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

Physical copies of this 71-chapter tome now exist. Do encourage your library to buy a copy…also doubles as excellent door stop! Co-edited with Jamie Tehrani and @rachkendal.bsky.social. @oxunipress.bsky.social @durhamanthropology.bsky.social

Punctuated equilibrium, a concept introduced by paleontologists in 1972, reimagines evolution’s tempo as a stochastic burst rather than a steady beat. A new model finds support for their theory in both molecular and fossil data. @jakebuehler.bsky.social reports www.quantamagazine.org/the-sudden-s...

CE Paper Alert 🚨

This is so cool! (especially as a retro gamer and evo-devo scientist).

For some three billion years, unicellular organisms ruled Earth. Then, around one billion years ago, a new chapter of life began go.nature.com/3JyRV4S

"The Cultural Macroevolution of Arcade Video Games: Innovation, Collaboration, and Collapse" #gaming https://doi.org10.1017/ehs.2025.10015

realistic Star Trek

Multiscale view on arcade games as model system for studying cultural macroevolution The Cultural Macroevolution of Arcade Video Games: Innovation, Collaboration, and Collapse🧪 @svalver.bsky.social , @blaividiella.bsky.social , @andrejpaleo.bsky.social, R. Bentley www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

A bit late on this, but here we explore how cultural information can guide development of behavior & cognitive skills just like genes. Can cultural evolution result in teaching trajectories that promote incremental acquisition of complex tasks? #culturalevolution #developmentalpsychology #modelling

Amazing paper idea, brilliantly executed! Cultural #macroevolution of arcade video games by @svalver.bsky.social @andrejpaleo.bsky.social @blaividiella.bsky.social and R. Alexander Bentley www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Yes! What’s exciting is how cultural and technological systems can display macroevolutionary patterns we usually associate with biology — diversification, collapse, persistence. Arcade games are just one tractable case study.

#ArcadeGames #RetroGaming #GameHistory

How to draw a Space Invader muffinman.io/blog/invaders/

It was an exciting journey led by Sergi! 😃 Here a thread you can find out how the diversification process in arcade games follows the principles of macroevolution and metabolic allometry: including "hat-like pattern" of diversity change and persistence of the 'living fossils'👇 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio

What do Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Mortal Kombat have to teach us about #cultural #evolution? As a social-technological phenomenon, #arcade game genres evolved like cultural species—some diversified, while others became "living fossils." 🕹️🧪 👉 doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

I love a good model indeed but my personal bugbear is when a model is cited in lieu of a finding. All models are useful no doubt but some are wrong.

I really enjoyed this discussion about the uses and misuses of theory in cultural evolution.

Macroevolution: Marine biomass and biodiversity through deep time 🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Ecosystem function and its evolution depend on the number of taxa and the amount of biomass. Results of samples spanning the past 541 million years. h/t Sergi Valverde @svalver.bsky.social

The grave risks for science as the whole of leaving fundamental scientific infrastructure in the hands of for-profit capitalist company. Essential scholarly services should be internationally curated by value-based societies/orders/colleges. 🧪

Turnover pulse is a theory proposed by late Elisabeth Vrba, which states, that the extinctions and originations (through allopatry) are concentrated in narrow time intervals of significant environmental upheaval. ajsonline.org/article/1241... 1/2

I think that using the words "model" or "theory" in the title is frequently interpreted as a limitation. In addition to being inaccurate, this bias ignores the ways in which theory has influenced (and still influences) science in general. @andrejpaleo.bsky.social @blaividiella.bsky.social

Just FYI: I've now written two obituaries for Margaret Boden (one for my facebook friends, one for Nature), and I'm in the process of writing a third. joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2025/07/marg... I'll let you know when/if I finish; hopefully before the Nature one (linked here) goes to print 21 August.

Margaret Boden, a British philosopher and cognitive scientist who used the language of computers to explore the nature of thought and creativity, leading her to prescient insights about the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence, died last month at 88.

Gregarious behaviour in butterfly larvae has evolved multiple times - Cicconardi, @ebablab.bsky.social et al. use genome data of 60 Heliconiini species, identifying signatures of convergent molecular evolution, on both coding and noncoding loci. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf179 #evobio #molbio

And one final thought: Ozzy going out after giving an emotional final performance that raised a ton of money for charity is more spiritually uplifting and did more genuine good than anything any televangelist and religious grifter who railed against him ever did combined.

Speciation always involves genes, and almost always also involves geography www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/13....

"Men who sell machines that mimic people want us to become people who mimic machines. They want techno feudal subjects who will believe and do what they’re told. We, as people, are being strategically simplified. This is a fascist process." organizingmythoughts.org/some-thought...

New Phanerozoic-scale biomass data show marine biomass and biodiversity have tracked each other for 540 Myr, supporting the patterns popularised by Jack Sepkoski in the 1980s. CC: @andrejpaleo.bsky.social @nilese.bsky.social @palaeophilo.bsky.social #macroevolution t.co/yfgPQU7l7l

I am excited to announce that the position of a senior postdoc (3 +3 years) in the field of theoretical biology is available in my group. The position provides the opportunity to closely interact with experimentalists and develop own research projects. Please RT. Details 👇: shorturl.at/iiiOv