David Bertioli

Nullius in verba

A welcome decision from the IOC Women athletes can compete fairly once more The debacle leaves the reputation of intellectual classes badly damaged. Their cultural weight was used as an illiberal cudgel, which is obviously anti-intellectual olympics.com/ioc/news/inter…

After today's excellent decision by the IOC.,if the Rio 2016 women's 800m. was held today, the 3 medallists in my photo. Wambui, Niyonsaba & Semenya would be barred and the medals would go to Canada's Melissa Bishop, Poland's Joanna Jozwik & GB's Lynsey Sharp @AthleticsWeekly

"I will therefore confess that there are several sentences in the present volume which some unusually stupid children of ten might find a little puzzling." From the forward of Bertrand Russell's "Unpopular Essays" Treat yourself! Download it for free here: russell-j.com/cool/UE_1950.p…

"innovation-led productivity growth has been the single most important factor limiting agricultural emissions globally" "farm policies which reduce UK food production can displace environmental damage to more biodiverse regions overseas" Great commentary by Charlie Dewhirst scienceforsustainableagriculture.com/charliedewhirs…

Is Green Misanthropy a Uniquely Western Affliction? "Post-industrial Westerners like to imagine that indigenous peoples possessed a preternatural wisdom to live in harmony with nature, a belief reflected in Hollywood movies like Avatar and Pocahontas. However, this is mostly projection on our part. It is modern people who romanticise nature, precisely because they no longer have to endure its daily hardships." @mboudry open.substack.com/pub/thebreakth…

@michaelshermer Keep up the good work, Michael! I agree with the above, with 1 exception Even young adults don't know their futures and cannot properly consent. If a woman asks to be sterilised in her 20s, before having children, standard medical practice is to deny - too many regret it.

Who in their right mind would counsel this 16-year old girl confused about her gender identity & advise double mastectomy? “This was not about ideology,” Fox's lawyer Adam Deutsch said. “This case was about medical malpractice." I disagree. Ideology drives it: The belief that someone can change sex is wrong. The belief that minors understand adolescence well enough to make life-altering decisions is wrong. The belief that gender affirming care (hormones & surgeries) can "align" someone's gender confusion is wrong (this is why the UK's NHS banned the practice). If you're an adult & decide to alter your body, fine, but leave confused minors alone. nypost.com/2026/02/03/opi…

@camjenglish @TheLancet @ScienceMagazine @Nature I think they may pretend it never happened, a bit like how institutions who fueled the Satanic Panic simply moved on as if nothing had happened

@BotanyBert @TheLancet @ScienceMagazine @Nature Many more to come. I can't wait to watch the journals try to slither away from this.

A welcome legal outcome. Responsibility for the tragic outcomes affecting thousands of adolescents and young adults lies in good part with @TheLancet, @ScienceMagazine, @Nature, and the academic and medical establishments that turned gender ideology into dogma.

@agronomistag @Prof_Braj_Singh @Nature @alpedrinhoBR @vandeHeijdenLab @FAOLandWater @theGSBI @SoilAssociation @soilecol @SoilScienceAust @EU_ENV @UNEP @UNBiodiversity @westsyduhie @CropGlobal Unfortunately Nature magazine isn't really a scientific magazine anymore.

@Prof_Braj_Singh @Nature @alpedrinhoBR @vandeHeijdenLab @FAOLandWater @theGSBI @SoilAssociation @soilecol @SoilScienceAust @EU_ENV @UNEP @UNBiodiversity @westsyduhie @CropGlobal Seems like a more nuanced title would support this finding: "Seventy per cent of the observed significant effects on the diversity of bacterial gene groups and 84% of the effects on fungal gene groups were positive."

Pleased to share our article in @Nature 'Pesticide mixtures harm soil biodiversity'. Along with @alpedrinhoBR we highlight policy implications& future research of new pub from @vandeHeijdenLab for pesticide regulations & soil biodiversity protection rdcu.be/e1aHs

The link between wonder, curiosity, a passion for knowledge, and the gaining of wisdom is central to the ancients and expressed in various ways. For example, in Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates says: "Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder."

Wisdom begins in wonder - Socrates

Senior academic suspended for inviting a speaker to discuss data categories that the entire world, for almost the entirety of human history, has regarded as straightforward and obvious Kudos to Prof. David Gordon and @ProfAliceS for maintaining their commitment to scholarship in the face of such dysfunction cafeamericainmag.com/no-crime-but-p…

Two business school professors from the University of Technology in Sydney have sounded the alarm on the declining quality of academic literature in a new publication titled “The junkification of research”. Drawing parallels to the “enshittification” of online platforms, they argue that similar forces are now overwhelming scholarly publishing. The key drivers are threefold: 1) relentless “publish or perish” pressures in academia, 2) scientific publisher’s incentive to publish more to make more money, and 3) AI making paper production faster and easier. Taken together, they say, these drivers are a recipe for disaster. The authors call for a shift to not-for-profit models of scientific publishing and better evaluation systems. I strongly doubt either is going to happen. The problem is of course not new, and you all know that I have been drawing attention to this trend for more than a decade. It is interesting to see, however, that the awareness for the issue is increasing. Paper: Rhodes, C., & Linnenluecke, M. K., “The junkification of research” Organization (2025).

Who else could make such a serious message so seriously funny? Bertrand Russell’s “The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed” is a timeless, witty, very short read, with a lovely universalist message. criticathink.wordpress.com/2018/04/11/the…

@BiolNor Thank you! The variegated, white and abnormal phenotype flowers seem best explained by gene silencing.

@BotanyBert Great stuff! Any possibility epigenetics mechanisms are also involved?

Peanut has one of the narrowest known genetic origins of any major crop. Yet it diversified into thousands of landraces and became globally important. How did such diversity arise from such an extreme bottleneck? A trilogy of papers in @ThePlantJournal explains this paradox onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tp…

Finally, in the 3rd paper, we ask whether this genomic instability is only ancient. Tracking a selfed single modern peanut plant over 7 generations, we detect a surprizing frequency (>1%) of new large-scale chromosomal changes—including a deletion that affects pod and seed size onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tp…

Strikingly, in the 2nd paper we show that lineages from the recreated ancestral peanut respond much more strongly to artificial selection for seed size than the diploid parents This provides direct evidence that polyploidy itself conferred a domestication advantage onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tp…