iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

"The ideology of equilibrium and dynamic stability characterizes modern evolutionary theory as much as it does bourgeois economics and political theory; Whig history is mimicked by Whig biology." p84

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"It must be remembered that for Darwin, the existence of 'organs of extreme perfection and complication' was a difficulty for his theory, not a proof of it." p83

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(i should throw my beloved adapt. colleagues a bone:) "The serious methodological and epistemological difficulties in the use of adaptive explanations should not blind us to the fact that many features of organisms clearly seem to be convergent solutions to obvious environmental problems." p79

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", the adaptationist program makes of adaptation a metaphysical postulate that not only cannot be refuted but is necessarily confirmed by every observation." p76 (a classic)

"If sufficiency of an organ is not a sufficient condition of its being an adaptation, neither is necessity of an organ a necessary condition." p74

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Daniel Bolnick @danielbolnick.bsky.social · 3h

"If the leg is a trait, is each part of the leg also a trait?" p72

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Reposted by Liam U. Taylor

This is something I love about @asn-amnat.bsky.social publishing: an American Naturalist article looks distinctly like an AmNat article.

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 4h

I woke up this morning and a nagging cough had finally cleared; now I know why.

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 4h

People don't really prepare you for life in Big Science, when the spotlight comes shining and it's your time for the stage

an extremely unenticing spam bot email about a niche scientific topic in a recent preprint about storm-petrels

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 21h

(I bet there is some paper that more fully treats male-male copulations in manakins. But it doesn't come to mind - if someone knows one, lmk!)

Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 21h

There's lots of complexity in the sociosexual behavior of young males at display leks! Copulations themselves are usually ignored or filtered. That itself is telling. A ton of awesome related papers on male-male relationships in these birds, though! doi.org/10.1086/283218 doi.org/10.1016/j.an...

doi.org

Odd Couples in Manakins: A Study of Social Organization and Cooperative Breeding in Chiroxiphia linearis | The American Naturalist: Vol 111, No 981

Male long-tailed manakins (Chiroxiphia linearis) perform highly specialized communal or cooperative displays to advertise their presence and to excite females for copulation. For the purpose of perfor...

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 21h

I love adolescent manakins! For amazing work on manakin social systems, check out Emily DuVal, Dave McDonald, Ignacio Moore (have many more recs here!!) hashtag self citation for adolescent plumages: doi.org/10.1093/evol... doi.org/10.1093/icb/... And adolescence itself: doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

doi.org

Social Environment and the Evolution of Delayed Reproduction in Birds

Abstract. One puzzling feature of avian life histories is that individuals in many different lineages delay reproduction for several years after they finis

Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 22h

This is the way!! I enjoyed the recent work on indiscriminate mating. One of my study systems, manakins, features a whole social category of adolescent "males" in "female" plumages who watch, and copulate with, older birds displaying. Very understudied dynamics!!

Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Proud of Luke Robinson, who took an undergrad project and turned it into a full manuscript, now out as a preprint. Using burrow measurements replicated 18 years apart, Luke shows how Leach's Storm-Petrel burrows change through use and disturbance. The nests are very dynamic! doi.org/10.64898/202...

Figure 1 from the preprint, showing the study site and system, including an illustration of a petrel burrow and the architecture of several example burrows.

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

that's ok 🙏 if you only gave the lecture once its outcomes were probably not due to selection

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"Every theory of the world that is at all powerful and covers a large domain of phenomena carries immanent within itself its own caricature." p65

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

(For this first section, On Evolution, I have definitely read better things on each of: genetics, development, environmental variation, evolvability, microevolution, and macroevolution. But I doubt there's anything so good at all of them at once.)

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"A rain forest can be recognized by its life forms even when it is not raining." p57

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Reposted by Liam U. Taylor

Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Guess what? You can explore our work on malaria and climate change on Our World in Data now! Take a look: ourworldindata.org/what-impact-...

ourworldindata.org

What impact will climate change have on malaria?

More than 600,000 people die from malaria every year. Will climate change make this worse?

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"As society gives rise to class division, the human pop. ceases to be the unit of adaptation .... each regular interaction of people in a given culture with nature is determined by the interests of the different social classes in their conflictive or cooperative relations with one another." p46

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"Not all response to the environment are adaptive." p42 (begging people to get back to just straight up saying obvious stuff clearly like this -- perhaps a little less cowardice than we are currently accustomed to?)

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"In the extreme case, the impossible becomes first possible and then necessary." p41

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

(Aside: beaming at this section, as no less than two hours ago I was drafting these slides for an upcoming research talk!)

a powerpoint slide that reads: "HOW DO ORGANISMS EVOLVE TO FACE THEIR SOCIAL SYSTEMS?"

A powerpoint slide that describes what is apparently the dialectical processes of evolution w/r/t social systems. This thinking was originally adapted from Prum and Stearns during my dissertation. There is, on the one hand, the evolution of a social system (like a seagull breeding colony). There is, on the other hand, the evolution with respect to the breeding colony. Or the evolutionary consequences of a breeding colony. These include delayed reproduction and delayed plumage maturation (for example). Obviously, the evolutionary consequences of a social system are not its evolutionary causes; coloniality does not evolve due to delayed reproduction. Narrow adaptationists are forced to either except the non-adaptive consequences of a social system or believe Wynne-Edwards. Oopsy poopsy!

