José Cerca

V happy about this one (@brentcemerson.bsky.social @biodiversitysmns.bsky.social @hernmoral.bsky.social)et al Species have survived on oceanic islands for Mya despite occupying small geographic areas, facing environmental calamities and having low Ne. We discuss this w/ a focus on conservation. 1/2

This looks fun!

last week to apply for full consideration—happy to chat informally if you are on the fence!

Exciting postdoc position on adaptive introgression in butterflies just announced by Konrad Lohse: elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid... I can highly recommend working together with him and Simon Martin in Edinburgh.

Huelga docente en Madrid por el desprecio a la educación pública en la Comunidad En Asturias, un Gobierno que presume de defender lo público abre paso a "universidades" privadas y bloquea sin ofrecer razones la oferta de empleo @universidadoviedo.bsky.social www.lavozdeasturias.es/noticia/ovie...

🏝️ How do island species persist despite small populations? A recent synthesis shows that purging, genetic drift and ecological buffering can act together, yet genomic erosion may still leave populations vulnerable to environmental change. 👉 doi.org/10.1016/j.tr... @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social

Far from taking pride in it, the men who killed this magnificent animal should be deeply ashamed. That swift, sleek, wonderful monster, flashing with holographic colours, reduced to a dead black lump. www.devonlive.com/news/devon-n...

In this thread, Monbiot explains how political decisions are made for reasons of power and interest, but then justified with pretextual arguments about logic and morality. The reason I cannot deal with most political coverage is that it takes the latter arguments seriously and ignores the real story

Here is how politics, in most cases, works: Rich and powerful interests, whether in fossil fuels, finance, big tech, media, meat, pharma or foreign governments, make a demand, and use their sophisticated tools to persuade a government to adopt it. The government adopts it. Please read whole🧵

Has anyone noticed whether @molecology.bsky.social started using AI to process papers? It's not the first time they've asked me queries that make no sense, and my conclusion is that it looks like AI slop.

Feedback on a *rejected* grant. Quo vadis?

Island species 🏝️ frequently experience founder events and population bottlenecks 🧬 and are often subject to disturbances that further reduce population sizes. Despite these challenges, some island lineages persist for millennia 🕰️ —the paradox of persistence. Here’s what we learned about it:

This. 💯 this. "Our work highlights an important knowledge gap: we still lack integrative, cross-taxon genomic time-series datasets linking deleterious variation, fitness, and demography." 👏 Maëva Gabrielli et al @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social 👀 #ConSERTeam🧬

Islands are amazing #biodiversity study systems. Here is our perspective on how they can be used as models for #conservation Thanks to José and Maëva for their great leadership on this #consgen #popgen

How local is local adaptation? Researchers transplanted more than 700 lab-raised stickleback fish among lake and stream environments, finding that adaptation to specific sites can outweigh adaptation to broader habitat differences. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/yTOk50ZP97o

Blaming AI agents when they escape sandboxes is like blaming lions for escaping a zoo. The company is responsible, they should be sued for accountability. Nothing complicated about it.

This looks super cool. Congratulations @amarques.bsky.social .

I’m looking to hire an NIH funded postdoc to join our lab here at Davis (please RT). Ongoing areas of interest include: 1) polygenic signals of selection from time series, ARGs, GWAS, etc 2) The interpretation of GWAS, polygenic scores, & sources of confounding

I'm looking to hire a postdoc to work on the RepAdapt + MacroMar projects, analysing genomic data from >130 species of plants, animals, and fungi (VCFs are processed, ready to go). Lots of potential for creativity and collaboration! yeamanlab.weebly.com/uploads/5/7/...

Really good chance for Swedish PIs/colleagues. We are very privileged to have NBIS.

I am endlessly thankful to Just Stop Oil for taking to the streets again today But it's not easy seeing such good, generous-hearted and courageous people being handcuffed and taken away, many possibly to long jail sentences It shouldn't have to be this way

It's always relevant to point out: America is a continent with dozens of countries. The USA is one of those countries. This is imperialist (and perhaps even colonialist) language, and likely has shared conceptual roots with the renaming of Lake Ontario or the Gulf of Mexico. Let's stop with this.

