@Lucy having read and written math and physics academic bullshit its just as bad over there

@Lucy @wallhackio biology can have good writing but sometimes it’s ass (partially dependent on subfield)

I have a feeling it’s linked to whether the field is governed by clubs of old cishet white men who think they’re the worlds smartest people and write in a way that intentionally obfuscates meaning. because other people not understanding you means that your point is just too intellectual for them

@Lucy @wallhackio like many academics value excellent communication skills (myself included) but there’s a subset of academics that I genuinely think see good communication as “feminine” or something and expect everyone to just kiss their ass because we’re so afraid of their big meaty brains

@wallhackio @Lucy that being said old fruit fly genetics papers are frequently hilarious and go on ten minute tangents about something only vaguely related to the plot but that I absolutely want to know about

for instance, the wife of the founder of fruit fly genetics (who did research in the lab but was only allowed to do so when the men weren’t in there) once lost an important fly and closed all the doors and windows and managed to find it

@Lucy @wallhackio I forget which of her papers this was in but there was a solid paragraph about this

@wallhackio @Lucy now that I’m thinking about it there was a lot of drama in early genetics, another guy Calvin Bridges was a total hoebag and he apparently slept with the wife of Alfred Sturtevant and was rumored to have died of syphilis. this was confirmed when my advisors postdoc advisor managed to track down his death certificate, which he had framed in his office

@cam @wallhackio holy shit biologists are messyyyy

@Lucy @wallhackio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Joseph_Muller muller in particular had a pretty wild life including becoming a eugenicist, then moving to Berlin, then protesting the Nazis, then deciding that eugenics would never work under capitalism, then getting investigated by the FBI and going to the Soviet Union, then proceeding to piss off Stalin (at the time the Soviet Union was pro-Lamarckianism which is basically the idea that environmentally influenced traits are inherited, like that giraffes stretched their necks to eat fruit from tall trees and that made their offspring have longer necks), then deciding that eugenics was bad and also not as easy as it sounded and eventually going back to the US where he spent a lot of time criticizing the use of radiation due to its mutagenic effects

@wallhackio @Lucy he also had a messy divorce with a kid involved during all of this

@cam @Lucy I didn't realize the biology Lore was so compelling

@Lucy @wallhackio a lot of it is the drosophila geneticist lore because they were all working together but there’s also other crazy shit that happened like a guy that was trying to make a cultivar of brassica (genus that includes a million vegetables from broccoli to turnips) and I forget which plants he was breeding but he wanted one that had a large edible leaf part and a large edible root and instead he got plants with tiny leaves and tiny roots and they sent him to the gulag

@Lucy @wallhackio I don’t think it was Lysenko but I don’t remember who it was

Lysenko was a dumbass who refused to believe genetics and executed a bunch of geneticists in the Soviet Union and also got shit tons of people in the Soviet Union and China killed in famines because he made farmers plant seeds basically on top of each other and nothing grew