Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum) in Bloomingdale Bog, NY.

Amazing. No notes. @evoroseman.bsky.social talk about race science for Ghent University. ugent.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Page...

How do social networks become adaptive? From self-organisation and phase transitions to cultural learning, social networks are shaped by feedback between individual interactions and collective dynamics. Check my new @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social paper www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

“The Auburn University Board of Trustees on Friday gave itself complete control over course offerings, curriculum, degree requirements and academic credentials while eliminating shared governance at the Alabama land-grant university… The policy leaves many questions unanswered”

“a dystopian move that would destroy what remains of merit-based review” www.science.org/content/arti...

Researchers have identified superparamagnetic macrophages in the livers of rock pigeons to be crucial for magnetic sensing. The finding uncovers an unexpected role for immune cells in sensory perception and may fundamentally change our understanding of animal navigation. https://scim.ag/4nTQ3nq

Great new work by @evangiangrande.bsky.social tracking how race scientists exploit preprint servers to legitimize and spread their work

When her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Cuban scientist Teresita Rodríguez set out to find a way to help her. In doing so, she might have changed the way we treat Alzheimer’s worldwide. 👉Premiering May 17 on our YouTube channel!

Ok, fine, no swimming today.

Excited about our new paper led by postdoc Jacob Feder, which examines social organization variation of baboons and their relatives. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Jacob's website here: jacobfeder.weebly.com UMass news release here: www.umass.edu/news/article...

Preprint on seek eating kinematics in passerines www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Abolitionist John Brown was born May 9, 1800.

Blue-gray gnatcatcher sunning

Today is Karl Marx’s birthday. I don’t know if he would be delighted or disparaged by how prescient his observations on the nature of society, economics, and science still stand 208 years after his birth.

This is your brain on adaptationism

I found two pretty obscure issues of the Yiddish art and literature magazine Topelpunkt. Looks like it was published until the early 2000s, but can’t find out much further about it. / איך האָב געפֿונען צוויי זעלטענע אויסגאַבעס פֿון דער קונסט און ליטעראַרישער זשורנאַל "טאָפּלפונקט".

Among South America's many amazing and superb passerines.... Cocks-of-the-Rock, Extreme Cotingas tetzoo.com/blog/2019/4/... #birds #passerines #ornithology

Happy May Day!

Not if you read Gene Wolfe you’re not.

Israel must release Zeteo contributor Alex Colston and the rest of the flotilla activists and crew. This is piracy:

New paper out in Biological Reviews📝🚨 When trying to explain why female birds engage in extra-pair copulations/paternity, we mostly focus on the benefits. But what about the costs? Should we not consider the downsides of the behavior we try to understand? 🧵 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Brutal review, wow... "The book reads like an Eat Pray Love of biotech grifting, designed to make her into a public figure based on her personal journey, now presented as the living impetus for her advocacy."

How did life originate? A vast body of literature has explored this question, and this is one of my favorite books on the topic—written by @ucscscience.bsky.social David Deamer, one of the true pioneers. @manlius.bsky.social @marktas.bsky.social @ben-s-e.bsky.social @julipereto.bsky.social

More details on the firing of the National Science Board. The NSF now has no director, deputy director, or board. They have issued almost no new awards in 2026. The plan appears to be to completely destroyed the agency. The details are horrifying and have Russ Vought written all over them.

Desmond Morris passed away yesterday. He was one of the last living links to classical ethology. While most famous for his book "The Naked Ape" (I wasn't a fan), his work in bird behavior was foundational for both ethology and the behavioral sciences broadly. www.bbc.com/news/article...

A family of Ravens is putting the goth back in gothic at NYC's largest cathedral--St John the Divine. There are five mouths to feed, so the parents are staying busy! ⛪️⛪️⛪️ #Ravens #Cathedral #birding

Today we honor the memory of the Jews and resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto who staged an uprising against the Nazis amidst impossible odds. We remember that the fight for freedom, dignity, and collective liberation endures. #WarsawGhettoUprising #JewishHistory #WarsawGhetto

Scientists stunned by ‘fundamentally new way’ life produces DNA | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

New paper in Animal Behaviour: After centuries of debate, we finally have direct evidence that common cuckoos use different egg-laying tactics 🥚 doi.org/10.1016/j.an... Check the appendix videos! #ornithology #broodparasitism #cuckoo @animbehsociety.bsky.social @ivb-cas.bsky.social

Maybe you just learned about woodcocks, but they've been a big deal for centuries. I wrote about the long history of loving the American Woodcock birdhistory.substack.com/p/more-than-...

Pinker’s shtick is eloquently projecting mischaracterizations of topics that knows nothing about into the public sphere. He masquerades as an expert, despite never seriously engaging with the fields he critiques. He’s the Trump of popular science writing. www.currentaffairs.org/news/steven-...

[CONFERENCE ALERT] May 5-7, EMBODIED COGNITION AND COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY Universidad de Murcia (Spain) Invited speakers: Louise Barrett, Lucia Jacobs, Susana Monsó, Paco Calvo, Matt Sims & Aditya Ponkshe. Check out the full program here: embodiedcomparativepsychology.square.site/program

Really sad to hear this, I almost went to Hampshire College. Ken Burns’s quote “It was dedicated to a transformational education, in an era when higher education has been hijacked by the transactional” captures so much of what is wrong with higher ed right now. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/u...

Happy Yuri’s night!

Seeing a lot of folks share this. Tailor birds are amazing, but some of this is clearly AI. I have never seen a tailorbird nest with stitching going around the top, and they don’t make arbitrary leaf patches, or use scotch tape.

New paper with Parker Tichko on the ‘poverty of the stimulus’. Drawing from comp psy, ethology, and dev systems thought, we propose that development should be approached as a causal “flow” of non-obvious organism-environment interactions rather than innate responses to impoverished environments.

Modeling organismal agency in evolution arxiv.org/abs/2602.00978

I've really enjoyed this series on Philosophy of Biology from @closertotruth.bsky.social: closertotruth.com/project/phil... Videos are 25min each, consist mainly of interviews with experts, and cover topics ranging from units of selection to biological information to evolution of cognition

First interspecies encounter.

Now with pages @systbiol.bsky.social ! "Social Environment and the Evolution of Delayed Reproduction in Birds" with @pseudacris.bsky.social and Rick Prum Some comparative support for the hypothesis that the evolution of complex social contexts restructure life histories doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

Beyond his gutter racism, Cofnas consistently resists even approaching the modern scientific literature. He doesn’t cite, or seem to understand, the consensus among geneticists that race doesn’t exist and genes can’t explain behavior. He traffics in shallow controversy and shallow controversy alone.

An opinionated Golden-browed Chlorophonia at Paraiso Quetzal Lodge #CostaRica #birds #nature

What a joy to finally share the cover of The Organism–Environment Pairing (@mitpress.bsky.social)! The 📗 will be out on May 12 📆! I look forward to the conversations it sparks among scientists, philosophers & historians! mitpress.mit.edu/978026205282... #evosky #histsci #philsci #philsky #booksky 🌱🐋