Aylwyn Scally @aylwyn_scally Twitter profile

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Aylwyn Scally

8 months

The next decade should be an exciting time for interdisciplinary research in genetics, archaeology & history. However this dialogue is also fraught with misunderstanding, and in some cases has had a rocky start. I discuss some of the problems here:

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

Has any US official, or even journalist, acknowledged how humiliatingly feeble the defence of their national legislature was? Against a rabble of day trippers and cosplay soldiers. Because that's the part that stands out to onlookers around the world.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

From the UK Race Report we learn that Seamus Heaney was a 'writer in the Commonwealth' and his language 'steeped in British cultural traditions'..

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

Very important message from UK police about the danger for students of unwittingly googling the Sci-hub website and clicking on it. Be aware of the serious & real risk of accessing tens of millions of scientific papers describing publicly funded research.

Police warn students to avoid science website

Universities are urged to block a science research website, which police say could put data at risk.

www.bbc.com

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

Top grant advice from Twitter: 1. Excite the reviewer! Remember when you decided to write a boring grant? That was where you went wrong. 2. Give lots of detail, but also not too much. If you count up the detail and it's not equal to the correct amount, that's a problem.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

It's hard to overstate just how stupid and pointless is the 'debate' about which country funded which vaccine the most, or who is doing it better. Science doesn't work like that. Multinational companies don't work like that. Viruses don't work like that.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

This would never fly in Britain. Total lack of hedge fund management and PR consultancy experience. Are any of these people even married to politicians?

Daniel Dale

@ddale8

4 years

The Biden-Harris transition has announced its Covid-19 Advisory Board:

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

1 year

@ITVNewsPolitics I can understand Sunak being disingenuous out of self interest. What I don't understand is why the assembled journalists don't challenge him.. Did anyone pipe up "you mean like the position the whole of the UK was in before Brexit"?

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

Naively I thought the main bone of contention regarding E.O. Wilson would be his support for group selection, not the fact that he used statistics.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

Great to see this finally published. These data represent a really valuable resource for human genetics, particularly studies of human evolution and ancestry, and they are freely available for researchers all over the world.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

PCR truthers is one conspiracy theory I really didn't expect.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

@DanielBolnick @TheoShantonas It's writhing by committee. (with apols to Lewis Carroll)

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

6 years

Keen to get in on the 2018 lab achievements trend, so here goes: 82 papers 35 grants 17 PhDs🥂 430 invited talks 🇦🇫🇧🇧🇦🇺🇦🇶🇦🇴🇦🇬Fields medal🏅 Legion d'honneur Booker Prize No nobel prizes ☹️ Hope your year wasn't too shit. Happy New year

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

6 years

I try to avoid technical jargon, but within the field of human evolutionary science this would be referred to as 'utter bollocks'.

Stefan Molyneux, MA

@StefanMolyneux

6 years

My ancestors were driven out of Africa and struggled to survive winter and hunger. Over thousands of years, they became smarter and wiser through suffering. They made the modern world. Now the Africans say we are “privileged” & thieves. No - suffering made us. No more guilt.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

Ancestry is frequently discussed and important to many people, but perhaps not always clearly understood. It is interesting to think carefully about how genomes can and cannot tell us about it. I enjoyed working with @mathiesoniain on this:

What is ancestry?

journals.plos.org

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

It seems that Elizabeth Warren has commanding support amongst my academic colleagues in the US... This fact alone suggests she is, sadly, doomed.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

8 years

For me the most sad & consequential death of 2016, not a singer or actor, but a brilliant scientist, David MacKay.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

1 year

Stunning conjunction of the crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus in the evening sky right now. The faint glow of earthshine on the unlit face of the moon is particularly beautiful.. alas not remotely captured by my phone camera.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

Kyle Reese: "Listen. And understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead." Politicians: "But what about just for Christmas?"

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

You're not officially a geneticist until someone argues with you about the the genetics of human traits based on the ethnicities of elite athletes.

