Panicked headlines about a “fertility crisis” are not being driven by experts who understand fertility trends 👇 Next time you see such a headline, worth thinking about whose interests “demographic collapse” narratives serve

It is not always this deranged. There are competent researchers in the field. Unfortunately it has always had a deranged wing which the discipline has never properly tackled

I wish I knew

I was wondering if giant tortoises are distinct enough from one another for it to be easy to count 180,000 of them…

My theory about RFK Jr. is that this is individualism taken to its extreme: don't regulate food, don't mandate vaccines. If you get sick, you should've done your own research. Your health is your own responsibility, even when corps. are allowed to put you at risk. The privatization of public health.

I’ve seen a few folks comment that “Guinea-Bissau is a low income country and cannot afford the hep B vaccine birth dose, so why is this study unethical?” It’s a good question. Let me have a go at answering it. In a nutshell, researchers cannot ethically exploit poverty & scarcity to do a trial

NEW: Prime Minister Andy Burnham finally breaks a decade of UK govt silence…& reveals there was ‘clear’ Russian interference in the Brexit vote. 1/

Going to be quite preoccupied today thinking about how you count giant tortoises: “Aldabra’s giant tortoise monitoring programme is one of the longest running in the region, but the atoll’s dense vegetation makes counting tortoises genuinely difficult in places”

* there is no bright side here. The lack of concern for the job losses - which will not just be among the laptop classes, and shrinking of access to education - which will hit the least privileged hardest, resulting from a *Labour* govt's policies is dispiriting, to use the mildest possible term

Looking on the bright side, at least there'll be no higher education sector left to destroy when a far-right party finally takes power in the UK*

Very nice paper by @lljschoenmakers.bsky.social on how to interpret debates over adaptationism. He argues that the sides of the debate are divided by different commitments about what constitutes genuine scientific understanding.

"the meme is the 19th century reformatted. Where race science once leaned on calipers & cranial photographs to make hierarchy appear fact, the meme keeps the visual grammar & throws away the instruments...this is Scientific Racism 2.0: same essentialist conclusions, recoded for an attention economy"