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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
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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
November 8, 2025 at 9:29 PM
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
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
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
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
dialecticbio.bsky.social
#26 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The communication of conformational changes here is very good. Love the design choices
September 4, 2025 at 12:31 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
He did everything in Excel. I forgot that he also never learned how to use Illustrator/Inkscape.
August 1, 2025 at 2:41 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
The comic does a lot of reifying old classist ideas present in The Bell Curve. This panel is especially misleading: there aren't genes for being a lawyer or a baker. The environment of a family that is being inherited here, and the SNPs correlating with families is a result of pop. stratification
April 1, 2025 at 10:30 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
It's finally official and verified: The X user "Cremieux" is ID'd as a guy called Jordan Lasker. Lasker has been LARPing as an expert in genetics on X to promote racist pseudoscience. @sashagusevposts.bsky.social has been calling out his bullshit for ages
Jordan Lasker, AKA ‘Cremieux’ One of the speakers at the conference is billed under a social media alias, Cremieux, but the Guardian has corroborated that the account is apparently run by Jordan Lasker, a long-time proponent of eugenics. The @cremieuxrecueil X account has been boosted or engaged with dozens of times by that platform’s proprietor, Elon Musk, often on the topic of falling birthrates.
March 3, 2025 at 9:19 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Wow! The DOGE feedback mechanism is working exactly as thus planned!!
Cremieux (a race science fraudster) tweets: DOGE has a very obvious feedback mechanism for its cuts. If DIGE makes a big broad cut against a million programs, people get upset about a few specific, very good ones like PEPFAR, and the program comes back because DOGE's members are, thus, informed it was good. Trump administration wants to un-fire nuclear safety workers but can't figure out how to reach them USDA accidentally fored officials working on bird flu and is now trying to rehire them
February 19, 2025 at 3:04 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Since the topic of "should science get involved in politics" has once again sprung up, here's Joseph Thornton talking about the Creationism effort to undermine scientific education, and how scientists initially tried not to get involved.
February 18, 2025 at 6:23 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
"Ah, but you see, my solution is much better. Sure, I won't do that either, because that also involves getting all political. Oh well"
Arguably, a better use of the Royal Society’s global influence and that of its fellows would be to explain exactly how the measures touted by the US government could damage public health and the environment for decades to come.
February 17, 2025 at 10:20 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
How are people STILL doing this? Look outside, the lunatics who believe science is a "woke cabal" are dismantling scientific institutions right now. Don't want science to be political? Ok, don't vote either, don't say anything, just lay down and get trod on. That's what Elon wants from you too!
My caution stems from something I have been thinking about for years—should science get involved in politics?
February 17, 2025 at 10:16 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
The sister paper is beautiful too. It has everything one could ever ask for, like:
• fractals in nature
• protein evolution
• references Gould & Lewontin 1979

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
a, Schematic representation of the requisites needed to produce a Sierpiński fractal from hexameric blocks and the symmetry-based constraints on oligomeric assembly. Green and blue dots represent active or open interfaces, respectively. b, Cryo-EM density maps of Sierpiński triangles of the zeroth, first and second fractal level. The 6mer (3.1 Å) was derived from the hexameric Δ2–6 SeCS variant. The 18mer (3.9 Å) was derived from the wild-type (WT) SeCS. The 54mer (5.9 Å) was derived from the pH-stabilized variant H369R SeCS. Together, our results show that building a stable fractal required a markedly small number of substitutions and no new strong contacts in the fractal interface. This result is consistent with previous studies showing that individual substitutions can substantially shift the occupancy of oligomeric states or induce supramolecular assembly. This facile origin and almost immediate subsequent losses in two lineages (Extended Data Fig. 8b) make a non-adaptive origin at least plausible. Moreover, the pKa of the new interface was already primed to match the physiological pH fluctuations as soon as the assembly emerged: introducing q18L into ancC (which, without this mutation, cannot make 18mers) resulted in an interface that dissociated over a similar pH range as in wild-type SeCS (Extended Data Fig. 8n). The apparently physiologically tuned pKa of the assembly is therefore either a molecular spandrel (a feature that initially evolved for reasons unrelated to its current use37) or simply a coincidence that looks deceptively adaptive. The large assemblies this protein can build are more clearly an evolutionary accident: as beautifully regular and complex as higher-order Sierpiński triangles are, they only appear at non-physiological concentrations and their size would be difficult to fit into the cytoplasm of S. elongatus. Even if the 18mer fulfils a useful function, the ability of the protein to make larger assemblies is almost certainly an accidental by-product of the unusual symmetry it happened to have evolved. Based on our findings, we suspect that evolutionary transitions in self-assembly may be more common than structural databases make it seem. As techniques to characterize protein complexes improve, we may discover a menagerie of assembly types that come and go as proteins evolve. Perhaps only a small fraction ever become important to their organisms and persist. Many others will fade as quickly as they appeared. We can therefore only wonder about how many unique …
February 17, 2025 at 11:17 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Feels strange to be sharing great science papers at the moment, but I love this paper published late last year from Georg Hochberg's team: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Evolution consistently produces molecular "spandrels" with no functional benefit
February 16, 2025 at 12:12 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
#25 doi.org/10.1016/j.tc...

Stefan Raunser's lab always produces some beautiful protein figures. I love the colour palette and clear labelling of subunits. "Toothpaste" cartoon style works well for figures of large multi-subunit complexes.
February 12, 2025 at 10:13 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
#24 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Found this preprint thanks to a talk at @lorneproteins.bsky.social
February 11, 2025 at 12:34 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news @veritasium.bsky.social, but there's a mistake in your new Youtube video:
"Aspartic acid" and "Arginine"
February 10, 2025 at 11:02 PM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
Actually, yeah, I can believe that, because running research facilities is expensive. Do you realise how expensive it is to keep a single -80C freezer running? Musk frames this as him saving money for science, but in reality, he is single-handedly killing science in the US
Elon Musk: "can you believe that universities with tens of billions in endowments were siphoning off 60% of research award money for "overhead"? What a rip-off!"
February 9, 2025 at 8:32 AM
dialecticbio.bsky.social
This sort of complaint about Bluesky is funny to me. Impact on society? Do you think scientists can improve society by... tweeting? Plus, I've never seen the academics who make these "Ivory Tower" complaints ever lead by example and engage with "dissenting opinions" themselves.
An academic on Twitter/X complaining about scientists moving to Bluesky: "Yes... But, what about the impact on the wider society? If you exclude dissenting opinions and interactions, you starting to live in the Ivory Tower."
January 27, 2025 at 12:52 AM