Dr. David S. Anderson

@DSAArchaeology

3 years

You’re not officially an archaeologist until someone says to you “But, maybe there really could have been a global super civilization 12,000 years ago that disappeared and left no remains behind.”

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 years

Hard to be certain but I think this guy was the 3rd reviewer on my last grant application.

Right Wing Watch

@RightWingWatch

5 years

Rick Wiles is warning you not to eat an Impossible Burger because they are part of a satanic plot to change human DNA and "create a race of soulless creatures on this planet.”

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

6. Keep constantly resubmitting your grant. Make it 15% better each time and after 20 submissions it will be 16.3 times better. Grants that weren't resubmitted ended up not funded, therefore resubmitting is the key factor. Also don't be afraid to completely rewrite it each time.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

@NewtonEmerson Makes sense - they must have been referring to the poems he wrote in primary school.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

As far as I'm concerned, closed-source software is fundamentally incompatible with science. A method relying on it, no matter how good its performance, may be commercially valuable but will be of limited scientific value until it is truly open and free.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

2 years

Here's a thread about our new preprint on human germline mutation.

Heritability of de novo germline mutation reveals a contribution from paternal but not maternal...

De novo mutations (DNMs) in the germline have long been identified as a key element in the causes of developmental and other genetic disorders. Previous attempts to investigate genetic factors...

www.biorxiv.org

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

11 months

Human ancestors may well have come close to extinction on one or more occasions in the past, but suffice to say I'm extremely unconvinced that the paper reported here has found evidence of it.

Human ancestors nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago

Nature - A new technique analysing modern genetic data suggests that pre-humans survived in a group of only 1,280 individuals.

www.nature.com

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

6 years

If we are serious about environmental impact, and genuine about helping researchers outside rich Western nations, we should be live streaming all sessions at *every* international scientific meeting. Perhaps with a small subscription to cover costs if necessary.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

7 years

This is frustrating. It's almost as if there was no meaningful career incentive or remuneration for scientists to do peer review properly.

Elisabeth Bik

@MicrobiomDigest

7 years

Current status as Associate Editor: 12 reviewers invited for 2 papers, all declined or not responded. This is why #peerreview takes so long

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 years

It's hard to imagine a more wrong-headed take than this. This is absolutely not the implication of a high 'genetic component' or heritability, which is a description of the status quo and says nothing about what might be achieved under different conditions or environment.

Charlotte Gill

@CharlotteCGill

5 years

If you scrapped private schools it wouldn't make as much difference as the Left thinks. That's because educational performance has high genetic component, meaning it can only be socially engineered so much. Private schools facilitate genetic potential better than state, that's it

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

4. Feasibility is crucial. That time you decided to propose an infeasible project was a mistake. But also make sure it is risky. 5. Send it to colleagues who have no idea at all about your field. That is the most useful feedback, and if they don't love it it's probably worthless.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 years

I think we are at that point in the movie where someone walks tentatively up to the UK, takes the gun out of their hands and slowly leads them, sobbing, towards the waiting police cars.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 years

A citation is not supposed to be an appeal to authority. It informs the reader where you got an idea or fact from, & thus where to find more detail. Be that a journal paper, a preprint, or a comic book, it should be cited. The only criterion should be long-term availability.

Dr. Nancy R Gough, PhD

@NancyRGough

5 years

Less than 70% of bioRxiv papers from 2013 published in a peer-reviewed journal. This is what scares me about making preprints as citable as peer-reviewed studies. th https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/515643v1.article-metrics

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

2 years

>Hi Slack, I'd like to sign into a new workspace. Slack: Who are you? >I'm the same guy with all these other workspaces. Slack. Uh.. nope. Maybe create a new account? >But.. ok. Slack: Here's a a one-time link. >Thanks. Can I also sign in on this other device? Slack: Who are you?

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

2 years

A lot of people have suggested Africa, and specifically East Africa, as the answer to this for everyone alive. It's true that we are reasonably sure there was a time in the past when all our ancestors (all who were alive at that time) were in Africa.

Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

2 years

Absolutely baffling. 'geographic areas from which your ancestors first originated' ???

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

3. Make sure the proposal is important for the field and can only be done by you, at your institution. Many people propose things that another highly qualified scientist in their field could do, which is obviously of little interest to funders.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

One thing we've learned this past year is that even shite pints in plastic glasses are still pints, and hence an order of magnitude better than cans in front of a computer.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

2 years

This paper is a great example of the challenges in discerning the causes of evolutionary change, and the pitfalls of naive adaptation stories. We thought lactase persistence was a rare case of an adaptation being relatively straightforward to explain..

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

Some thoughts on the recent paper about Polynesian ancestry by Ioannidis et al. (Long thread.)

Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement

Nature - Genomic analyses of DNA from modern individuals show that, about 800 years ago, pre-European contact occurred between Polynesian individuals and Native American individuals from near...

www.nature.com

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

6 years

Is there any more stupid section of a grant application form than the part asking you to explain how the award will be useful to your career. Like, I'm asking for money to do my actual job. Does that sound like it might be just a bit useful?

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

Sometimes academic life is pretty good. A quiet library, beautiful view, and an interesting paper to read.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

Guessing this is PNAS again..

Barry Blight 🇨🇦

@DrBarryChem

4 years

The peer review process failed here.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

Agree 100% with Aoife here. Sapiens is a terrible book and its success is mystifying. In particular, it's been the cause of some frustrating conversations with colleagues in the humanities.

Aoife McLysaght

@aoifemcl

4 years

I HATE THIS BOOK. WITH A PASSION. WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE LIKE IT??!!

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

So we are calling this new strain the London virus, right?

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 years

Some thoughts about this piece on 'race' and population genetics. It's nice that it affirms that population geneticists are not actual racists. And there are indeed some relevant criticisms one could make about popgen as a field, both in general and in specific instances.

New Scientist

@newscientist

5 years

How real is race? "We assume that race has been purged from science. But has it?" asks @AngelaDSaini in her new book

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

6 years

Lots of people sharing this NYT piece; I found it pretty disappointing. There are many issues one could raise about how paleogenomics has developed as a field, and how the big journals operate. But to lay them all at David Reich's door is ridiculous.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

8 years

@rtenews you guys are ON IT

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 years

No, genetics has little or nothing to do with why the @AllBlacks are good at rugby. And that's not how evolution works either.

RTÉ Sport

@RTEsport

5 years

‘If you put evolution on hold for 200,000 years we might catch up with @AllBlacks here...but they have genetics that make them more powerful, more adaptable to rugby’- Dr Emmet Byrne delivers the #rterugby lecture iTunes Soundcloud

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 years

@aoifemcl Yes I think I've seen that 80s movie. She starts the course, has awful time & realises the boy will never love her. Then unexpectedly she makes a breakthrough; montage of her in the lab & giving talks. At the end she's a prof & married to different guy who loved her all along.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

@theAliceRoberts As you can see it's a beautiful day, the pubs are open, and everyone's having a wonderful time!

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 years

I got together with @ewanbirney , @JenniferRaff and @AdamRutherford to write a piece about human population genetics and 'race'.

Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer - Ewan's Blog: Bioinformatician at large

Ewan Birney, Jennifer Raff, Adam Rutherford, Aylwyn Scally Human genetics tells us about the similarities and differences between people – in our physical and psychological traits, and in our...

ewanbirney.com

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

@jrossibarra @PetrovADmitri This is a key risk. But also a serious issue of exposing researchers in less well resourced institutes to papers they would otherwise be protected from.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 years

If you are a recently qualified or final-year PhD student in computer science, engineering, maths or physics, and are interested in a postdoc in computational genetics and human evolution here in Cambridge, get in touch.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

I wrote about the challenges of complexity in human ancestral demography: how current inference approaches are increasingly problematic, and where some future directions may point. (Yes I think machine learning will be important.)

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

Genuinely confused. If you want to be a scientist why would you not want to learn about calculus? And isn't it one of the more interesting parts of school mathematics?

