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wrightam.bsky.social
Statistical phylogenetics and the fossil record. Researcher, professor and mentor at a PUI. Mother, reader, runner. Congenital optimist. Minnesotan Virginian.
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In preparation for #evol2025, we’ll highlight one of our five Early Career Travel Awardees each day this week! In each highlight, you can find out more information about our awesome students and postdocs, as well as talk information so you can catch their presentations at in-person #evol2025 🧵

Well, we leave for #evol2025 in a week. Guess that means it's time to wake up at 5 am, edit student posters, suggest radical reorgs and new figures, then panic at 8 am because I'm not ready for work. Livin' the dream.

Finally got a chance to do a bit of notebook shopping after being in want of a good one for months

There’s all this, and on top of it, few high school grads are prepared for a mathematically-intensive degree. Even fewer for critical thinking. And now genAI. It’s very hard to revert to blue book for programming-intensive classes. Our information sector is going to be hosed for years.

I’m not sure it’s more fun than doomscrolling, but my DMs are open for bug reports

Sun’s out, fun’s out

The visual storytelling here is 💯

Interview on anglerfishes for @npr.org featuring myself and undergrad Rose Faucher www.npr.org/2025/06/04/1... Anglerfish ancestors once roamed the seafloor. Here's how we know : Short Wave : NPR

Come be my colleague! Happy to answer questions about this role.

The worst thing about a waterpark birthday is that your kids can literally just swim away from you I am ready to leave this hell. They are not.

What are we using to visualize fbd trees lately?

Good talk; followed it up by outing myself as a Silmarrillion nerd

This is why you’re the dumbest motherfucker alive if you’re an academic who tries to ‘address their concerns’ these people don’t want to have a principled conversation about the appropriateness of diversity statements, professor, they want to destroy your job. You cannot meet them halfway.

Nervously writing down what room my talk is in and heading there a half hour early because I’m afraid I’ll get lost. See kids? Professors are just like you.

Since I've seen a certain amount of discussion in the past week about what conferences should or shouldn't do, one thing I can recommend is: get involved in a conference in your field. Find out what actually goes into it.

Interesting new paper on challenging synchronization of fossil & molecular clocks for angiosperms. My former PhD Katherine Valde now prof Loyola has been working on some philosophical dimensions of this, incl a paper on when disagreements in science are productive: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23555/)

Apologies for the typos from having done this while multitasking earlier, but some general How To Conference stuff from a thread earlier today.

If you want more virtual content at conferences, the best way to get it is voting with your feet. See you Wednesday.

I’ve been on the conference committee for the Evolution Meetings for the past three years, and I pretty strongly agree with all of this. We’ve been very committed to a robust virtual meeting, and I think have succeeded reasonably well. Our societies bought in and out marquee events online. Great!

I just opened my messenger bag to get my wallet and it’s full of claw machine tokens. There is no exit from the House of Charles Entertainment Cheese.

I'M RIGHT FOR ONCE

I know it's a holiday and I should wrench myself off my computer ... but I think I've hit on the explanation for a very weird finding we've been struggling to explain

Original hierarchical take on the evolution with discussion and critique of many other hierarchical approaches (including of yours's truly😉) link.springer.com/book/10.1007... “a new evolutionary model called “Hierarchical Evolutionary-Developmental Theory” or “H-Evo-DevoTheory” 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio

I am in a Chuck E. Cheese, and I’m going to be hearing these songs in my nightmares for weeks. Maybe a welcome break from my normal nightmares?

Ok, I did not realize how big groundhogs were. There’s one perched on a hill above the train station, and I am gobsmacked. He must be like 12 pounds.

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨 🗓️29th May 2025, 16:00 UTC🗓️ Join us for next week’s talk given by Dr Allison Hsiang from Stockholm University, on “Automating large-scale morphometric data generation using AutoMorph and deep learning” Register here: bit.ly/palaeoverse-...

❤️❤️❤️