't apply to class differences

Harden’s purported measure of criminality reveals another perennial failing of this scientific method. Respondents were asked if they had ever been arrested, convicted, or incarcerated, and their answers were taken to represent their innate predisposition toward lawbreaking (data for this question came from two US databases, Add Health and COGA). It is inexcusable not to know, or to pretend not to know, that who gets ensnared in the US justice system has little to do with innate tendencies toward violence or lawbreaking. (For excellent critiques of what Harden says—or leaves unsaid—about race, see M. W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin and Anne O’Connor et al.) If the US prison population in the last 50 or so years has grown from less than 100 per 100,000 people to more than 500, that is not because of a change in the population or its genetic makeup. A societal structure, created through a deliberate history of political decisions, determines these “trait values,” and in turn determines who will check yes when a geneticist asks them if they have been incarcerated. Changing this structure or this context would change the “genetics of sin,” which we can therefore see are not a transparent reflection of our nature.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

If I had this written about a research paper of mine I would simply exit from any sort of public life forever

How did they claim to distinguish nature from nurture? Consider just one item from Harden and her co-authors’ laundry list: “age of first sexual encounter.” Their study depends on the notion that the earlier this takes place, the more evidence we have that a person is innately driven toward general risk-taking by an absence of self-control. (A Christian morality pulls the strings behind the scenes of this science: where else does one derive the concept of abstinence as virtue?) Still, they make a noteworthy exception: “[W]e coded all individuals with responses below the age of 12 as missing [i.e., as providing no data on the question], as this could reflect childhood sexual abuse rather than earlier onset of sexual behavior.”

One does not need to be a psychologist—in fact, maybe it helps not to be—to spot the shortcomings of this quick fix. Among other things, it is possible to be sexually abused at any age. Harden and her colleagues obviously recognize that they need to filter out this possibility, in order to even pretend their number is a proxy for innate virtue or vice, as opposed to external happenstance, but the data available provides no rigorous way of distinguishing nature from nurture.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Did Harden not write the following? I think it's fair to call bullshit on this just as we call bullshit on when Charles Murray says it

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Fondly remembering that Gad Saad has gifted us hilarious examples of evolutionary psychology's "just-so" storytelling E.g., women don't want a mandatory paternity test shoved on them, because they're duplicitous harlots, and not for any other reasons www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/homo...

Evolutionary Psychology Yields Fascinating and Unexpected Findings.
Evolutionary Psychology's Explanatory Powers.
Posted June 29, 2009

I recently had an email exchange with a biochemist about the ability of evolutionary psychology (EP) to generate important and valid scientific knowledge. During our e-chats, he challenged me to provide him with findings that have ever been uncovered via the EP framework that were "great, profound, and valuable." At first, I responded that this was a silly challenge as I found it hard to believe that even a strident anti-EPer such as himself could genuinely believe that of the endless scientific papers that have been published within the framework, not a SINGLE one possessed any value or merit (apparently he could not think of any). The biochemist replied that my unwillingness to provide him with any examples was implicitly supportive of his very low opinion of EP. I could not allow such a throwing down of the gauntlet to go unchallenged, so I sent him the following list of 15 findings, which I subsequently posted as a comment on his blog. This is not meant to be the definitive list of key EP findings, as there are endless other ones that could have been included herewith. Rather, it is meant to capture the wide range of topics that are addressed by EPers.

(12) Women are less receptive to mandatory hospital DNA paternity testing (for obvious reasons). In other words, their willingness to adopt a new product/service is fully driven by an evolutionary-based calculus.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

A quick look at the editorial board of this journal reveals how this slop got published: it's filled with the Quillette freak crowd, including Cory Clark, Steven Pinker, and (lol) Colin Wright link.springer.com/journal/1118...