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

1 year

Unless the proposal is that animals evolved more than once (and it isn't), this is incorrect. Every animal today is an equally close relative of the first animals.

Laura Helmuth

@laurahelmuth

1 year

One of the most contentious questions in evolutionary biology has been: which living species is the closest relative to the very first animals? Now we know it's these squishy beauties: comb jellies, or ctenophores via @sciam

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

@CantreBreiniol I don't think the authors have any idea what they mean by British culture.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

@michaelhoffman @slanketgoals @biorxivpreprint Fantastic news, congratulations to you both! Think I'll skip the methods section for this one though.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

2 years

So essentially ChatGPT is conversing at the level of a well-polished Oxbridge undergraduate - a bit of a bullshitter but talks a good game. It's quite unnerving.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

2 years

I'm not entirely sure why people are moving to a different site just yet, tbh. It's not like the previous regime here was exactly laudable, and there are genuine advantages to having a single platform that reaches everyone, including non-scientists and people in different fields.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

Agree with this. Calling postdocs trainees is part of the general infantilisation of pre-tenure researchers. It helps to justify treating them like shit and providing an inadequate career structure.

Kamil S Jaron 🇺🇦

@KamilSJaron

4 years

This really made me wonder. Am I the only one who finds weird to call postdocs trainees?

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

It's times like this when people expose themselves for what they truly are.

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

4 years

I'm not a fan of reparations for the sins of past generations. But when this is all over, amid the terrible human suffering that is now inevitable, is there not a case for demanding some sort of reparations from the Chinese government?

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

popgen folks: I'm revising the suggested reading for my popgen lectures and need textbooks available as ebooks. Apart from @Graham_Coop 's excellent notes (), and Felsenstein's book (), any other recommendations? (Need not be free.)

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 years

On the one hand, we seem to be moving towards a consensus, based on fossil evidence, that there were many dispersals of humans out of Africa over hundreds of thousands of years. Perhaps almost continuous movement out and in, as climate and environment allowed..

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

I reviewed The Genetic Lottery by @kph3k for @NatureEcoEvo .

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

7 years

100% this

Dorsa Amir

@DorsaAmir

7 years

My humble plea to science journalists: please include a link to the scholarly paper you are reporting on.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

Feedback and comments are always hoped for when submitting a preprint, but particularly with this, our contribution to an ongoing, important and in places difficult debate about terminology and how we communicate our research in human genetics.

The language of race, ethnicity, and ancestry in human genetic research

The language commonly used in human genetics can inadvertently pose problems for multiple reasons. Terms like "ancestry", "ethnicity", and other ways of grouping people can have complex, often...

arxiv.org

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

2 years

Once again, excellent news on Cambridge admissions. There's no surer sign of something positive happening than cries of anguish from the Telegraph.

Discrimination fears as Cambridge admits record number of state school pupils

Selection must be on merit, says education pressure group, as 72.5pc of new undergraduates at the university will be from state schools

www.telegraph.co.uk

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

Morning walk in the late November fog, which rolls into Cambridge from the fens.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 months

Very sad news. Such a clear thinker. Darwin's Dangerous Idea ranks alongside The Extended Phenotype as essential reading for anyone interested in evolution. And Consciousness Explained remains the most coherent discussion of that topic that I have read.

Daily Nous / Justin Weinberg

@DailyNousEditor

3 months

Philosopher Daniel Dennett has died.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

6 years

@simongerman600 Also compare the UK in these maps.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

Amazingly, this is not a parody account.

Department for Business and Trade

@biztradegovuk

8 years

France needs high quality, innovative British jams & marmalades #EXportingisGREAT #ExportOpps

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

6 months

Starting next week, the Darwin College Lecture Series 2024 is on the theme of REVOLUTION. Eight public lectures, each by a different distinguished speaker, explore this topic from multiple perspectives spanning history, science, philosophy, art and politics.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

This arrived today and I've spent most of the afternoon reading it, and enjoying it immensely. Fantastic work @arvidagren .

