David Castellano

Now published in Perception (@pec-ipe.bsky.social)!

Schulz-Hildebrandt, H. (2026). When purple perceived only at fixation: A fixation- and distance-dependent color illusion. Perception, 0(0). doi.org/10.1177/0301...

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

Estimation of effective size of large continuously distributed populations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.09.704747v1

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue

By: @royaards@newsie.social

Autogenes? Deacon?

A figure depicting continental drift from when Gondwana existed to present day, with continents and countries colored according to the ratite species that occur or occurred on them. Next to that is a cartoon of a phylogeny that we would expect support for if continental drift explained patterns of species occurrence and relatedness. And next to that is a cartoon of the phylogeny supported by the genetic data presented in this paper, which demonstrates that closely related species must have traveled great distances after Gondwana broke up, after which flightlessness evolved, and that this happened more than once.

This paper is a great for teaching phylogenetic trees.

"Ancient DNA reveals elephant birds and kiwi are sister taxa and clarifies ratite bird evolution"

Clearly written. It discusses hypotheses of relatedness among species via continental drift vs genetic data. 🧪

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

But if bottom up determinism is true, then top down causality is simply a feedback loop?

Just as no one has ever learned to ride a bike by reading an instruction manual, the same is true for societies with fascism. To learn certain things, it is necessary to participate in certain things. Much to my regret.

Every century, fascism (easy and ineffective solutions to complex problems) rises because no member of the family is left to remember how badly it worked.

GHIST logo

Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament challenges!

Among the 9 challenges, we had five winners: @alwaysrong.bsky.social, @adaigle.bsky.social, @andrewhvaughn.bsky.social, @thymelicus.bsky.social, @rgollnisch.bsky.social

MBE | SLiM 5: Eco-evolutionary Simulations Across Multiple Chromosomes and Full Genomes

Haller, Ralph & Messer present SLiM 5, a major extension of the SLiM simulation framework for simulating multiple chromosomes, enabling a heightened level of realism for full-genome simulations.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf313

#evobio #molbio #compbio

Somatic and germline mutational processes across the tree of life https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.28.691837v1

My first post for @Forbes

Anti-predictions for 2026. Stuff people say will happen that ain't gonna happen: UFOs as Aliens; AGI; 3I/Atlas

forbes.com/sites/adamfr...

Los análisis genéticos sugieren que el virus de la peste porcina no salió del laboratorio de la Generalitat que estaba a cientos de metros Los patógenos con los que se experimentaba en el centro científico catalán no coinciden con los que han matado a 29 jabalíes, según una primera comparativa no concluyente

Los análisis genéticos sugieren que el virus de la peste porcina africana no salió del laboratorio de la Generalitat que estaba a cientos de metros, según los primeros resultados "no concluyentes" de @tonigabaldon.bsky.social
elpais.com/ciencia/2025...

The Phyloverse | David Castellano | Substack By day, I study how DNA mutations shape life with computational biology. By night (and coffee breaks), I ponder evolution on a cosmic scale. This Substack explores Evolutionary Cosmology—a strange ide...

Oh!! Thanks for sharing this, it is more brain food for my personal project about the Phyloverse! open.substack.com/pub/stevecas... would love to hear your opinion too

What Is the Phyloverse, and What Am I Trying to Do Here? Whether you are a new subscriber or a long-time reader, it’s worth explaining what this project called the Phyloverse is really about.

Right, what am I pretending to do here? open.substack.com/pub/stevecas...

What about icy moons with liquid water inside? Are they expected to be more common?

Freaky Earth. Does Water Make Us Alone In The Cosmos? Earth has both land and water. That might be really, really uncommon.

Continents and oceans: we both. But it didn’t have to be this way and on most planets it probably isn’t. That’s important because truly complex life may need dry land to get going.

Today's Everyman's Universe post.

www.everymansuniverse.com/p/freaky-ear...

Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance Scientists have long debated the origins of exceptional human achievements. This literature review summarizes recent evidence from multiple domains on the acquisition of world-class performance. We re...

Multidisciplinary training, over time, produces the highest impact people

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Happy to hare that the preprint I was advertising below has been published by the Journal of Evolutionary Biology:

academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

Thanks @jevbio.bsky.social for supporting responsible publishing!

You were 😉

The interviewer was very insistent about living forever and editing babies.

The analysis of variance and the analysis of causes This issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics contains two articles by Newton Morton and his colleagues1,2 that provide a detailed analytic critique

They have never heard about Lewontin's norms of reaction between genotype, phenotype and environment. Amazing how many quantitative geneticists are not aware of this point. academic.oup.com/ije/article-...

It's called wisdom

Transcription start sites experience a high influx of heritable variants fueled by early development - Nature Communications The impact of transcription on germline mutagenesis remains poorly understood. Here, the authors identify a mutational hotspot at transcription start sites in the human germline that is significantly ...

I am very pleased to see our work, in which we describe a mutational hotspot at transcription start sites in the human germline, out:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Great work from @castellanoed.bsky.social, @vseplyarskiy.bsky.social, Miguel Cortés Guzmán and Clàudia Serrano Colomé!

We Might Not Be So Strange We Might Not Be So Strange: Perhaps intelligent life wasn’t so unlikely after all.

I wrote this piece at the start of the year, so it's nice to see it finally out before the year's end! It looks at the notion of "hard steps" in evolution that allegedly make intelligent life rare in the universe, and why that might not be correct after all.
nautil.us/we-might-not...

Transcription start sites experience a high influx of heritable variants fueled by early development - Nature Communications The impact of transcription on germline mutagenesis remains poorly understood. Here, the authors identify a mutational hotspot at transcription start sites in the human germline that is significantly ...

Transcription start sites are new mutational hotspots, according to a new study by the CRG's Donate Weghorn in Nature Communications. The mutations can be passed down to future generations and appear shortly after conception, in the first few rounds of cell division.