E. Yağmur Erten

With @saramitri.bsky.social, @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social and L. Lehmann we’ve launched the UNIL Center for Theory in Ecology and Evolution @unil.bsky.social🇨🇭

To kick things off, we’re offering short visiting fellowships for theorists in ecology & evolution. Apply & pls RP 😀

tinyurl.com/2wem36zz

Early-bird deadline now extended until Feb 22! Please spread the word.

Today is the #InternationalDayofWomenandGirlsinScience ✨
To celebrate, we’re opening registration for our workshop "Women in Evolutionary Biology II" — keynotes, research, networking, and discussions on equality & inclusion in science.
📍 Plön (Germany) | 🔗 workshops.evolbio.mpg.de/event/144/ov...

We are hiring🚨

We are looking for 2 postdocs and 1 reasearch assistant to work in the ERC project “Tipping dynamics and resilience in adapting ecological systems” at @eawag.bsky.social
Find the description of each position and the link to apply in the thread ⬇️

#FemmesEnScience 🎉 Fierté pour l'UM! Isabelle Olivieri figure parmi les 72 femmes scientifiques proposées pour être inscrites sur la tour Eiffel. 1ère professeure de génétique des populations à #Montpellier, son parcours d’exception est aujourd’hui reconnu à l’échelle nationale @isemevol.bsky.social

Theoretical biology fuelled by copious amounts of coffee and karjalanpiirakka in Helsinki on a very cool topic with @piretavila.bsky.social? Don't miss this (3-year!) postdoc opportunity!

Any suggestions for a text-to-speech app to listen to scientific papers? I'm looking for something like Speechify that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, preferably, and got a bit lost in the sea of options when I tried to search for this 😅

course schedule as a table. Available at the link in the post.

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students.

I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

1/13 New paper out! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Historical records across thousands of women showed that mothers with more children had shorter lifespans during a famine, fitting an evolutionary explanation for why we age
@hannahdugdale.bsky.social
@lummaalab.bsky.social
@erikpostma.bsky.social

As part of @react-enlight.bsky.social we have a public lecture next Thursday on the evolution of ageing across the tree of life by @yagmurerten.bsky.social, come along! 👇

Applications for the MEME programme (www.evobio.eu
) are now open! MEME is a research- and mobility-oriented master’s in evolutionary biology (& I’m a proud alumna!), jointly run by the Unis of Groningen, Uppsala, Montpellier, and LMU Munich, with Harvard and Lausanne as partners. Spread the word!

Always assumed Michaelis & Menten were two guys; turns out Menten was a badass woman and is my new academic crush! Wikipedia: “She played the clarinet, created paintings worthy of art exhibitions, climbed mountains, went on an Arctic expedition, enjoyed astronomy, […] had mastered several languages”

Just discovered this year's IgNobel Peace Prize winner, "Dutch courage? Effects of acute alcohol consumption on self-ratings and observer ratings of foreign language skills", very relatable as someone who's learning Dutch 🙃 doi.org/10.1177/0269...

Abstract: Current definitions of cancer describe what cancer does but not what it is. Furthermore, they derive largely from human cases and may not apply to other multicellular organisms, especially those lacking a basal membrane. Comparative oncology, however, has shown that cancer occurs across a broad diversity of organisms. What definition should be adopted when framing cancer in a comparative and evolutionary perspective? And can an evolution-based definition be applied in clinical oncology? We will show that a universal definition of cancer not only helps provide a basis for progress in comparative oncology, but can also help to explain the diversity of cancer phenomena within humans.

Join @cmaley.bsky.social, @lucielaplane.bsky.social, Joel Brown and Benjamin Spada for a live EvoChat discussion about "How we define cancer matters", hosted by the International Society for Evolution, Ecology and Cancer (ISEEC).

Oct 1st at 8am PST, 11am EST, 5pm CEST

ucsb.zoom.us/j/8313111375...

