Demographic shifts, inter-group contact and environmental conditions drive language extinction and diversification. #linguistics

Many thanks also to @elena-moos.bsky.social, who just joined bsky. Elena was the master knapper in the new study who made the application of the new method possible. Follow Elena, and I am sure you'll see amazing stone tools (and even dice!) made by her.

Friends in Edinburgh! Join me on June 27, as I unveil The Story of Birds at our wonderful local bookshop, Toppings. Get your tickets early here! www.toppingbooks.co.uk/events/edinb...

Nice to see “tinkering” being highlighted in cultural evolution. We recently published a chapter synthesizing our work on tinkering-based models of software and technological evolution. The growing convergence suggests this idea is now part of our shared toolkit. @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

As a side point: the term "tinkering" is not even new in the context of cultural evolution -- Francois Jacob had a paper on this in 1977 called "Evolution and tinkering" and @svalver.bsky.social + colleagues directly refer to tinkering in their papers on tech evolution

Very happy to see our ice-fishing paper on the cover of @science.org this week! 🎣🎉 We tracked large groups of Finnish competitive ice-fishers to study how social foragers use social information when searching for resources. 🐟 Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (contact me for open access)

"diversity peaked before a sharp decline, suggesting a possible link between ecological specialization and extinction risk..aligns with hypotheses proposing that overspecialization limits adaptability, leading to extinction under background conditions" doi.org/10.1017/pab.... 🧪 #Geology ⚒️ #Paleobio

Happy #WinterSolstice ❄️ In Chaco Canyon in the US Southwest, ancient monumental roads align with the winter solstice sunrise over Mount Taylor. Features of both land and sky were (and still are) ritually important to the region's Indigenous people. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

📢 New Blog Post Achieving true interdisciplinarity is hard! @shumon.bsky.social makes an argument for accepting the transformative nature of #interdisciplinary research - even if that means researchers must revisit their standard methods and assumptions! 🔗 read on here: shorturl.at/YE4gx

Imagine you have no clue that there is an entire universe of people with diverse capabilities centering on the generation of new ideas and the refinment of old ones.

I dislike that Time Magazine has chosen to conflate CEOs with the people who actually got their hands dirty making the technology work. I’m incensed that Fei Fei Li is half off the page. I’m sure she is too gracious to say it.

In episode 1029, I talk with Dr. J. Doyne Farmer (@doynefarmer.bsky.social) about his great book, Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World. #Economics #Science youtu.be/h0Vfoz9n2kQ

I’d like to thank Stuart Newman for his editorial work in one of my favorite journals these days. Biological Theory is one of the few journals that takes seriously the intersection between empirical and theoretical approaches to biology. I wish the best to Kevin Lala in his new role as editor.

Why does every decade promise a method, a language, or now #AI that will “fix” #software #complexity? Software never behaved like an engineered artifact. Our research shows it evolves like an #ecosystem. A thread ↓

While discussing ideas on the evolution with @svalver.bsky.social and wandering around wonderful Barcelona, I'm learning some architectural paleontology. Giant (pea-sized) foraminifera — Nummulites and some sea urchin spines. Provenance probably local Eocene «piedra de Gerona», España. 🧪⚒️ #Geology

Tomorrow 11/26 at 12:00: @andrejpaleo.bsky.social on the deep-time dynamics of Earth's biosphere. If you’re interested in macroevolution, paleoclimate, complex systems, or scaling laws in natural history, this is one you shouldn’t miss! Charles Darwin room @prbb.org! @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social

Finally a thread that intersects with the insights and expertise of @chrisklausmeier.bsky.social and @maitner.bsky.social

Excited to announce our book “Neuroevolution: Harnessing Creativity in AI Agent Design” by Sebastian Risi, Yujin Tang, Risto Miikkulainen, and myself. We explore decades of work on evolving intelligent agents and shows how neuroevolution can drive creativity in deep learning, RL, LLMs and AI Agents!

#OnThisDay in 1970, Douglas Engelbart received U.S. Patent No. 3,541,541 for the invention we now know as the computer mouse. A small wooden device that reshaped how humans interact with computers and laid the foundation for modern user interfaces. #OTD #PatentHistory #ComputerHistory

Only 2 days left to get your abstracts in!

In the age of AI slop, true expertise is even more important to value. Experts are the people who get so annoyed about the precise way to describe something they dedicate their lives to it (see excellent blog: www.experimental-history.com/p/thank-you-...). We need them and their journals. 7.2/n

Brand-new conference on collective behaviour! Join us to foster a community to study how interactions among the constituents trigger fascinating collective phenomena: biofilms, fish schools, tissue self-organisation, bird swarms & many more! Thanks to amazing speakers for helping us realise this!

Pinball model of development and reprogramming. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

I am pleased to announce a new postdoctoral position in Theoretical Ecology. More info here: info.bc3research.org/2025/11/06/p...

Innovation isn’t random — it follows geometric laws. Our new Behind the Paper post in @springernature.com Communities explores how innovation forms a fractal geometry — self-organizing like a living system. communities.springernature.com/posts/the-fr...