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"But once a pattern of fluctuation has arisen, it is itself a fact of life for the species in question and for other species. Thus new selection pressures arise as the result of previous evolution." p41

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"Nevertheless, and grudgingly, science has accepted the reality of qualitative change and the importance of discontinuity." p39

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"The genetic description of speciation asserts the occurrence of diversifying selection without describing its content. It is a kinematics without a dynamics." p36

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"ScienceDirect gives the number of citations as 1454, so replicating this paper sounds like a good investment." It's funny to imagine in theory a cite threshold where 'low' impact 'false' positives persist, whereas 'high' impact 'true' pos are repeatedly culled through sloppy replications

Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"Like modern bourgeois social thought, modern evolutionary thought denies history by assuming equilibrium." p23

Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"Evolution leads to greater ... diversity, complexity, homeostasis, & stability of the living world, in a physical environment that is increasingly uniform, simplified, & chaotic. The extraordinary feature of this conceptual structure is that is has no apparent basis either in fact or in theory."p21

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

hahaha I remember it well. It was definitely this. I'm not sure if I even agree with their characterization, but I take compliments when I can get them. The thoughts ended up in the discussion of a small paper about seagull behavior, lol.

From Taylor 2024 published in the all-timer greatest scientific journal Waterbirds.

'I thus raise the hypothesis that young Herring Gulls develop with respect to territorial conventions (“what does lunging at another bird do?”; cf. Kohn 2024) even if they are neither developing territories (“where is the border at which I lunge?”; cf. Coulson 2002:103) nor learning per se (“what is a lunge?”; cf. Groothuis 1992). Closer studies of immature seabirds are needed to understand different forms of social development across species. Ainley et al. (1983) generally suggest that young penguins need rookery experience to eventually obtain territories or mates. Bradley and Wooller (1990) make somewhat vague references to “social environments” and “conventions.” Pickering (1989) implies young albatross must establish and maintain a pair-bond before reproduction. These remain radical suggestions, couched as they are in the subtle terms of seabird biology. For example, albatross depend on biparental care to successfully raise young (Tickell 1968). Developing a pair-bond is thus a material requirement of reproduction, like having feathers or gonads. There are many studies of feathers and gonads. There are few clear statements on what it means for a bird to “develop a pair-bond,” let alone “develop a social convention.”'

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

One of the greatest compliments I ever got about my writing was "this sounds like it's from the 80s or something". It was about a paragraph they did not like in a paper draft they did not like 🤣

Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

On the other hand, maybe I'm too pessimistic and we just need to let Brandon Ogbunu cook...

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I get nearly jealous reading some stuff even through the 80s (e.g. Dahlem conference papers). I'm not sure how to say it, but it seemed like there were certain aspects of THOUGHT rather than PRACTICE that were just treated much more seriously? Something definitely turned.

Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I posted something that might be too easy to misinterpret. What I like about this book is that not everyone old and good at math has to end up doing bad biology. There was, at least once, a different way!

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"While it is appealing to speak of 'information' about the environment being 'encoded' in the structural and physiological complexity of organisms, such statements remain in the realm of poetry" p18

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I am reading this slowly for a book group over the coming days, so prepare to be slowly entertained for days or weeks to come.

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"Thus when the population geneticist Dobzhanksy, described evolution as 'a change in the genetic composition of populations' (1951, p.61), he did so for lack of anything better." p14

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"But whether the cause of tuberculosis is said to be a bacillus or the capitalist exploitation of workers, whether the death rate from cancer is best reduced by studying oncogenes or by seizing control of factories..." p5

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Thread for bangers from The Dialectical Biologist

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Reposted by Liam U. Taylor

The Ramsey Lab @theramseylab.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It is widely held that fitness is affected by population size, 'n.' But Grant Ramsey shows, in a new #openaccess paper in @jrnlofphil.bsky.social, that this familiar claim rests on both mathematical and conceptual mistakes.🔥 👇📃 doi.org/10.5840/jphi... #philsci #HPbio #evobio #philsky #HPS 🧪

Promotional black-and-white image announcing the publication of an article in The Journal of Philosophy. The text displays the journal title, the article title "Much Ado About ‘N'othing," and the author’s name, Grant Ramsey, in a minimalist layout.

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Reposted by Liam U. Taylor

Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

A revised version of this preprint is now posted on arXiv. The theory section is rewritten, improving model exposition based on feedback we received, we fixed some confusion and errors, contextualized the models more carefully so the interpretation becomes clearer, and improved the overall writing.

arxiv.org

The Difference Between "Replicable" and "Not Replicable" Is Not Itself Scientifically Replicable

Replication studies estimate the replicability rate of scientific results by aggregating binary verdicts of experiments as ``replicated'' and ``not replicated''. These estimates assume rarely attainab...

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

hey chat, how's my scheduling poll looking?

a poll that shows essentially a solid block of no one being able to meet all together

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

put them in drafts Liam, just put them in drafts. like little herbs on the windowsill.

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Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

this is why in my classes I only provide grades to Test Student. It is a form of ungrading.

Liam U. Taylor @liamtaylor.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

but, but, what's not to love about the comment box system?