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dialecticbio.bsky.social
Bird account
@dialecticbio.bsky.social
2.8K followers 480 following 440 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
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
theophite.bsky.social rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 3d
"there has been constant gene flow between populations for essentially the entire history of the human race, we passed through a genetic bottleneck only a few thousand couples wide, intelligence is our key adaptive trait, and the most genetically diverse population of humans on earth is all dumb."
jamellebouie.net jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 3d
apropos james watson’s death i had an idle thought today about how stupid race/iq stuff sounds. “buh if your skin is darker you are biologically less smart” is a thing only a dumbass can believe
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
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Important details about that new embryo selection company, its dubious scientific claims, plus its many affiliations with white nationalism 👇👇👇
sashagusevposts.bsky.social Sasha Gusev @sashagusevposts.bsky.social · Aug 2
A few thoughts on Herasight, the new embryo selection company. First, their whitepaper (drive.google.com/file/d/1EpFi...) implies that competitors like Nucleus have been marketing and selling grossly erroneous risk estimates. This is shocking if true! 🧵
August 2, 2025 at 11:04 PM
Reposted by Bird account
gcbias.bsky.social
Numerous FAQs & think pieces were written promising GWAS participants & the broader public that sociogenomics was focused on education improvement, environmental interventions, and away from the hereditarian past. All quickly betrayed.
August 2, 2025 at 2:15 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Just stating the obvious:
- academic jobs are super competitive, even with a good CV
- Colin severely overstates how impressive his CV is (he doesn't know how to use R or Python)
- Colin makes no mention of the fact he was in the middle of a massive scandal and has had many papers retracted
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · Jul 31
Colin Wright is a world class loser
WSJ OPINION Cornell University Discriminated Against Me I was excluded from a candidate search on the basis of my race and have filed an EEOC complaint. By Colin Wright July 30, 2025 at 4:53 pm ET
August 1, 2025 at 1:40 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
The New York Times Had To Work With A Eugenicist So They Didn’t Get Scooped By A Bigot @defector.com
defector.com/the-new-york...
The New York Times Had To Work With A Eugenicist So They Didn't Get Scooped By A Bigot | Defector
On Thursday night, right before a long summer holiday weekend, the New York Times published a triple-bylined bombshell: 16 years ago, in an application form for a college that ultimately did not accep...
defector.com
July 9, 2025 at 11:12 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Really highlights how the world of the far-right is kinda like Plato's cave, but they're all in the cave voluntarily, and it's just them making shadow puppet shows for each other and getting scared
thembo.bsky.social 💀 🎃 ThemBOO! 🎃 💀 @thembo.bsky.social · Jul 9
Important to note that the "Cindy Steinberg" account on Twitter(now suspended) that prompted Grok's "Hitler is good" replies was a fake account created by nazis to seed posts they could shriek at. It matters b/c nearly all the anti-SJW stuff a decade ago was based on posts created using this tactic.
July 9, 2025 at 9:33 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
I've been MIA for a while, but it makes me happy to see everyone now hates this racist dipshit Jordan Lasker guy as much as I do.

Some niche lore on Jordan: he's such a pathological liar that even other neo-Nazis eventually got sick of his bullshit: tgstat.com/channel/@TGH...
capitolhunters.bsky.social capitolhunters @capitolhunters.bsky.social · Jul 4
The saga of the NYT's anti-Mamdani story taken from notorious white supremacist Jordan Lasker (they call him an "academic") gets even more amazing: Lasker's only impactful paper, which claimed white people are smarter, is infamous: it misused data so badly it got his tenured co-author fired. 2/
July 9, 2025 at 6:45 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
The Trump admin is terminating scientific grants under the pretence combating antisemitism. They are going to any use any pro-Palestinian activity on campus as an excuse to do this to all American universities, effectively killing science and free speech rights in one go
A tweet from the official NIH account on X: Today #NIH is terminating more than $250 million in funding—including more than 400 grants—to Columbia University following directives from the Trump Administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. The cancellations are due to Columbia University’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.
March 11, 2025 at 8:30 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
A while ago I decided to give up on maintaining my own Neovim config because I was just making a worse replica of LazyVim, so now I just use LazyVim and haven't looked back
March 7, 2025 at 11:59 PM
Reposted by Bird account
briggsgroup.bsky.social
Mature #HIV-1 contains >2000 copies of “spacer peptide 2”, but we didn’t know why. We now see that SP2 binds the matrix protein and triggers the change into its mature arrangement. Summary video from @margotriggi.bsky.social
February 28, 2025 at 2:04 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
As expected, the Royal Society does nothing like a bunch of cowards. Nazism, spreading lies, and destroying scientific institutions are A-OK according the Royal Society
March 4, 2025 at 12:09 AM