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Gad Saad, the evo psych hack and IDW reject, has published a new evo psych "paper". It is an extended twitter screed that's indistinguishable from standard Nazi talking points. This is apparently what passes as scholarship in the Springer journal 'Theory and Society'

The revival of the social sciences – inoculation against
parasitic ideas and suicidal empathy, and the quest for
consilience via the evolutionary lens
Gad Saad1
Received: 29 September 2025 / Accepted: 24 November 2025
© The Author(s) 2026
Abstract
To maximally flourish, the social sciences must be inoculated against parasitic ideas
(e.g., postmodernism) and suicidal empathy (e.g., an epistemology of care), both
of which arise when the pursuit of truth is confounded with social justice activism.
Furthermore, the social sciences currently exist in disorganized if not incoherent silos of knowledge void of an organizing meta-theory. The evolutionary lens provides
such a unifying framework whilst engendering the requisite consilience.
Keywords Parasitic ideas · Suicidal empathy · Consilience · Evolution · Social
sciences
Over the past three decades, the social sciences have promulgated ideas that serve
as a blitzkrieg on science, logic, reason, common sense, and the most fundamental fabric of reality. This first became evident in my early attempts to incorporate
evolutionary psychology within the business school in general and marketing and
consumer behavior in particular (Saad, 2007, 2011a, 2013). Most social scientists
resisted the idea that the human mind is shaped by the exact same evolutionary forces
that have forged every other species on earth. Apparently, evolutionary theory could
be used to explain every single species on earth save one: Homo sapiens. This has
been coined the human reticence effect (Ranney & Thanukos, 2011). Some social
scientists are willing to concede that evolution might explain the evolution of our
respiratory, digestive, and urinary systems but to use evolution to explain the human
mind, well, that is pure anti-science quackery.

What could cause many social scientists to be so removed from reality? Saad
(2020a) argued that human beings are susceptible to have their neuronal circuitry
hijacked not only by actual brain worms (Flegr, 2007; Goczol, 2025; Lafferty, 2006)
but by ideological brain parasites, which he coined as idea pathogens. In other words,
the neuro-parasitological framework (McAuliffe, 2016; Moore, 2002) explains how
human minds could be zombified by ideological capture. Examples of parasitic ideas
include postmodernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism, biophobia, transgender activism, radical feminism, a rejection of meritocracy via the promulgation
of the diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE) cult, and identity politics along with
its ethos of eternal victimhood. These ghastly ideas originate from social scientists
housed in universities (see also Saad, 2025a) hellbent on creating a utopian world
rooted in their progressive idealism. In this make-believe world, objective truth is too
constraining. Instead, it is better to adhere to postmodernism, with its liberating dictum that no universal truths exist. Its emancipatory allure frees us all from epistemological constraints. Along those lines, it is excessively “mean” to posit that all people
are not created with equal potentiality. Social constructivism rescues us from reality,
by purporting that we are all born as blank slates (Pinker, 2002), to potentially be
molded into nearly anything via the appropriate schedule of reinforcement. It is also
too restrictive to presume that one’s biological sex might be deterministically established by one’s chromosomes and genitalia. T

All these parasitic ideas start off with the hope of achieving a noble objective
rooted in social justice (Saad, 2020a). If along the way truth must be sacrificed, activist social scientists construe this as a small incidental price to pay. The epistemology of truth (the scientific method) takes a backseat to the epistemology of care and
empathy, a topic that I discuss in my forthcoming book Suicidal Empathy (Saad,
2026). To fully hijack human reasoning requires that both our cognitive and emotional systems be fully parasitized. This is precisely why the neuro-parasitological
framework is particularly apt, because it explicitly explains how organisms might
engage in suicidal behavior to advance the objectives of the parasite. Wood crickets
(Nemobius sylvestris), once parasitized by a hairworm (Paragordius tricuspidatus),
commit suicide by jumping into water, as the neuro-parasite requires this to complete
its reproductive cycle (Sanchez et al., 2008; Libersat et al., 2018). Parasitized human
minds, bathing in the ideological solace of suicidal empathy, are not only killing the
social sciences but destroying the fabric of the West (Saad, 2025b). Take the West’s
open door immigration policy. Cultural relativism, a parasitic idea, forbids Westerners from casting judgment regarding the practices and beliefs of other cultures lest
they be accused of being bigots. Who are we to judge the stoning of women or the
taking of child brides? This yields the suicidally empathetic reflex to state that all
immigrants are equally likely to assimilate within the West, and to accordingly insist
on allowing entrance to millions of people who do not share the deontological principles that serve as the bedrock of Western liberties and freedoms. The outcome is not
difficult to predict if you possess the courage of extrapolation.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Rainbow lorikeets got published in Science. Big congrats to all rainbow lorikeets and bird lovers in general www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Fig. 1. Genome assemblies, annotations, and transcriptomes.
(A) Species representing the four sugar-consuming groups. [Bird photos (top to bottom): Steven L. Hunter (ML426078561), David J. Southall (ML431374521), Gerald R. Allen (ML633429605), and Charles Davies (ML205719751); photos accessioned into the Cornell Lab of Ornithology | Macaulay Library] (B) Cladogram and diet of the birds included in the study. On the basis of the percentage of dietary nectar and fruit intake, we delineated four groups of core sugar-consuming birds (red font) and core non-sugar controls (blue). Core non-sugar control sets were defined as groups phylogenetically close to sugar-consuming clades and comprising a similar number of species but not taking any nectar in the diet. These were used as direct controls in the downstream analyses. (C) Comparison of genome assembly contiguity. The contig N50 value indicates that 50% of the assembly consists of contigs of at least that size. The nine newly sequenced birds are indicated with a blue circle. (D) Status of 15,133 ancestral bird genes, classified by TOGA as those with an intact reading frame (blue), with gene-inactivating mutations (premature stop codons, frameshifts, splice site disruptions, or deletions of exons or entire genes; orange), or with missing or incomplete coding sequences owing to assembly gaps or fragmentation (gray). (E) Status of 8338 near-universally conserved Aves genes (BUSCO, odb10) in annotations generated in this study (green circles) or NCBI RefSeq annotations. (F) Tissue-specific transcriptomes generated for pairs of sugar-consuming and non-sugar control species. Black arrows specify the direction of DESeq2 analysis (for details, see methods and table S11).

