When sexual selection through mate choice depletes versus exaggerates genetic variation: Unraveling the lek paradox | PNAS The evolution of female preferences for male display traits relies on females receiving indirect benefits from their mate. This requires substantia...

Kuangyi Xu, a current EEB postdoc at UToronto and a former student in my lab, spearheaded this new dissection of the lek paradox. It often doesn't hold! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Blossoming trees around the Japanese Garden’s pond.

The canopy of the avenue of cherry trees, all in blossom. The sun is shining through from a clear blue sky.

New Yorkers lounge on bright green grass in the shade of dozens of cherry trees in bloom.

A purple and blue ground cover flower acts as a foreground with the avenue of cherry trees beyond.

Logged off, needed more than grass. Needed all of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Biologists Confirm Not Much Evolution Happened Today STANFORD, CA—Calling it a “pretty slow one” as far as natural selection and genetic drift were concerned, biologists from Stanford University confirmed Tuesday that not much evolution happened today. ...

Biologists Confirm Not Much Evolution Happened Today

theonion.com/biologists-c...

It seems too much to hope that he just thinks morphological variation in bacula is super cool, huh 😔

Spread the word! UChicago BSD is currently searching for an instructional professor (open rank) to help develop and support graduate training in quantitative biology at UChicago. This is an Instructional Professor position (open rank). apply.interfolio.com/183517.

I love when new versions of the Eukaryotic tree come out, just casually reorganizing our understanding of the diversity of life.

I may study birds but showing students how incredibly animal/vertebrate-centric our understanding of biodiversity is has to be one of my absolute favorite things.

Brief fun survey from Jessica, Andrew & myself:

If you are a faculty member, research scientist, postdoc, or senior Ph.D. student in any area of science, please take five minutes and fill it out. We’ll share the results widely along with some reflections.

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Today I was going through Rand’s 1936 expedition notes* for the first time and he had pretty much the same ideas I’ve been having about the biogeographic patterns I’m finding in my second chapter but I’d been worried were too out there.

GSAC is gathering anonymous input on how funding uncertainty is affecting grad students and postdocs, including challenges and helpful strategies. Responses will be shared in aggregate to inform advocacy and discussions at Evolution.

Share your perspective by May 1, 2026:
forms.gle/c63zpSkwK3HT...

Also like, I have a bunch of sequence data showing something moderately surprising and he didn’t (yet) know what DNA is so it’s not like I’ve been scooped.

*from the Mission Zoologique Franco-Anglo-Américaine à Madagascar (1929-1931), Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.

I am so SO lucky this stuff is digitized and even (sort of) searchable!

This is both extremely validating and my first time personally experiencing the phenomenon everyone talks about of having an “original” scientific idea only to discover somebody else already had it 100 years ago.

Today I was going through Rand’s 1936 expedition notes* for the first time and he had pretty much the same ideas I’ve been having about the biogeographic patterns I’m finding in my second chapter but I’d been worried were too out there.

Poster for a spoof academic lecture. Title reads "The Macroevolution of Cereal Mascots: A lecture by Dr. Matt Friedman." Cropped circles show pictures of Darwin and Matt; these flank the title. Below, a variety of colorful cereal mascots are shown, with a quote from Origin: ". . . endless forms most beautiful have been, and are being, evolved." The time and venue is listed at the bottom of the poster: Thursday, April 9th, 8:30 pm Biological Science Building.

Poster for spoof academic talk. Several lines of text are shown against a cream background: 8:30PM THURSDAY, APRIL 9TH A SPOONFUL OF KNOWLEDGE RM 1010 BSB World-reknown paleontologist, Dr. Matt Friedman, will be giving an exclusive lecture on the macroevolution of cereal mascots. If you don't know what that is, you should come. If you already know what that is, you should still come. We will be providing cereal, milk, bowls, and spoons as usual, but byob, byom, byoc, and byos is encouraged! Two images are shown at the bottom of the poster. The first is a cartoon-like illustration of a stack of books topped with a bowl of cereal bearing the Cereal Club logo. The second shows the classic illustrated sequence of human evolution, with the modern human's face topped with the Cereal Club logo.

Last night, it was my honor to deliver the inaugural "Spoonful of Knowledge" lecture for the U-M Cereal Club. I gave an updated version of a talk on cereal mascot evolution put together in the last year of my PhD, longer ago than I care to admit. Poster credit: Cereal Club Instagram.

Read the story. Not a peep that the PCBs came from general electric. They just happened to be in the river and were now magically lowered.

Figure of historical timeline for ideas in the manuscript. Caption reads: "An evolving view of phylogenetic biogeography. Each period (arrow) corresponds to one of the four periods discussed in the main text. The ordering of themes within each period does not precisely correspond to when key ideas were introduced or popularized."

New preprint on the recent history of phylogenetic biogeography, with co-authors Isabel Sanmartín and Joel Cracraft, now up on EcoEvoRxiv: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

A Phylogenetic Model of Established and Enabled Biome Shifts Abstract. Where each species actually lives is distinct from where it could potentially survive and persist. This suggests it is important to distinguish e

New study led by Sean McHugh (@phyllurus.bsky.social) now out in @systbiol.bsky.social!

Sean's approach models how species gain and lose biome affinities over time, both in terms of where they *do* live (e.g. movement) and where they *could* live (e.g. adaptation)

doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

Our new paper in @journal-evo.bsky.social is out! 🎉

We showcase how to use phylogenetic meta-analysis of variance to test evolutionary hypotheses across species, applied here to test patterns of stabilising selection and canalisation for wing length in 172 birds

📄 doi.org/10.1093/evol...

We had a 3D printed whistle on the seder plate.

As an anti-AI person myself, this is a useful starting point for anyone these days - clear expectations & *explanations* around lab policies will help all parties concerned navigate a murky space, even if the policy is “please don’t.”

Aww love the yellow soles!

Wow, I didn’t realize anyone was still using AI image generation this bad 😂

Pleistocene demographic histories dominate contemporary genomic diversity in a continental radiation of Himalayan–Hengduan songbirds | PNAS Genetic diversity, the fundamental substrate for evolutionary potential, is declining globally at unprecedented rates. Yet the mechanisms governing...

Pleistocene demographic histories dominate contemporary genomic diversity in a continental radiation of Himalayan–Hengduan songbirds
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Are you an early career professional (last two years of PhD or first five years in your job/post PhD?) attending #AOS26 in Amherst MA this summer? We're looking for a diverse range of speakers to be featured in our Early Professionals symposia. DM me for more details!

Trump administration orders dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service Late Tuesday afternoon, with the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the ...

“They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science…And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees”

New preprint! We sequenced 175 'Alalā (Hawaiian crow) genomes to understand why >50% of eggs fail to hatch in a species recovered from just 9 individuals. What we found was a both exciting and surprising. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I’ve seen lots of people (including myself) just say “ebird lifer”. For me, personally, I would distinguish between a bird I know I saw but it was before I was as much of a birder/keeping track as closely/don’t remember it clearly, versus one that just isn’t on my ebird list.

Hey y'all. I'm a month late to this, but I wanted to share that one of my PhD chapters was published in Systematic Biology with my advisor, Frank Burbrink. Here, we explore how ecological opportunity influences phenotypic evolution in North American natricid snakes. 🧵/8

Was probably an off-off-broadway musical at some point.