📢 Here is my commentary about the pitfalls of taking an impoverished evolutionary approach to culture, which include 'the limitations of a unidirectional model of evolution' and 'the neglect of niche construction theory'. #ehbea #evolution #psychscisky 🧪 🧵 1/2 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Congratulations to @gemmaeling.bsky.social al, Ana M. Rojas, and @rosafernandez.bsky.social for their groundbreaking application of large language models to understand the functions of uncharacterized proteins (the “dark proteome” sequences). This is a solid step towards non-model organisms! 🪄🧬

Fractal clusters and urban scaling shape spatial inequality in U.S. patenting 🏺🧪 S. Duran-Nebreda, @blaividiella.bsky.social, @svalver.bsky.social et al www.nature.com/articles/s44... Innovation is distributed unevenly across space, yet mechanisms behind patenting inequality are poorly understood.

Congratulations Sergi and Co, excellent work! Bretskyan hierarchy in spirit work on the spatial structures of innovation. Look at this revealing thread on the new study about the spatial patterns of human innovation👇 🧪 #Complexity

What does #ecology have to do with #innovation? #Scalinglaws of innovation don’t just come from city size, they emerge from how ideas compete and spread. Then, inequality is not a bug; it’s an emergent feature. See doi.org/10.1038/s442... @svalver.bsky.social @sduran-nebreda.bsky.social

There’s no need for confrontation here. Qualitative and quantitative approaches study the same phenomenon, just at different levels and timescales. Innovation needs both: imagination to create new forms, and analysis to understand how those forms evolve and connect.

Quant and Qual are not opposites — they’re layers of the same phenomenon. Innovation begins as a social process — people, relationships, creativity — yet it leaves patterns we can learn from. Quant analysis shouldn't replace the human story; it helps us see how those stories connect across scales.

Is #innovation born or made? Why do some places keep innovating while others fall behind? Is innovation the product of cities—or of deeper laws? Our new paper in npj Complexity explores these questions through the lens of a century of US patent data.🧵👇 nature.com/articles/s44...

Excited to be in Valencia this week for my annual master’s seminar at the Master’s Degree in Bioinformatics, coinciding with the publication of our new book chapter based on course notes. Thanks to @julipereto.bsky.social for the ongoing collaboration! 📚 link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Postdoc Opportunity - Interested in plant scaling, quantitative botany, or theoretical plant biology? join our group to explore how plant form, function & scaling principles connect across levels of organization www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons-postdoctoral-fellowships-in-plant-biology🧪🌾🌐

Excellent opportunity at a fantastic institute with one of our best PIs.

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

🚀 The University of Rochester is hiring in Complex Systems (Physics)! Join a vibrant cross-disciplinary cluster supported by the Simons Foundation. Great opportunity to build a program at the interface of physics, biology & cognition. Apply ➡️ apply.interfolio.com/173432

The Innovation Game: How Arcade Genres Evolve, Imitate, and Collapse www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20... @blaividiella.bsky.social @andrejpaleo.bsky.social

📢 Excited to announce CompleNet 2026! Join us to share your network science research in a highly interdisciplinary conference! 🗓️ 4–8 May 2026 | 📍 Zaragoza, Spain 🇪🇸 🚨 Call for contributions open – submit by Nov 15, 2025! 🌐 Info & registration: complenet.weeblysite.com

This moment from our latest episode with science writer @edyong209.bsky.social is 🔥 We asked Ed — how do we talk up the benefits of science in the face of government cuts? He told us that's the wrong approach. 🧪 Listen wherever, or watch on Spotify 👇 open.spotify.com/episode/7Evh...

Jane Goodall, Eminent Primatologist Who Chronicled the Lives of Chimps, Dies at 91. Gift link: nyti.ms/48FOuUn

Study is exploring what paleontologists and neontologists know about the punctuated equilibria, and how they perceive the dominant modes of evolution. As expected, there is a significant variance in views on evolution reflecting differing backgrounds. doi.org/10.1017/pab.... 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio

We're hosting the 20th anniversary meeting of the Network Science Society at Northeastern University! Follow our account as we announce speakers and join us in Boston this summer!

New Element in the Philosophy of Biology series—free to download until October 6! Walter Veit examines the role of models in evolutionary biology: their types, testability, and interrelations 👇📕 www.cambridge.org/core/element... #philsci #HPBio #evobio

All of the noise and misinformation on social media, as well as the neverending celebration of stupidity, encourages us to seek refuge in books and old papers. See you soon.

In 2016 Geoffrey Hinton said “we should stop training radiologists now" since AI would soon be better at their jobs. He was right: models have outperformed radiologists on benchmarks for ~a decade. Yet radiology jobs are at record highs, with an average salary of $520k. Why?

Very proud of this paper in BioScience : « Too cute to be wild: what teddy bears reveal about our disconnection from nature » 🧸 are more than toys, they shape among our first emotional connections to nature. But their design may also distort how we see wildlife ! 👉 doi.org/10.1093/bios... 🧪🦤

Happy to share our new paper introducing the Animal Culture Database in Scientific Data: We’re putting together a resource consolidating primary research on cultural behaviors in wild animal populations and how they’re affected by human activity (1/5) www.nature.com/articles/s41...