taylor cooper
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iamtaylornotyou.bsky.social
taylor cooper
@iamtaylornotyou.bsky.social
As an Evolutionary Biologist, I can confirm lizards are cool.
PhD Student | Stroud Lab | Georgia Tech
Reposted by taylor cooper
While stories of singular DNA changes that drove evolution of human brain/behaviour remain seductive, advances across multiple fields of biology cast doubt on such simplistic narratives of our origins. A new paper from my lab shows how biobanks may speak to this fundamental question.🧪
Explainer🧵👇1/n
Evaluating the effects of archaic protein-altering variants in living human adults
Promise and pitfalls of using large biobanks to study impacts of archaic protein-coding variants in living humans.
www.science.org
December 18, 2025 at 1:51 PM
Reposted by taylor cooper
Or just don’t use acronyms.

Acronyms are almost always bad for readers because of the cognitive and memory load.

Acronyms are nice for typing when you’re in a hurry and don’t want to keep repeating lots of words.

So just use find and replace to clean up your manuscript before submitting.
Acronyms in academic papers should have clickable pop-ups that describe what they are.

Sometimes I just want to read the method/results and not have to dig through the intro for all the initial instances of the acronym.
December 13, 2025 at 6:14 PM
Reposted by taylor cooper
Took me a year (😱), but I finally published a blog post about our article on the #quantgen variance partition of phenitypic plasticity with @lmchev.bsky.social, published in @peercomjournal.bsky.social.

🇬🇧 devillemereuil.legtux.org/quantitative...
🇫🇷 devillemereuil.legtux.org/fr/genetique...
Quantitative genetics of reaction norms: an onion partitionning – Pierre de Villemereuil
devillemereuil.legtux.org
December 10, 2025 at 10:48 AM
Reposted by taylor cooper
One of my neighbors has been putting up these fish facts posters. All kinds of different fish, marine, freshwater, deep, shallow, all kinds. This is a good one. “Stg this real fish” took me out. Good work, neighbor.
December 7, 2025 at 3:39 PM
I love Letters to a Pre-Scientist week! This round, my pre-scientist pen pal (whose stem interest was "not at all") asked me about cool lizards. I doubt they've ever seen this buff worm! (Mexican worm lizard, Bipes biporus)
December 3, 2025 at 4:49 PM
Reposted by taylor cooper
Somehow these peas also require 10x the normal amount of water to boil.
November 13, 2025 at 6:50 PM
Curly-taileds are some of my favorite lizards, but unfortunately we don’t have them in Georgia… or do we?? One of the best things I’ve found in a cracker barrel parking lot! Check it out now in Reptiles & Amphibians journals.ku.edu/reptilesanda...
November 13, 2025 at 7:24 PM
Reposted by taylor cooper
Warning. ⚠️ If you are writing an NSF GRFP, new this year, you need official transcripts to apply. Beware. They will not review applications without official transcripts. ‼️
November 4, 2025 at 8:50 PM
lizard rage (n): a feeling that results from a lizard evading you multiple times, slipping the loop, or otherwise getting the better of you. May result in yelling obscenities, throwing and/or breaking your pole, and a foul mood.
November 2, 2025 at 9:16 PM
Reposted by taylor cooper
Thank you Python Software Foundation:

“Ultimately, however, the value of the work and the size of the grant were not more important than practicing our values and retaining the freedom to support every part of our community.”

pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-...
The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program
In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Op...
pyfound.blogspot.com
October 31, 2025 at 1:15 PM
Very exciting, but the real question is does Arghap36 explain why my orange boy ACTS like an orange boy. iykyk
Last year, two teams have independently found the long-awaited mutation and discovered a protein that influences hair color in a way never seen before in any animal.

Learn more on #NationalCatDay: https://scim.ag/3LdWP8b
October 29, 2025 at 5:29 PM
Always love working down in Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.

Catching some great lizards all day every day and teaching high school students how we use them to study ecology and evolution.

Can’t imagine a better gig!
October 27, 2025 at 7:25 PM
Amazing symposium on Sex and Gender at #Evol2025 So grateful to all the speakers for bringing us together to think about how to teach and communicate these complex topics @jacanamama.bsky.social Thomas Sanger @bio-eddy.bsky.social @cissyballen.bsky.social
June 24, 2025 at 4:27 PM
Do proportional changes in neurons underlie behavioral divergence in Lake Malawi cichlids? Come to my talk at 4:15 in Olympia 1 to find out! #Evol2025
June 21, 2025 at 12:42 PM
Had such an amazing time at the 2025 Evolutionary and Quantitative Genetics Workshop! Thanks so much to the amazing organizers and participants @pseudacris.bsky.social @lauraalencar.bsky.social @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social Patrick Carter, Jacqueline Sztepanacz, & Joe Felsendtein
June 20, 2025 at 12:11 PM
Reposted by taylor cooper
Please share! JOIN THE LAB! We are looking to recruit a motivated reserach technician to assist with field research on restoration and lidar data collection in #longleaf pine at the beautiful @thejonesctr.bsky.social Apps due July 6 jonesctr.org/wp-content/u...
June 20, 2025 at 11:49 AM
Reposted by taylor cooper
Hot off the press 📣: one of the most surprising and unsettling findings of my PhD. A novel social tradition emerged in the tool-using white-faced capuchins of Jicarón island… abducting and carrying the infants of another species. Thread with gifs, videos, and all the bizarre details 👇
Humans have many unusual traditions. But did you know animals’ strange behaviors can become culture too? Out now in Current Biology (doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...) we show the rise and spread of a surprising tradition: interspecies infant abduction. Interactive timeline (www.ab.mpg.de/671374) 🧵 (1/12)
May 19, 2025 at 3:08 PM
Reposted by taylor cooper
Convergent evolution of "smelling like rotting meat" is mediated by a 3 amino-acid chance in a conserved enzymes, just out @science.org 🔽

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Convergent acquisition of disulfide-forming enzymes in malodorous flowers
Identifying the metabolic and genetic changes that confer evolutionary novelty is essential for understanding the factors facilitating or constraining the occurrence of traits. We show that dimethyl d...
www.science.org
May 8, 2025 at 7:18 PM
Reposted by taylor cooper
Green anole, originally from tropical Cuba, have evolved to live in this. Wut.

@iamtaylornotyou.bsky.social

🦎🦎🦎
January 10, 2025 at 1:42 PM
Reposted by taylor cooper
January 8, 2025 at 12:56 PM
Reposted by taylor cooper
Running away isn't always the best strategy, simply staying put and hoping the danger will pass can be better, & now Damián Oliva & co show that signals in the mudflat crab's MLG1 neurons trigger freezing when the crab is at risk from a distant threat

journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...
November 27, 2024 at 4:44 PM
Reposted by taylor cooper
Teaching has gotten to this point in the semester in my second year courses.

⚒️🧪🦀🦑 #evosky
November 19, 2024 at 3:38 PM