Kevin Bird

@stairwaytokevin

Postdoc in evolutionary genomics of polyploids at RBG Kew | science & society | opinions mine Mizzou, Fulbright Belgium, and Michigan State alum. Here because of medicaid, public universities, and pell grants

1.277 Folgt8.739 Follower4.741 Posts

Bluesky

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir stairwaytokevin.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· 2d

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· 4d

My workplace is cooler than yours, sorry

Sign that reads “Please ensure this door is closed at night as badgers are damaging the Dukes Garden

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· 6d

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· 10d

The original

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· 10d

In a way, aren’t we all wizards doom-pondering our orbs

A wizard in repose, staring lazily at at his orb the same way you’re looking at your phone, you schlub

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Jul 10

Only in the Journal of Controversial ideas can a symposium that was full of talks quantitatively refuting race science claims and a paper about how race science fails basic standards of evolutionary biology be framed primarily as moral judgements and censorship.

In March 2024, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists held a symposium titled “Undermining the production of race science.” The symposium’s stated goal was to “form the basis for a comprehensive and in-depth guide that will aid scholars of human evolution in writing effective reviews to make it more difficult for race science to get into the literature and to improve our own scholarship when it comes to issues at the intersection of race and biology” (Roseman, 2024a). Kevin Bird, one of the symposium’s participants, argued in a paper published in American Psychologist that race research is socially harmful because of “its use by racial extremists, sometimes directly assisted by psychologists, to influence social policies regarding immigration, social welfare, criminal justice, and diversity and to preserve the racialized structure of society” (Bird et al., 2024).
Another goal of the AABA symposium was “Developing concrete changes to mainstream evolutionary theory and method that make it more difficult for race scientists to use mainstream scholarship in their work” (Roseman, 2024b). Several of the symposium’s presentations made specific proposals about how evolutionary biology should be modified to prevent race research from making use of its findings, described as “reforming our own sciences so that we no longer give it support” (Roseman, 2024a) or “how we can shift methodological norms towards ones that do not as easily play into the premise of race science” (Athreya et al., 2024). The rejection of otherwise mainstream ideas in biology, due entirely to their potential to support race research, is an example of what Shuichi Tezuka (2021) describes as a “domino effect” that tends to occur when a hypothesis is rejected on religious or political grounds. Or as Tezuka (2022) put it: moral judgments about science cannot remain confined to a single idea for long.

ournal of Controversial Ideas
(ISSN: 2694-5991) Open Access Journal
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Controversial_Ideas , 6(1), 1; doi:10.63466/jci06010001

Article
The Equality Paradox
Shuichi Tezuka (pseudonym)
Author email: S.Tezuka@protonmail.com
How to Cite: Tezuka, S. The Equality Paradox. Controversial Ideas 2026, 6(1), 1; doi:10.63466/jci06010001.
Received: 16 November 2025 / Accepted: 17 March 2026 / Published: 10 May 2026

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Jul 4

Explaining gen AI benchmarking to an American: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Jul 3

Yes, being a British columnist

Telegraph headline: “Is there anything more pathetic than a Bluesky user?” By Stephen Pollard

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Jun 23

How do you go from Dame Lillard and Giannis to this in 2 years...