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

#27 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Great example of how less is more. The sparing use of colours and black outlines pops against the shades of grey, drawing the eye to exactly where it should go.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

More Invisible Cities (my comfort book)

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Steven Pinker in 2019: “I was not aware of the charges against Epstein at the time. And no, I was not paid for the letter" www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pete... Epstein files: [shows Pinker was paid $10,000 for the letter] www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

Pinker said that over the years he has regularly offered his linguistic opinions to Dershowitz for use in various cases. “I don’t recall his telling me that the question pertained to the Epstein defense,” Pinker said. “I was not aware of the charges against Epstein at the time. And no, I was not paid for the letter — it’s something that Alan and I do regularly, as colleagues.”

"Alan [Dershowitz] had us give Dteven Pinker $10,000 for a letter"

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

This email from Dawkins in the latest Epstein documents is a kind of perfect glimpse into the psychology of old boys club: Dawkins whinges about the "nasty young woman", but also has an undercurrent of unease, and seeks reassurance from Brockman that the child sex trafficker wasn't all *that* bad

Begin forwarded message:
> From: Richard Dawkins <
> Date: July 4, 2011 5:42:43 PM EDT
> To: John Brockman .‘Z >
> Subject: Lawrence
> John
• > 1. I hope you recovered well from your operation.
> 2. There is a rather nasty young woman called Rebecca Watson, who seems to be running some
kind of a witch-hunt against Lawrence Krauss because of his defence of Jeffrey Epstein.
> http://skepchick.org/2011/04/lawrence-krauss-defends-a-sex-offender-embarrasses-scientists-
everywhere/
> There are people on her blog talking about organising a walkout when Lawrence speaks at TAM
in Las Vegas. I remember that you told me something of the circumstances of Jeffrey's arrest,
and that his case is not as black as painted. Might you possibly remind of it.
> Thanks (and greetings from Jackson Hole, Wyoming)
> Richard

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

Another example of this weird crackpottery Bret has with shrew evolution that makes even Geoffrey Miller of all people look reasonable

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

Sidebar, but I am reminded that this bit about bat wings evolving from shrew foots has been a long-running thing with Bret, and he really does seem to think that such morphological evolution has not been, or cannot be(?), explained by textbook evolutionary science

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

You can have all the lip service to not doing stigms, but by the act of sensationalising Hitler's DNA, the message here is pretty clearly "but... here me out ok... WHAT IF genes for X made Hitler a Nazi?" Second: this quote is so dumb. No, he wouldn't have. You think Nazis operate in good faith?

The research will probably provoke controversy, both for its having been done and for its findings. What is clear is that if Hitler had seen these genes in anyone else, his verdict would have been unequivocal.

Professor Turi King, the lead geneticist on this research, said: “If he was to look at his own genetic results, he would have almost certainly have sent himself to the gas chambers.”