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

2 years

One surprising aspect of the discussion about E.O. Wilson is the idea that he was a fondly regarded and universally respected icon of evolutionary biology. He had a great deal of influence, but was also one of the more divisive figures in the field.. 1/4

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 years

I was mildly critical of the piece in @newscientist , but this by @AngelaDSaini in the @guardian is very good on the postwar history of 'race science'.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

8 years

Thoughtful article by my colleague John Welch on why constant calls for 'new evolutionary synthesis' are harmful.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

2 years

Well. This is a fortuitous time to be heading to Leipzig.

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@aylwyn_scally

3 years

One thing I'm learning from the reaction to @kph3k 's book that hardly anyone has yet read is that we need to do a much better job of teaching what heritability is. Indeed, coming up with a better name for the concept would also be good.

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@aylwyn_scally

5 years

@ProfBootyPhD It had old man smell. Also Google Scholar actually found papers.

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@aylwyn_scally

4 years

Some genuinely good news.

Save Virunga

@SaveVirunga

4 years

#Virunga mountain #gorillas population is at its highest since 1970. The species has been removed from the list of critically endangered species of the @IUCN

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

Nice article about some of the exciting recent work on ancient African genetics from @cschlebu , @HennLab , @SarahTishkoff and other colleagues.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

There's a mature literature on the concept of randomness, and the ideas involved are highly relevant to genetics and evolution. Evidently we should address it in teaching. As an intro I recommend Edward Beltrami, 'What Is Random?: Chance and Order in Mathematics and Life'.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

I'm attending more talks and seminars now than I used to, by colleagues not just here in Cambridge but all over the world. Meeting in person is important, but this is great also and we should have been doing it a long time ago.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

7 years

Fascinating paper on ancestral African demography . Pleased to see how well our conjecture of 2012 is bearing up :)

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 years

EU: Brits, if you want your ice cream you have to come down off the bouncy castle. Yes, the other children are still on it, but the man says you can't eat ice cream on the bouncy castle. Look, it's starting to melt. UK: Waaaaahh I want ice cream.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 years

Lol, my timeline is now just a hosepipe of shite about black people winning the 100m sprint.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

Useful info for Irish citizens in the UK: UK European Health Insurance Cards (EHIC) expire at the end of this year but as EU citizens you (+ children + non-UK spouse) can get one which lasts a further 5 years. Go to - you've 2 days left to apply.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

8 years

'Debunked' might be one of those useful words where, as soon as someone uses it, you know you can safely ignore them

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

4 years

Is it just me or is Slack's implementation of conversation threads actually quite terrible?

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 months

@ewanbirney The thing is, there's no imperative to present human ancestry as a 2D picture. That's a choice these authors have made. Figures are not decorations, they tell a story, and if you present one you have a responsibility to think about what it shows and what people will take from it.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

We really should stop talking about species having 'origins' in some place or time. At least not without defining clearly what is meant - and doing this usually reveals how incoherent the idea is.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

5 years

This being 2-dimensional has me triggered.

Cyan Banister

@cyantist

5 years

What’s your perfect toast? 🍞

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

2 years

Unusually, I find myself in complete agreement with Owen Jones here.

Starmer gambled Labour’s fortunes on his integrity – no wonder he’s in deep trouble | Owen Jones

Focusing on honesty and decency was always going to be a thin strategy, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones

www.theguardian.com

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

Perfect.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

1 year

Nothing quite as wonderful as the sunlit interior of a good pub on a summer afternoon.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

6 years

This business of putting the results before the methods.. why? Who came up with this? It makes even less sense than putting the figures at the back.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

3 years

Re simulations and machine learning in popgen. Simulations are an essential tool for exploring how models behave, especially in the many cases where we can't write down an analytical solution, but also even where we can, as a way of gaining intuition.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally

10 years

The people who design manuscript submission websites should be forced to use them each day just to login & check email.

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Aylwyn Scally

@aylwyn_scally