Life comebacks university

An ‘anti-woke warrior’ trolled this graduate’s ‘useless’ degree and was gloriously owned into next year and back

John Plunkett. Updated November 20th, 2025

This really is the gift that keeps on giving.

It’s @juliet_turner6, an ecologist & evolutionary biologist and newly-qualified DPhil at the University of Oxford who really got some people’s backs up when she went on Twitter to celebrate this.

And when we say ‘people’ what we really mean is men, obviously, with one man in particular getting brutally owned after suggesting that men don’t find women with degrees attractive.

And it didn’t end there – of course it didn’t – after this anti-woke warrior of sorts stumbled blindly into the discourse to offer up their own thoughts, such as they are, suggesting the real reason people (men) had their backs up was because it was such a useless qualification.

Just in case that’s tricky to read, Juliet Turner studied the ‘evolution of cooperation and division of labour in insects’.

Here’s what @SanguineChester had to say in full.

People are not seething because you earned a PhD. They are seething because, after all the self congratulation and the glitter emojis, they discovered the grand achievement you are flaunting is… about ants.

Most people can accept someone celebrating medical research, engineering breakthroughs, or something that clearly improves the world. But when they see someone behaving as though they have unlocked the secrets of the universe only for the punchline to be “I studied ant chores”, it lands very differently.

It feels less like academic excellence and more like elite insulation. Ordinary people are drowning under rent, tax, debt, and collapsing public services, and then they watch an Oxford biologist triumphantly posting about insect labour division while describing their “beautiful office”.

The resentment has nothing to do with education. It is the tone deafness of boasting about a life of academic comfort while researching a topic that most people instinctively place somewhere between trivia and hobby.

The fury is not directed at your success. It is directed at the mismatch between the scale of the celebration and the subject matter. In short: people are annoyed because it is about ants.

And we’re glad he did – in a way – because the comeback was absolutely first class. With honours.

The irony behind all the criticism of my research is that you would struggle to find a topic more fundamental or widely applicable than my DPhil thesis. ‍♀️

To give a few examples, by studying the evolution of cooperation and division of labour, we inform:

• Pure science. All complex life depends on cooperation & division of labour e.g. genes in a genome, cells in an organism. This field helps explain how life transitioned from single cells to complex multicellularity.

• Cancer biology. Cancer is a breakdown of cellular cooperation. The same rules that maintain stable cooperation in superorganismal insects underlie the stability (or collapse) of multicellular systems like our own bodies.

• Tech. Swarm robotics: decentralised control, signalling, efficiency optimisation. All informed by the principles governing insect societies.

• Economics & Sociology. Role specialisation & allocation, why different societal structures evolve, how national/international conflicts get resolved, how cooperation can persist despite incentives to cheat.

Not to mention that insects form the backbone of all terrestrial ecosystems and amount to more than half of all known species, performing countless essential ecological roles.

But yeah, why bother studying ants.

Boom!

And here is just a little bit of the love people had for that.

And just in case that’s left you in the mood for a little bit more …

Follow @juliet_turner6 here!

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A bigoted manbaby tried to belittle this woman’s academic achievement and her epically brutal response was simply first class

Source @juliet_turner6