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Jun 17

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Jun 8

I wake up -> there is something wronger with Britain -> I wake up

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Jun 4

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Jun 2

My work here is done

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Jun 1

This page pretty much hits the highlights

D. Cofnas is against academic freedom for those who hold different views
In Cofnas’s blog posts, we find numerous passages calling for the expulsion of dissenters from the
university rather than engaging in ra,onal dialogue with them.
In the sec,on “What to do” from the blog post Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity
Problem, we read:
14
“In my article, “How to Take Back Academia,” I proposed a three-part plan:
(1) Promote knowledge of the cause of race differences
(2) Change the population of decision makers on campus
(3) Leverage poli)cal power
The same plan can be generalized. Promo)ng knowledge of the genetic cause of race differences
destroys the premise of wokism, but this is not enough to attain victory. Our ins)tu)ons are brimming
with delusional—and in many cases mentally ill—true believing Red Guard thugs who were appointed
to maintain the ideological status quo. Many of these people will fight to the gates of hell to defend the
woke system, and won’t accept evidence for hereditarianism no matter what. We need to find legal
ways to remove these people from posi)ons of authority: get rid of fake grievance-studies departments
at universities; revoke the tenure of pseudoscholars who were hired in job searches that illegally
discriminated against whites, Asians, and men; mass fire the woke commissars in the state department;
and so on. We have to leverage poli)cal power both to change the population of decision makers and
in order to deprive the woke of one of their most powerful weapons, which is civil rights law. “
Cofnas’s plan is not to engage in rational dialogue with those who hold different views, but rather to
drive them out of universities. Among other things, by curtailing their civil rights.
We see this in a more recent blog post as well (Beating Woke with Facts and Logic, October 9, 2025)
“Our ins)tu)ons are teeming with woke fana)cs who will never listen to reason and should be purged.
Civil rights law has been a powerful weapon in the …

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· May 30

Could just one journalist try to not be a credulous rube with these obvious con-artists?

Gene editing
"There is no way to stop this':
'Biotech Barbie' Cathy Tie on her mission to genetically modify babies
The Canadian entrepreneur has always pushed the boundaries of gene editing, once attempting to turn horses into unicorns. Now she is set on modifying human embryos - something her controversial ex-husband was jailed for doing
Jenny Kleeman
Sat 30 May 2026 06.00 BST

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· May 19

There's another issue, which is that methods like RDR already account for the majority of rare variant effects. You can account for asstative mating bias too and the effect is minimal www.nature.com/articles/s41..., So those don't seem very likely as explanation either.

Young et al.18 recently used family data from Iceland to obtain heritability estimates for 14 traits, including height (0.55 s.e. 0.04), BMI (0.29 s.e. 0.06) and EA (0.17 s.e. 0.09). These estimates are lower than many pedigree-based estimates25,28, including those presented here for
(Table 2). Young et al.18 use their RDR (relatedness disequilibrium regression) method, which is a generalisation of full-sib IBD regression, to estimate within-family genetic variance. Thus the RDR method potentially measures a quantity equivalent to
, or the random mating genetic variance scaled by the phenotypic variance in the current population. Applying a correction to the RDR estimates (following the method outlined for full-sib IBD regression, Supplementary Note 4), we obtain estimates for the equilibrium heritability of 0.65 (0.06) for height and 0.18 (0.11) for EA. These estimates remain significantly lower than
for both height (
= 5.4, p = 0.02) and EA (
= 3.9, p = 0.05). Similarly, the RDR estimate for BMI is lower than our estimate using close relatives (0.50 s.e. 0.03) and other estimates which are free from environmental confounders (i.e. full-sibs raised apart28; 0.44 s.e. 0.04). Although Young et al.18 conclude that common environmental effects have inflated past estimates, here we highlight that AM is also important for the interpretation of their results. The effects of AM may partially explain the differences between the results from the RDR method and other estimates.

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· May 18

First real post on the new blog! If you follow human genetics, you've likely of "missing heritability". If you look at twins to estimate heritability, you get values much larger than what molecular genomic methods produce. IQ, for example, goes from 50-80% heritability to 10-15%. Which is right?

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· May 12

My opinion is that this is the only result that matters (I'm working on some piece either touching on it or talking about it directly). The within-family test is the decisive one; without it confounding is always an issue. I suspect East Asian ancestry isn't completely independent of ancient Eurasia

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· May 8

Meme of a tabby cat standing between two arrows making a cycle, the top says “I wake up” the bottom says “there is something wringer with Britain”

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· May 3

This is your brain on adaptationism

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· May 2

Big news, we've found the gene for "Do you know who my father is?"