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

What the fuck are we doing, people? I'll skip the part where I talk about the pitfalls of polygenic scores, because it really doesn't matter. First: you don't get to say "we are not stigmatising people with these conditions" and then have a debate about how these conditions made Hitler into Hitler

The risk of stigma
The scientists and documentary-makers are determined to ensure that the revelations are not used to stigmatise people with the conditions that are indicated by Hitler’s genes.

While the genome was a factor in the making of Hitler, scientists and historians are clear that it was merely the canvas on which numerous other factors came together. These include abuse suffered in his childhood, trauma from the First World War and, above all, his contemporary context.

In short, antisemitism is not genetic or symptomatic of these conditions. That was a societal ill, and in another time he could arguably have been a very different person. People will debate whether his genes were critical to his particular case, but there is little debate that Hitler was in the eye of a perfect storm of factors that led to his rise and his atrocities.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

Love your work Nathaniel, but saying that Watson believed in and promoted racial pseudoscience, but also that he personally didn't have hatred in his heart for Black people, is a meaningless qualifier. That's just describing how racism operates

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

What a fantastic obit of Watson. Unfortunately, his life story is a common trope: guy who thinks he's hot shit experiences failure for the first time, and instead of learning from that, goes full bigot and gets really into The Bell Curve.

One formative influence was Watson’s making his one and only important scientific discovery when he was only 25. His next act flopped. Although “Watson’s [Harvard] lab was clearly the most exciting place in the world in molecular biology,” geneticist Richard Burgess, one of Watson’s graduate students, told the oral history, he discovered nothing afterward, even as colleagues were cracking the genetic code or deciphering how DNA is translated into the molecules that make cells (and life) work.

‘I really don’t know what happened to Jim’: Friends ask where James Watson’s odious attitudes about race came from
“He fell flat on his nose on all these problems,” Harvard’s Ernst Mayr (1904-2005), the eminent evolutionary biologist, told the oral history. “So except for this luck he had with the double helix, he was a total failure!” (Mayr acknowledged the exaggeration.) By the 1990s, even Watson’s accomplishments at Harvard and CSHL were ancient history.

Watson nevertheless viewed himself “as the greatest scientist since Newton or Darwin,” a longtime colleague at CSHL told STAT in 2018.

To remain on the stage and keep receiving what he viewed as his due, he therefore needed a new act. In the 1990s, Watson became smitten with “The Bell Curve,” the 1994 book that argued for a genetics-based theory of intelligence (with African Americans having less of it) and spoke often with its co-author, conservative political scholar Charles Murray. The man who co-discovered the double helix, perhaps not surprisingly, regarded DNA as the ultimate puppet master, immeasurably more powerful than the social and other forces that lesser (much lesser) scientists studied. Then his hubris painted him into a corner.

Although the book’s central thesis has been largely discredited, Watson embraced its arguments and repeated them to anyone who would listen. When friends urged him to at least acknowledge that the book’s science was shaky (or worse), Watson wouldn’t hear of it.

“He loved getting a rise out of people,” the lab friend said. “And when you think of yourself as a master of the universe, you think you can, or should, get away with things.”

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

So James Watson died, and it's interesting observing the Nazis eulogise and lionize him. There's the standard stuff about his racism and sexism and "cancellation" making him a hero. Then there's the labelling of Watson as a "genius". Genius? Haha

Ed Dutton (aka "The Jolly Heretic"), a white nationalist and race pseudo-scientist, pictured with James Watson.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

Rereading Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. I like to think these are describing thermodynamics, evolution, biology.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

Damn, ok, the opening to this review goes beast mode www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1.1. Life as thermodynamics: it's disequilibria all the way down
In their thermodynamic dimension living systems are staggering and
wondrous Taj Mahals of disequilibria—writ in both structure and pro-
cess; of intense and dynamic disequilibria in fact, precariously lofted
high above the quiet repose of the equilibrium state. This is their essential

and distinguishing property. But, of course, the 2nd law dictates that a
particular disequilibrium can only arise by a process in which it is “driv-
en” into place—against probability—by being mechanistically tied to the
dissipation of a ‘greater’ disequilibrium; tied through a mechanism that
fuses the two processes, driver and driven, into a single—and spontane-
ous—thermodynamic process; a thermodynamic “Atwood machine”. In
consequence, life's multitudes of disequilibria are linked together—and
to the external world—in cascading networks of driver–driven pairs;
each linkage embodying an instance of disequilibria conversion; or, as
it is more conventionally termed, “free energy conversion” (“FEC”) or
“free energy transduction” [1,2]. And “bioenergetics”, we here argue, is
entirely the study of FEC.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