Come & work with us - fully funded 4 year PhD on Social Ageing: Social environment effects on senescence, using an epigenetic clock www.rug.nl/about-ug/wor... @rug.nl @david-s-richardson.bsky.social @keesvanoers.bsky.social @seychelleswarbler.bsky.social photo: @charlisdavies.bsky.social

New in #ProcB - From policy to practice: Progress towards #data- and #code-sharing in ecology and evolution @asanchez-tojar.bsky.social @eivimeycook.bsky.social tell us more in our blog royalsociety.org/blog/2025/09...

Nova Norda - Dinozorlar (Official Audio) YouTube video by Nova Norda

TL;DR: Birds are really cool and offer an exciting avenue for studying cancer! Also, here is a song about dinosaurs to celebrate: youtu.be/0ueF5GLSKmg?...

Strong ancestral defences can make birds cancer-robust and help explain their longevity, but birds may be ‘too robust’ if strong defences compromise reproduction. Yet, strong defences can also be adaptive if miniaturisation brings longer lifespans (flight) and higher cancer risk (metabolic scaling).

We show that unless the evolution of cancer defences is mutation-limited (e.g. due to low mutation rate or pleiotropy), birds would have evolved weaker defences than their ancestors. However, evolutionary lags, if they occur, can result in birds retaining strong, dinosaur-level cancer suppression.

Here, we model cancer defence evolution over macroevolutionary time, tracking changes in relevant traits such as body size, extrinsic mortality rate, and effective population size during birds' miniaturisation from dinosaurs.

Birds tend to live longer and get less cancer compared to similar-sized mammals. Since birds shrank in size from larger ancestors (= dinosaurs), which also had to deal with cancer, could birds' cancer robustness be explained by them having retained their ancestral cancer suppression mechanisms?

Shrinking to bird size with dinosaur-level cancer defences: Evolution of cancer suppression over macroevolutionary time Author summary Humans are not the only species suffering from cancer, yet cancer does not impact all life equally. Body size is relevant because maintaining a large number of cells in a tumour-free st...

New paper out! 🤩 "Shrinking to bird size with dinosaur-level cancer defences: Evolution of cancer suppression over macroevolutionary time" with @kokkonut.bsky.social and @marcanthonytollis.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1371/jour... A short thread:

We’ve got seven places left!

Sadly, this is the last Evolution of Ageing workshop to be held with the Gutenberg series. It won’t be continuing next year!

Great to have the opportunity to share our group's work at #ESEB2025 @yuhengsun.bsky.social @euantheyoung.bsky.social with @erikpostma.bsky.social @lummaalab.bsky.social @yagmurerten.bsky.social

Editorial: Accountability, voice, and trust - responsible use of GenAI in scientific publishing Over the last few years, the development and rapid advancement of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatG

Many of us are using LLMs in coding and scientific writing. They are very helpful tools, but we need to be thoughtful as we integrate them into our work flows to preserve accountability, voice and trust. academic.oup.com/evlett/advan.... An editorial at @evolletters.bsky.social for discussion:

Agreed! I was super keen to see both but they were literally at the same time as the symposium I was talking in 🥲 would it somehow be possible to repeat these online for those of us who couldn’t attend? #ESEB2025

A general conclusion of the talk by @yagmurerten.bsky.social: Age-specific cancer incidence data can help us estimate the level of cancer suppression across species #ESEB2025

Now at the #ESEB2025 cancer evolution symposium, @yagmurerten.bsky.social presents collaborative work with @amyboddy.bsky.social (sorely missed here!) on cancer across species in lemurs (photos not permitted)

Great talk by @gauravathreya.bsky.social about his work on age-dependent facultative sex! It’s been a super fun and interesting project to work on 🤩 and a preprint will be coming soon! #ESEB2025

MEME alumni (www.evobio.eu) at #ESEB2025! We span so many generations now, from the first cohort (graduated in 2012) to those who are still studying, with master students, PhD students, postdocs, and PIs among us! So happy to get together in every ESEB 🤩