Ozgur Taskent
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ozgurtaskent.bsky.social
Ozgur Taskent
@ozgurtaskent.bsky.social
130 followers 240 following 11 posts
post-doctoral researcher @METU/ODTU @CompEvo
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Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
johnhawks.net
The Yarımburgaz cave complex is around 22 km west of Istanbul, in the Thracian part of Turkey. An upper cave is the location of a Byzantine church, while a lower chamber has much older Middle Pleistocene record of choppers, modified flake tools, and remains of cave bears.

Photo: CeeGee (Wikipedia)
Cave opening in a rocky slope
December 20, 2025 at 6:21 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
fervillanea.bsky.social
This is a good time to talk about the TRUE genetics revolution brought in by sequencing the human genome:

The genetic underpinning of traits is not simple, will never be simple. Complex gene-gene interactions are the rule, not the exception 🧵

www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Biobanks reveal genetic complexity in human evolution
Tiny genetic variations between humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans might not be all they were cracked up to be.
www.nature.com
December 19, 2025 at 5:29 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
evolletters.bsky.social
Pleiotropy increases with gene age in six model multicellular eukaryotes
doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Now in @evolletters.bsky.social by Reese Martin and Ann T Tate
Pleiotropy increases with gene age in six model multicellular eukaryotes
Abstract. Fundamental traits of genes, including function, length, and Guanine-Cytosine (GC) content, all vary with gene age. Pleiotropy, where a single ge
doi.org
October 29, 2025 at 4:10 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
evolletters.bsky.social
Gestation length both shapes and is shaped by other life history traits in terrestrial eutherian mammals
doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Now in @evolletters.bsky.social by Thodoris Danis et al.
Gestation length both shapes and is shaped by other life history traits in terrestrial eutherian mammals
Abstract. The length of gestation in eutherian mammals, which is key to their reproductive success, is closely connected to other life history traits, body
doi.org
November 5, 2025 at 6:47 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
mingzuyu-pan.bsky.social
Happy to share my work with my advisor Zachary Szpiech! Why are associations between ROH & complex traits inconsistent across studies? We use realistic simulations to show how demographic history and genetic architecture interact to shape the phenotypic impact of ROH. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
The Influence of Demographic History and Genetic Architecture on Complex Traits via Runs of Homozygosity
Runs of homozygosity (ROH) are contiguous genomic regions where all sites are homozygous, inherited from identical haplotypes due to shared ancestry. The number and length of ROH in individuals varies...
www.biorxiv.org
December 18, 2025 at 2:36 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
profsimonfisher.bsky.social
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 Ozgur Taskent
sashagusevposts.bsky.social
I wrote about the bizarre case of Herasight, the embryo selection company going all in on eugenics.
Embryo selection company Herasight goes all in on eugenics
...
open.substack.com
December 13, 2025 at 8:16 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
jkpritch.bsky.social
Our latest preprint revisits the classic model of mutation-selection balance.

Do human recessive genes fit Haldane's 100-year old model?

This work is by the wonderful @jonj-udd.bsky.social, and co-mentored by @jeffspence.github.io

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Allele Frequencies at Recessive Disease Genes are Mainly Determined by Pleiotropic Effects in Heterozygotes
The classic theory of mutation-selection balance predicts the equilibrium frequency of genetic variation under negative selection. The model predicts a simple relationship between the total frequency ...
www.biorxiv.org
December 13, 2025 at 4:45 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
plosbiology.org
Introgression between species can shape #evolution. Study of the colorful American #warblers (Parulidae) by @kevinfpbennett.bsky.social @davetoews.bsky.social &co reveals intergeneric & interspecific introgression of genes related to carotenoid #plumage color @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/48MyfU2
Topological discordance between the concatenated ultra-conserved element species tree of parulid warblers and a 1.8-kb region of the BCO2 gene. Left: Full co-phylogeny, with the species tree on the left and gene tree on the right. Right: A magnolia warbler (Setophaga magnolia) perched on a rose branch. Image credit Davey Walters.
December 12, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
neal.fun
Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :)

The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used

> neal.fun/size-of-life/
December 10, 2025 at 4:03 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
biorxiv-genetic.bsky.social
Allele Frequencies at Recessive Disease Genes are Mainly Determined by Pleiotropic Effects in Heterozygotes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.05.692665v1
December 9, 2025 at 6:34 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Yep, still very much an accurate description of eugenics 👇
wiringthebrain.bsky.social Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 13d
@rebeccasear.bsky.social gives a great quote from Alfred Russell Wallace: eugenics was “simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft”.

