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dialecticbio.bsky.social
Bird account
@dialecticbio.bsky.social
2.9K followers 490 following 460 posts
The "The Dialectical Biologist" account.
Structural biology & anti-racism.
Loves: birds, proteins, Linux, Lewontin
Hates: race science, racists, transphobes
Posts Replies Media Videos
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Man, writing is so hard. You're constantly confronted with your own limits, all the papers you have not read, all the terminology and facts you keep forgetting, etc. No wonder people turn to alcohol or worse (generative AI) when writing.
January 6, 2026 at 6:41 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Still crazy to me that the richest man in the world is a straight up white supremacist and constantly trying to incite a "race war". Seems like we really need to do something about that if we want to survive the next decade
January 3, 2026 at 2:32 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
A movie that came out in 2025 that deserves way more love is "Mountainhead". Extremely funny satire of tech billionaires and AI zealots.
January 1, 2026 at 1:55 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
I'm currently giving this a hate-listen, because why not: Bret Weinstein on the Joe Rogan podcast for the 2000th time. In it, Bret will apparently finally reveal to us his groundbreaking new theory for evolution

youtu.be/WX_te6X-0aQ?...
Joe Rogan Experience #2427 - Bret Weinstein
YouTube video by PowerfulJRE
youtu.be
December 18, 2025 at 5:31 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
A part of me was naively hopeful that, with the erosion of science in the USA, other countries/governments would increase science funding in a race to become new tech leaders (looking at you Australia). Of course, that was a pipe dream.
December 7, 2025 at 9:19 PM
Reposted by Bird account
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
I'm increasingly interested in race science as a form of cultivated, weaponized statistical illiteracy. Take this figure, one of the most common propaganda plots, plotting national IQ data against education polygenic scores. "The correlation is so high! Clearly IQ differences are genetic!"

Oops!
November 28, 2025 at 11:31 PM
Reposted by Bird account
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
I talked a bit with Jason about Grokipedia and it is, without exaggeration, like if you trained an LLM solely on white supremacist blogs and had it try to write Wikipedia entries. Some of the most insane stuff I’ve seen on the internet
November 17, 2025 at 7:08 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
????????
November 17, 2025 at 10:05 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Elsevier's Intelligence has "gone woke". Never thought I'd see the day
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · Nov 12
Today is the day! Our reply to the two concurrent critiques (from the same set of authors) is now published in the journal Intelligence 🧵 1/
November 12, 2025 at 9:45 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
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.
November 12, 2025 at 8:42 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
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
November 9, 2025 at 12:08 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
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.”
November 8, 2025 at 10:51 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Yes but you see the racists thought about this and came up with a brilliant answer, which is that Northern European populations experienced cold winters which put enormous selection pressure on high IQ alleles because uhhh, they had to plan ahead. No other populations had needed to plan ahead before
November 8, 2025 at 6:40 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
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.
November 7, 2025 at 9:54 PM
Reposted by Bird account
jbenning.bsky.social
We're excited to share the final version of our paper, where we demonstrate how confounding remains a thorny problem for claims about causal genetic influences on human behavioral and socioeconomic outcomes. (w/ @jedidiahcarlson.com @oliviarxiv.bsky.social Ruth Shaw @arbelharpak.bsky.social) 🧵👇
November 7, 2025 at 7:06 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Rereading Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. I like to think these are describing thermodynamics, evolution, biology.
November 7, 2025 at 9:47 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Recently learned that Pewdiepie's new schtick is that he loves Linux and protein folding. I'd to apologise to the world on behalf the Linux+protein lover community, we denounce this cringe Nazi
November 5, 2025 at 9:03 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
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.
October 11, 2025 at 10:02 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
The Royal Society has a code of conduct that we can all read (
royalsociety.org/-/media/abou...), which Elon has violated, but they can ignore it and say "well, it's not our job to "police" the conduct of our Fellows". Maybe they hope Elon will reward them for Obeying In Advance, but he won't.
royalsociety.org The Royal Society @royalsociety.org · Oct 1
"I am increasingly concerned over threats to the values that allow science to flourish." Read the full statement from the President of the Royal Society Sir Adrian Smith: royalsociety.org/news/2025/10...
A statement from the President of the Royal Society | Royal Society
A statement from the President of the Royal Society regarding threats to the values that allow science to flourish.
royalsociety.org
October 2, 2025 at 12:15 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
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
September 21, 2025 at 1:31 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
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?
September 16, 2025 at 11:49 PM
Reposted by Bird account
kohngregory.bsky.social
Today is the birthday of one of my favorite scientists, thinkers, and writers of all time, Stephen Jay Gould. He would have been 84 year old. “Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.” -S. J. Gould
September 10, 2025 at 9:08 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
I watched "Eddington" the other night, and Ari Aster has proven once again that he is the undefeated best writer-director of this generation
September 4, 2025 at 2:29 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Hold on, I thought trying to retract papers for political reasons was only something "woke" mobs did?
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
RFK Jr demanded a vaccine study be retracted — the journal said no
In a rare move for a US public official, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr called for a Danish paper finding no link between aluminium in vaccines and disease to be retracted.
www.nature.com
September 4, 2025 at 2:07 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
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."
September 1, 2025 at 2:41 AM