Effects of Genetic Propensity for Education on
Labor Market and Health Trajectories across the
Working Life*
Stefano Lombardi† 1,2,3, Nurfatima Jandarova† 4, Kristina Zguro† 5, Jarkko Harju4
,
Aldo Rustichini6
, and Andrea Ganna5,7,8

Abstract
Education is a major source of inequality in income and health. Polygenic indices for educational attainment (EA-PGI) capture both direct and indirect genetic influences on education, but their effects on income and health remain unclear. Using Finnish registry data
on 51,056 graduates followed annually since graduation for up to 25 years, we report three
findings. First, higher EA-PGI strongly predicts income growth, but only among highereducated people: tertiary-educated graduates at the 90th percentile earn €45,392 (13.1 %)
higher discounted lifetime income than those at the 10th percentile. This effect is not mediated by overall health and is entirely absent for the secondary (high school)-educated
workers, who do not beneift from higher EA-PGI levels. Second, EA-PGI does not predict
income differences at labor market entry or the quality of the first employer, but rather a
higher job-to-job mobility toward higher-quality firms that drives the long-run income divergence. Third, controlling for parental EA-PGI in 12,871 parent–offspring trios reduces
the discounted lifetime income gap by 71 %, and the effect of paternal (but not maternal)
EA-PGI on offspring income exceeds that of the offspring’s own EA-PGI. These findings
suggest that genetic factors associated with educational attainment predict income trajectories primarily through faster and more frequent changes to higher-paying employers.
However, much of this association reflects indirect paternal genetic effects, consistent with
enduring paternal patterns of intergenerational job and income transmission.

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Apr 28

This is an odd paper, and I think probably the only solid conclusion from it is that inferring cognitive ability from the skull is even less straightforward than we thought www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Abstract
Neanderthal endocrania are different in shape, though slightly larger in size than modern humans on average. These shape differences have long been used to suggest Neanderthals differed cognitively from modern humans, e.g., by having inferior linguistic/symbolic ability, poorer executive function, and/or smaller episodic and working memory capacity. However, whether the morphological differences in their brains inferred from their endocrania indicate truly meaningful cognitive/behavioral differences—with real evolutionary implications—is not clear. Recent work using deformation mapping techniques suggested there had been significant brain differences between Neanderthal and the anatomically modern Homo sapiens (amHs) that were contemporary with them. However the inferred differences were not put into the context of modern human populational variation in brain anatomy, which is known to be substantial. We estimate MRI brain region volumes in two modern population samples (US and Chinese) using deformation mapping and find similar sized differences to those reported for Neanderthal vs. amHs, with 9 of 13 brain regions showing larger absolute differences for US vs. Chinese samples as compared to reported Neanderthal vs. amHs differences. To the extent that brain anatomy differences indicate cognitive differences, this suggests that cognitive differences between Neanderthals and amHs would have comfortably fit within the range found among modern human populations—which are generally not considered evolutionarily significant. In fact, the endocranial differences between Neanderthal and their contemporaries predict cognitive difference effect sizes of only 0.14 SDs or less. This undermines the suggestion that Neanderthal replacement occurred because of cognitive limitations.

Degree of overlap of samples of individuals from populations that differ by 0.142 SD. This is the largest cognitive difference between Neanderthal and amHs predicted by the cerebellar differences inferred by the results of Kochiyama et al. (74). (A) two normal distributions corresponding to amHs and Neanderthal populations. Mean of amHs arbitrarily set to 100 with a SD of 15, and Neanderthal with a mean of 97.87 (100 − 0.142 × 15) with the same SD. (B) examples of two sets of data (n = 1,000 each) randomly drawn from these normal distributions. The green dots indicate the mean values, and the green lines indicate ± 1 SD. These give a visual sense of how small the difference and how large the overlap is predicted between amHs and Neanderthal populations.

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Apr 13

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Apr 12

The fascist version of

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Apr 12

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Apr 10

The Irish seeing this post

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Apr 10

Achievement unlocked: same picture 9 years apart

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Apr 9

I think if you drive, you deserve fewer rights

Norman Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech painting

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Apr 8

Mental

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin· Apr 3

We also used this as an opportunity to look at the evolution of immunity gene clusters (NLRs) at a higher level across species and show that the well-documented turnover of these genes is juxtaposed against positional conservation across species. The clusters are the same but the players change