January 08, 2016 at 07:29AM

A bit late, but without further ado: Today I Learned: 1) Apparently just about everything I know about evolutionary psychology (taht is, the evolution of behaviors) comes from a scientist I'd heard of, but never really given anything other than a last name in my mental indexing scheme, by the name of Robert Trivers. He came up with the textbook evolutionary theories for reciprocal altruism, sex differences, cheating, cooperation, sexual jealousy, self-deception, parent-child conflict, romantic bonds, and others. Robert Trivers also seems to be one of the more, uh, real people on the planet. In addition to winning one of the most prestigeous worldwide prizes in evolutionary theory, he, I quote, "was a member of the Black Panthers and collaborated with the group’s founder. He was arrested for assault after breaking up a domestic dispute. He faced machete-wielding burglers who broke into his home and stabbed one in the neck. He was imprisoned for 10 days over a contested hotel charge. And two men once held guns to his head in a Caribbean club that doubled as a brothel." That sounds like a full life to me! Thanks to Michael LeFew!!!! for linking me to this fantastic little article on Robert Trivers: http://ift.tt/1ZP0dUC 2) There are order-of-magnitude around 1,000 publications a year on RNA-seq. 3) There are somewhere around 300-350 "moderate" to "high" publication rate research universities in the US, according to Certain Metrics (TM).