We have a ca 1.5 yr postdoc available in our team, asking, 'what is the shape of the fitness landscape between oviparity and viviparity?' and 'what drives viviparity to evolve'? 🧬 using 🦎 as a model. closes 16 Sept. Details on EvolDir evoldir.net/brian/evoldi... @glasgow.ac.uk @sbohvm.gla.ac.uk

Well this just got bumped up to the top of the reading list: "Chromosomal inversions accelerate genetic evolution and drive ecological speciation across an island gradient" doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

'La evolución de los seres vivos', de Pablo Vargas Gómez y José María Gómez Reyes. Colección #QuéSabemosDe coeditada con CSIC CSICdivulga buff.ly/a2QTrpY

The first manuscript from my postdoc is out (doi.org/10.64898/202...)! We introduce 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞-𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 for studying population structure change over time, with the temporal resolution of Ancestral Recombination Graphs (ARGs). Joint with @jkpritch.bsky.social and @jeffspence.github.io. 1/n

Congratulations to @dortizba.bsky.social on a new collaborative Tansley Review in @newphyt.bsky.social! Predictive evolutionary genomics: principles, validation, and practice doi.org/10.1111/nph....

Excited for @gabrielesgarlata.bsky.social’s new preprint on the Genome-Wide Effect of Drift and Selection over a Single Generation 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Latest crazy story from the frontiers of math and AI -- a neurosurgery resident, with no training in advanced math, uses ChatGPT 5.6 to solve a major open problem in numerical linear algebra. alextownsend.net/essays/SIAMN...

Our study on giant transposons Starship 🚀🧬 in the genome of the lichen fungus Xanthoria is now out in @pnas.org! What did we find out about Starships in #lichen fungi? 👇Updated thread below 🖥️ 🧪 🦠 🧫 #SymbioSky 1/6 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Thrilled to share that I'll be starting my lab at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm as a DDLS Fellow in November! 🧑‍🔬🧬🎉 Of course, we will be delving into all things mobile DNA & evolution, as well as developing AI approaches for biodiversity genomics #newPI #TEsky #TEworldwide

EcoEvoJobs 2026-27 just opened for business and we've already got 79 faculty / permanent jobs listed. Please repost! ecoevojobs.net

Interested in genetics, diversification, and speciation? We're hiring a Research Associate to help with our projects, including the convergent evolution of fruit color. Come and work with us! Feel free to contact me with questions. (Reposts appreciated!) Link: indiana.peopleadmin.com/postings/33973

What a sad story. www.science.org/content/arti...

Just posted: a group paper describing major updates to my software pixy, for population genetic summary statistics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... New since 2021: arbitrary ploidy, multiallelic sites, missingness-aware Watterson's θ and Tajima's D, Hudson's FST, multicore execution!

Please share: Full-time PhD position on Butterfly Evolution at High Elevations 🦋⛰️ The project aims to understand the evolution and adaptation of Andean white butterflies using genomics. DEADLINE: September 11, 2026 More info: pavelmatos.wordpress.com/join-us/

Very cool pair of papers demonstrating little link between amount of additive genetic variation and amount of nucleotide variation within species: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our criteria for success are disastrously skewed. In my view, a successful person is one who does more good than harm, on any scale. On this measure, most billionaires are massive failures, while humble folk in my neighbourhood who look after other people are highly successful.

Renowned Evolutionary biologists Peter & Rosemary Grant are back with new research on adaptive radiation in Geospiza finches on Daphne Major, looking at the long term impacts of hybridization on 3 species of ground finch! You can read the full paper below 👇 🧪 (1/2) doi.org/10.1093/evol...

New preprint on the effect of ancient admixture / structure on genealogical trees. I introduce a new way of summarising reconstructed genealogies that captures a clear signal of ancient gene flow into the ancestors of modern humans. Feedback welcome!

The distribution of integer partitions in human genome-wide genealogies reflects gene flow from a super-archaic lineage https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.14.738421v1

As you prepare for your holiday outings, please remember Monbiot’s Inviolable Law on Leaving the House: T = 2A² + 5C² Where T is time in minutes, A is adults and C is children.