BIG FIGHT AT POLAND’S WROCLAW ZOO!!!

Please reconsider, buy Florida.

If you read his letters, you will quickly realize that any notion that Lorenz's membership in the NSDAP was opportunistic is incorrect. The book by Föger and Taschwer is also an excellent account of Lorenz's enduring attraction to Nazism before the war. He later regretted, but never apologized.

Excellent piece on Lynn’s “national IQ” dataset: “If you can convince people that “scientific racism” is an oxymoron – that science deals only in truth, and truth cannot be racist – then you can launder a centuries-old ideology of racial hierarchy through the prestige of science itself”

New paper out! Early-life social instability increases aggression in chickens, but does not affect response inhibition 🐤 We discuss what this means for developmental links between social environments, cognition, and social behaviour, highlighting strong context dependence Full text: rdcu.be/eYOzC

"...occurrence [of SSB] was more likely in species inhabiting drier environments with increased food scarcity and predation pressure, in species with greater size dimorphism and longer lifespans and in those with more complex social structures and hierarchies." 🧪 #EvoBio

The Continuing Debate on Dinosaur Cognition .... tetzoo.com/blog/2026/1/...

Alfred Russel Wallace born OTD in 1823. He said he shared with Darwin “an intense interest in … the variety [of living things] that catches the eye of the observer even among those which are very much alike, but which are soon found to differ in several distinct characters.” 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio

It’s been 7 months and they still aren’t used to the camera setup at their feeding station.

Interesting paper highlighting that selection isn't an omnipresent force in animals' lives. Through behavioral decisions (a reflection of their agency), organisms persist in areas where past selection has not acted, creating "non-adaptive" but successful populations. academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...

Exciting chapter that proposes a dialectical view on plasticity. Haukedal shows how plasticity can be more than just passive and flexible responses to the environment, it can also be a creative and organizing force within evolutionary processes. link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

New and unexpected recruit to the aviary! Almost removed all the nest boxes before I saw one new nest, with one egg.

Heading to the A train before the snow.

Superb starling

RIP MetroCard (1994-2025)

Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History

Wood stork sunning

A highlight of a recent fieldwork trip to AWC's Pungalina-Seven Emu Sanctuary was seeing my first Gouldian Finches. We only got a brief look at a group of 6 on sanctuary (thrilling nonetheless) but then on the way back to Darwin we had ~130 of them visit our campsite in Limmen National Park. #WildOz

Our lab's new paper describes the importance of female social decisions in shaping the social organization of Gouldian Finch flocks. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In the days before digital cameras I studied at the University of Ghana and lived with family in South Africa and Botswana while working for Wits Uni. I thought I lost all the photos from that period in an apartment flood a few states ago. Happily that was not the case, and I have found them!

NSF is about to dismantle NCAR at Russell Vought's direction to protect the fossil fuel industry. It's hard to communicate just how much NCAR does, so let's take a look: I've never worked at NCAR, and I've worked with NCAR researchers once ever. What scientific discoveries has NCAR made possible? 👇

🚨 New study by #SPEmembers 🚨 #AnimalBehaviour #Ethology "Multi-generational fidelity, ecological and social determinants of roosting in a cooperatively breeding bird (Argya squamiceps)" Ben Mocha et al. with SPE members Yitzchak Ben Mocha @benmocha.bsky.social @ Royal Society Open Science

Historically, developmental psychobiology (DP) treated development as a central organizing force in a species’ natural history—shaping individual outcomes and evolutionary selection. If you’re interested in DP’s past and future, submit an abstract for our special issue. Submission time is flexible.

Alternative take: Universities (and all institutions really) are terrible at predicting job market changes over a timescale of 5 to 10 years. Thus, turning them into clout chasing vocational training centers is a stupid bet when the original Humboldtian mission showed surprising resilience.

Same visual environment? Really? Does the neural network also exhibit tetrachromatism?

American white ibis crèche

Wadhams, NY

Behavioral ontogeny in a pelagic tunicate reveals the deep origins of chordate behavioral developmental plasticity. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.03.692109v1

Just received Georg Striedter and @evoneuro.bsky.social’s new book. It’s a tour de force that covers a huge swath of avian ethology and neuroscience with wonderful figures and illustrations.

The scientific community failed when it allowed Lynn and others to promulgate obviously shoddy national-IQ “science” without substantial backlash. Lynn was biased by his admitted racist aspirations. His errors and lies are now malignant with our culture, and being weaponized by the right.

Huge congratulations to the wonderful Donna Haraway for winning the 2025 Erasmus Prize: erasmusprijs.org/en/laureates...

I am pleased to announce that from Jan 1 2026 I take over as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biological Theory. My first act, with the support of the editorial team, is to bring the journal to BlueSky from X. Please follow us @biologicaltheory.bsky.social. We will be posting about all our articles.

Ethologist S.A. Barnett (1915-2003) is the author of (IMO) the best single-species monograph still in print, The Rat. He also wrote a powerful and clear short history of how reductionism and overzealous adaptationism stripped agency from human biology. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Kudos to Rebecca for leading this charge! Lynn's data is an embarrassment to the scientific enterprise. The skull measurers on Twitter are having a predictable response with the repeated claim that "other data replicate" Lynn's results. Easy to see that's not true for the 2002, 2012, or "new" set

We had a new paper out yesterday in @royalsocietypublishing.org Biology Letters. About how the cranial feathers of male Golden and Lady Amherst’s Pheasants affect their visual fields. Nice to see it picked up The New York Times and Science. Paper link below.

Retraction Watch has covered the problem of the “national IQ” database. Should be noted I’m far from alone in working to remove these publications. The spreadsheet of pubs which use NIQ - linked to in the article - was started by @kohngregory.bsky.social; a project also worked on by Cathryn Townsend

If you make a system that can self-replicate and is capable of mutation in a way that can respond to selective influences, that doesn't mean it's alive. Who agrees with that?

Not convinced. The fact that all biological systems (even organoids) show some endogenous activity does not mean that experience plays no causal role. The existence of structured activity is not evidence for the absence of causal experience.

Got the wonderful UK edition of @philipcball.bsky.social book on biological agency. If you haven’t read it yet I highly recommend it. Going to attempt to teach a seminar class around in soon to introduce students to these concepts.

Interesting chapter by Garland Allen on dialectical materialism, reductionism, and its relationship to animal consciousness research. By charting a dialectical approach to the study of animal minds, he suggested alternative ways to situate the brain's role in the evolution of behavior.

"Mice seem to assist pregnant females when they get into difficulty giving birth, with experienced mothers being the most helpful. This is thought to be the first official sighting of such assistance in non-primates, and so expands our knowledge of caregiving behaviours across the animal kingdom."

It only took us several decades and dozens Nature/Nature Genetics papers but we finally got to the conclusion that plant and animal breeders (and Lewontin) arrived at from the start: twin studies suck!

A global screen for magnetically induced neuronal activity in the pigeon brain www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... - so cool! 🐦🧠

Complex dynamics of social learning in groups of wild Arabian babblers #Bird #SocialCognition doi.org/10.1093/behe...

What a disastrous move on the side of the @uniofleicester.bsky.social . In a world affected by the global change which needs a multitude of perspective, they are planning to narrow-down all Earth sciences to few unoriginal generics. Please sign the petition 👇 🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #EvoBio #Paleobio

A reminder to anyone interested in #brains #birds or behaviour, our new book is available for FREE as an ebook in addition to print copies. #neuroethology #neuroskyence #ornithology 🧪🧠🪶 direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...