Extraordinary. We've known for a while that JD Vance and the rest of the Trump admin all follow the same race-and-IQ obsessed weirdo freak accounts on twitter (like this eigenrobot loser), and that miasma of idiocy is what runs America now

@eigenrobot: if H1Bs are supposed to be a means of obtaining Labor not available domestically it's curious they're cheaper than domestic labor. an easy way to ensure that they aren't directly substituting for domestic labor would be to add a $100k surcharge per head

Trump to impose $100,000 fee per year for H-1B visas, in blow to tech
By Aditya Soni, Kristina Cooke and Jeff Mason
September 21, 202510:52 AM GMT+10Updated 8 mins ago

@eigenrobot: guys im gonna be honest if I had knows people were going to take my posts seriously enough to implement them as policy, if that's indeed what happened, I would have put a hell of a lot of more thought into them

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

UK Biobank data is being used here for blatant race pseudoscience by a white supremacist blogger, Jordan Lasker. @ukbiobank.bsky.social this looks to be a clear breach of terms and an unauthorised use the data, no?

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

#26 www.nature.com/articles/s41... The communication of conformational changes here is very good. Love the design choices

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

Lots to unpack here, but the main thing I want to comment on is the absurdity of it all. Science/academia in the U.S. is being rapidly destroyed by the Trump admin, but all that pales in comparison to "woke" peer review, amirite folks? Cc'ing: @caitlinmoriah.bsky.social

Steven Pinker: Evidence that woke isn't dead, peer review is problematic, and science needs to address deep problems in its culture: A grad student at Harvard conducted the first systematic, data-based study to document & explain the rise in gender dysphoria. His paper was rejected from a leading journal because, among other things, "Throughout the manuscript, the authors use language that is considered prejudicial and outdated (e.g. "natal sex" as opposed to "sex assigned at birth"). It is critical to follow best practice and guidelines surrounding gender inclusive language particularly for research specifically on the topic of gender incongruence, expression, and identity."

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

He did everything in Excel. I forgot that he also never learned how to use Illustrator/Inkscape.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

The comic does a lot of reifying old classist ideas present in The Bell Curve. This panel is especially misleading: there aren't genes for being a lawyer or a baker. The environment of a family that is being inherited here, and the SNPs correlating with families is a result of pop. stratification

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

The Trump admin is terminating scientific grants under the pretence combating antisemitism. They are going to any use any pro-Palestinian activity on campus as an excuse to do this to all American universities, effectively killing science and free speech rights in one go

A tweet from the official NIH account on X:

Today #NIH is terminating more than $250 million in funding—including more than 400 grants—to Columbia University following directives from the Trump Administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. The cancellations are due to Columbia University’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

It's finally official and verified: The X user "Cremieux" is ID'd as a guy called Jordan Lasker. Lasker has been LARPing as an expert in genetics on X to promote racist pseudoscience. @sashagusevposts.bsky.social has been calling out his bullshit for ages

Jordan Lasker, AKA ‘Cremieux’
One of the speakers at the conference is billed under a social media alias, Cremieux, but the Guardian has corroborated that the account is apparently run by Jordan Lasker, a long-time proponent of eugenics.

The @cremieuxrecueil X account has been boosted or engaged with dozens of times by that platform’s proprietor, Elon Musk, often on the topic of falling birthrates.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Wow! The DOGE feedback mechanism is working exactly as thus planned!!

Cremieux (a race science fraudster) tweets:

DOGE has a very obvious feedback mechanism for its cuts. If DIGE makes a big broad cut against a million programs, people get upset about a few specific, very good ones like PEPFAR, and the program comes back because DOGE's members are, thus, informed it was good.