Still very much spot on.
December 8, 2025 at 4:57 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
compevohumang.bsky.social
Çatalhöyük hakkındaki arkeogenetik çalışmamızın Archaeology Magazine tarafından yılın en önemli 10 keşiflerinden biri olarak seçilmiş olması bizi çok mutlu etti! 💃🏻👩🏻‍🔬🧪🏺

archaeology.org/issues/janua...
Top 10 Discoveries of 2025 - A Feminine Touch - Archaeology Magazine - January/February 2026
Çatalhöyük, Turkey
archaeology.org
December 8, 2025 at 7:47 AM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
compevohumang.bsky.social
We are delighted to learn that our Çatalhöyük archaeogenetics study published in @science.org was chosen as one of @archaeologymag.bsky.social 's top 10 discoveries of 2025. 💃🏻👩🏻‍🔬 🧪 🏺

archaeology.org/issues/janua...
Top 10 Discoveries of 2025 - A Feminine Touch - Archaeology Magazine - January/February 2026
Çatalhöyük, Turkey
archaeology.org
December 8, 2025 at 7:41 AM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
evolletters.bsky.social
Check out our cover article by @timjanicke.bsky.social and colleagues about the role of sexual selection in animal speciation. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic.... The beautiful illustration is by Katharina Bóth.
December 4, 2025 at 4:04 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social
Transcription-induced mutation and gBGC at the Transcriptional Start Site impact the evolution of human protein-coding genes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.24.690122v1
November 29, 2025 at 5:32 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
helsenjana.bsky.social
How do new centromeres evolve while staying compatible with the division machinery?

Discover it in our new Nature paper! We show centromeres transition gradually via a mix of drift, selection, and sex, reaching new states that still work with the kinetochore.

👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09779-1
November 26, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
rebeccasear.bsky.social
"Drawing on a corpus of over 15,000 scholarly articles published between 1800 and 2024, we map the linguistic landscape of eugenics in scholarly discourse to reveal its institutional, scientific, and sociopolitical entrenchment"

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Echoes of Eugenics: Tracing the Ideological Persistence of Scientific Racism in Scholarly Discourse | Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimiza...
dl.acm.org
November 23, 2025 at 9:24 AM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
apragsdale.bsky.social
In an earlier project simulating quantitative traits/stabilizing selection in a human-Neanderthal model, I became a bit curious about some observed fitness dynamics that I wasn’t expecting.

I’m not sure if this is all that interesting or relevant, but at least it’s short.
biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · Nov 19
Mean fitness is maximized in small populations under stabilizing selection on highly polygenic traits https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.17.688329v1
November 21, 2025 at 11:09 AM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
mootspoints.bsky.social
Excited to share that our cross-disciplinary conversation on ancient DNA and mobility is now published in Studies in Late Antiquity doi.org/10.1525/sla.... - and also out as an episode of the Byzantium & Friends podcast youtu.be/PdNeL6ika-k?... 🏺🧬
Human paleogenetics and late antique migration: a cross-discipline discussion
YouTube video by Medievalists
youtu.be
November 18, 2025 at 9:03 AM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
nature.com
Nature research paper: An ancient recombination desert is a speciation supergene in placental mammals

go.nature.com/47UiBWa
An ancient recombination desert is a speciation supergene in placental mammals - Nature
Deep learning methods identified a large and evolutionarily conserved X-linked low recombination region in placental mammals that serves as both a barrier to gene flow in hybridizing lineages and an accurate phylogenomic marker.
go.nature.com
November 14, 2025 at 2:03 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
arkeofili.bsky.social
Neandertaller Yok Olmadı, Bir Parçamız Haline Geldi

arkeofili.com/neandertalle...
Neandertaller Yok Olmadı, Bir Parçamız Haline Geldi - Arkeofili
Neandertaller tek bir olayla veya soykırımla dünyadan yok olmak yerine, modern insan popülasyonunun bir parçası hâline geldi.
arkeofili.com
November 14, 2025 at 8:36 AM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
mollyprz.bsky.social
An empirical approach to evaluating the prevalence of long-lived balancing selection in humans--and important limitations. Work by @hannahmm.bsky.social
November 11, 2025 at 7:14 PM
Reposted by Ozgur Taskent
moorjanipriya.bsky.social
Exciting new study led by @ekerdoncuff.bsky.social and @meaghanmarohn.bsky.social on the evolution of Lactase Persistence in South Asia.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Revisiting the Evolution of Lactase Persistence: Insights from South Asian Genomes
Lactase persistence (LP), the ability to digest lactose from milk into adulthood, is a classic example of natural selection in humans. Multiple mutations upstream of the LCT gene are associated with L...
www.biorxiv.org
November 7, 2025 at 2:33 PM