amazing - I'm happy to hear that! And, I respectfully disagree - you do deserve to be a PI!

appreciate the nomination of the paper for your class :')

Thank you so much, Eric! And thank you for suffering through the poster to hear the spiel during the early days of the project lolol

Super grateful the manuscript made it to the read pile!

Would be interested in hearing what you think if it strikes you. DMs are open

woohoo - love systematics! Enjoy starting your lab!

Appreciate you, Thibaut. I think a part of me will always be drawn to academia / never really leave

Time will tell. I'm not worried about it

There are many paths to happiness - I will find one

Honestly, I agree with you. And the unreliability is a *huge problem. This is why we implemented a new method designed to rigorously identify reliable genes and conducted over 700 topology tests.

Despite our results, I'm still not convinced and want to do more analysis on this topic

you're def a thoughtful scientist, so if you have ideas to the contrary, I'd love to hear them!

Also, people don't really entertain a sister relationship between cteno&sponge, which would be an important indicator for a hard polytomy

It's possible, though I haven't seen any analysis for it

If integrative phylogenomics supported a hard polytomy, then we would have expected at least some support for the ctenophore-sister hypothesis.

Glad you like the article - thanks for checking it out!

I'm glad you like the manuscript! I anticipate this will not be the last paper on the topic and welcome more analyses.

In fact, I am not totally convinced in the sponge-sister hypothesis (or the ctenophore-sister hypothesis) and look forward to doing more analyses myself

...like I better..*

uh oh. sounds like a better emotionally prepare myself haha

nah, you're totally chill, and I appreciate you. I realized that - while trying to be vulnerable and honest - I might make others feel more hopeless than they should or need to.

I want to be a beacon of hope and inspiration, not a source of negativity. My previous post wasn't inline with that idea

No problem! Please let me know if you have any other questions - happy to answer them!