Trump administration wants to un-fire nuclear safety workers but can't figure out how to reach them

USDA accidentally fored officials working on bird flu and is now trying to rehire them

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

Since the topic of "should science get involved in politics" has once again sprung up, here's Joseph Thornton talking about the Creationism effort to undermine scientific education, and how scientists initially tried not to get involved.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

"Ah, but you see, my solution is much better. Sure, I won't do that either, because that also involves getting all political. Oh well"

Arguably, a better use of the Royal Society’s global influence and that of its fellows would be to explain exactly how the measures touted by the US government could damage public health and the environment for decades to come.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

How are people STILL doing this? Look outside, the lunatics who believe science is a "woke cabal" are dismantling scientific institutions right now. Don't want science to be political? Ok, don't vote either, don't say anything, just lay down and get trod on. That's what Elon wants from you too!

My caution stems from something I have been thinking about for years—should science get involved in politics?

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

The sister paper is beautiful too. It has everything one could ever ask for, like: • fractals in nature • protein evolution • references Gould & Lewontin 1979 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

$a, Schematic representation of the requisites needed to produce a Sierpiński fractal from hexameric blocks and the symmetry-based constraints on oligomeric assembly. Green and blue dots represent active or open interfaces, respectively. b, Cryo-EM density maps of Sierpiński triangles of the zeroth, first and second fractal level. The 6mer (3.1 Å) was derived from the hexameric Δ2–6 SeCS variant. The 18mer (3.9 Å) was derived from the wild-type (WT) SeCS. The 54mer (5.9 Å) was derived from the pH-stabilized variant H369R SeCS.$ $Together, our results show that building a stable fractal required a markedly small number of substitutions and no new strong contacts in the fractal interface. This result is consistent with previous studies showing that individual substitutions can substantially shift the occupancy of oligomeric states or induce supramolecular assembly. This facile origin and almost immediate subsequent losses in two lineages (Extended Data Fig. 8b) make a non-adaptive origin at least plausible. Moreover, the pKa of the new interface was already primed to match the physiological pH fluctuations as soon as the assembly emerged: introducing q18L into ancC (which, without this mutation, cannot make 18mers) resulted in an interface that dissociated over a similar pH range as in wild-type SeCS (Extended Data Fig. 8n). The apparently physiologically tuned pKa of the assembly is therefore either a molecular spandrel (a feature that initially evolved for reasons unrelated to its current use37) or simply a coincidence that looks deceptively adaptive. The large assemblies this protein can build are more clearly an evolutionary accident: as beautifully regular and complex as higher-order Sierpiński triangles are, they only appear at non-physiological concentrations and their size would be difficult to fit into the cytoplasm of S. elongatus. Even if the 18mer fulfils a useful function, the ability of the protein to make larger assemblies is almost certainly an accidental by-product of the unusual symmetry it happened to have evolved. Based on our findings, we suspect that evolutionary transitions in self-assembly may be more common than structural databases make it seem. As techniques to characterize protein complexes improve, we may discover a menagerie of assembly types that come and go as proteins evolve. Perhaps only a small fraction ever become important to their organisms and persist. Many others will fade as quickly as they appeared. We can therefore only wonder about how many unique …$

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

Feels strange to be sharing great science papers at the moment, but I love this paper published late last year from Georg Hochberg's team: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Evolution consistently produces molecular "spandrels" with no functional benefit

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

#25 doi.org/10.1016/j.tc... Stefan Raunser's lab always produces some beautiful protein figures. I love the colour palette and clear labelling of subunits. "Toothpaste" cartoon style works well for figures of large multi-subunit complexes.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

#24 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Found this preprint thanks to a talk at @lorneproteins.bsky.social

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news @veritasium.bsky.social, but there's a mistake in your new Youtube video:

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

Actually, yeah, I can believe that, because running research facilities is expensive. Do you realise how expensive it is to keep a single -80C freezer running? Musk frames this as him saving money for science, but in reality, he is single-handedly killing science in the US

Elon Musk: "can you believe that universities with tens of billions in endowments were siphoning off 60% of research award money for "overhead"? What a rip-off!"

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

This sort of complaint about Bluesky is funny to me. Impact on society? Do you think scientists can improve society by... tweeting? Plus, I've never seen the academics who make these "Ivory Tower" complaints ever lead by example and engage with "dissenting opinions" themselves.

An academic on Twitter/X complaining about scientists moving to Bluesky:

"Yes...
But, what about the impact on the wider society? If you exclude dissenting opinions and interactions, you starting to live in the Ivory Tower."

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