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...

Prof. Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social will join us in Copenhagen on Wed, Sep 24, 12:30-13:15 to present at an exciting data science seminar! Topic: Why Use An Evolutionary Perspective To Study Culture? To attend, see: nerds.itu.dk/event/data-s...

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go! 400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it's forever." - Carl Sagan, in Cosmos (1980) Visualisation of our galactic cluster 💫😲💫✨💫🌌💫 NASA

@aaup.org has prepared materials for faculty who face these threats and harassment. 6/ www.aaup.org/issues-highe...

Ever wondered how animals know where they are? Or how they find where they need to be? The answer is that they have maps and compasses built into their heads! Excited to see this new review of map-and-compass navigation led by Joe Morford out in Animal Behaviour @asab.org doi.org/10.1016/j.an...

The Guardian names ANDOR the Best Show of the Year. “It is unlikely we will see something like it - politically radical with Disney budget carte blanche - ever again.”

The count down starts for #CESRabat! Follow @ces2026.bsky.social and join us May 11-13 next year for an exciting meeting in Rabat, Morocco. Massive thanks to the #CESRabat organising committee: Sarah Alami (co-chair) Mathieu Charbonneau (co-chair) Zachary Garfield Edmond Seabright

Interesting discussion of human–AI integration using an endosymbiosis analogy👇

In contrast to the classical view of the shifting balance of clades, when carrying capacity changes due to external perturbation, in the new view - carrying capacity changes with perturbation: both the megaclimate and the diversity experience punctuation and stasis. 4/4

Glad to share our latest article on the "co-coordinated stasis of large mammal diversity with the environments". Long in reviews it is finally out--a work done during the post-doc of Simona Bekeraitė app.pan.pl/article/item... 1/4 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology #Macroecology

Final Call – COMPLEX NETWORKS 2025 📍 Binghamton, NY, USA | 🗓️ Dec 9–11, 2025 Submit your Full Paper or Extended Abstract by September 14, 2025 and join a community of researchers in network science, #complexsystems, and #computational social science. 🔗 Submit now: complexnetworks.org/submission/

We lost Mark Norell today. Dinosaur hunter extraordinaire. The coolest dude alive. My PhD supervisor. Wherever you are, raise a glass of your favorite lager or single malt, as it is what Mark would want.

Governor announces New Mexico will now provide free universal child care

Nice gift "Plate Tectonics Flip Book" from the author Ch. Scotese to our tectonist J. Lazauskienė 😀

The most detailed study so far of the coordinated stasis (the extension of the punctuated equilibria and "Turnover pulse") — episodes of coordinated morphological and ecological stability of the whole faunas: doi.org/10.1017/pab.... 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology #Macroecology

🧠 Want to integrate cultural evolution into your course using award winning materials created by the field's experts, and get paid $2000 to do it? 💵 🚨 The Cultural Evolution Society is seeking applications for the ACE Teaching Innovation Awards. 🔖 Apply here: vuw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Geological time is punctuated by events. Scaling changes our understanding of life and the planet. From eons to epochs: Multifractal geological time and the compound multifractal - Poisson process 🧪 Shaun Lovejoy, @andrejpaleo.bsky.social et al www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"Elisabeth S. Vrba, the “Three Musketeers,” and the Expansion of Macroevolutionary Theory"

When the macroevolution is profoundly mutable: "..profound inversion of patterns in modern taxa highlights the significance of paleontological data in understanding drivers of evolutionary diversification and the limitations of approaches using only living species." 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #Geology #EvoBio