“These technologies have considerable near-term potential to treat a variety of neurological issues – from ALS to Parkinson’s to paralysis. The problem is, their investors don’t always appear to have curing disease as an end goal” www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

How aware is/are your MP(s) of what your local universities deliver beyond taught programmes? Little in political debate or media suggests that their understanding is high. Perhaps it's time to add tutorials with worked examples to the mix, before it's too late. ICSs offer easy starting points. 8/8

What's lost when we lose staff, departments, programmes and faculties in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and what's that got to do with organ donation? Amid the looming losses faced by Cardiff, Edinburgh, Lancaster, Leicester and Nottingham (among many others), here's a worked example. 1/8

Such a lovely quote. We can be rigorous AND empathic - to the word in general and our study participants in particular. And more beautifully expressed than my usual: Be a good scientist. DBAD. 😆 I've rarely had such lovely rejection letters as I got from Jane. Hers remain big shoes to fill.

1/13 New paper out! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Historical records across thousands of women showed that mothers with more children had shorter lifespans during a famine, fitting an evolutionary explanation for why we age @hannahdugdale.bsky.social @lummaalab.bsky.social @erikpostma.bsky.social

"Reproductive factors, including gravidity, parity, abortion, age at first pregnancy, breastfeeding duration, and menopausal age, were significant determinants of mortality risk in older Chinese women." academic.oup.com/biomedgeront...

Hard to think of a better epitaph for a scientist than this: “She inspired us to see the world with both rigor and heart” onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Also like the focus on understanding the history of a discipline here 👇

🧠👀 Dr Rachel Bennetts, our expert in face processing at Brunel psychology, shared her thoughts in @theguardian.com on a fascinating new study exploring what makes some people exceptional at recognising faces 😶‍🌫️ 🔗 👇

Educational Expansion Regimes and Wealth Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa: “findings highlight the importance of categorizing educational expansion as distinct regimes by revealing how seemingly similar educational expansions have vastly different associations with wealth inequality”

So, lots of people picking up Kevin's post to declare all Evolutionary Psychology/ists misogynistic pervs. And I get why but look: I trained in Evo Psych. I trained in Behavioural Ecology too which maybe helps but I came into academia an enthusiastic researcher of sexual selection. 1/

‘When Adam Smith wrote “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest,” he omitted any discussion of the unpaid work of his mother (& later his sister) that went into cooking his dinner.’ on.ft.com/4olyOut

Have definitely come across this reviewer: “This manuscript was not worth my time so I did not read it and recommend rejection.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"mortality was higher among children under age 5 whose parents lost siblings under age 5. Intergenerational persistence was strongest from mothers to children and particularly for mothers who lost siblings as infants in relation to mortality among their own infants" academic.oup.com/ereh/advance...

On the decision of the New York Times to air a podcast debating “did women ruin the workplace?”: “Taking the sort of misogynistic nonsense that you see on Fox News and repackaging it as a pseudointellectual debate in a prestigious publication imbues these arguments with a dangerous validity”

“What is now needed is to place eugenics within a new framework, and see it as interconnected with other paradigms within global racism, social and health inequities. We must put an end to the eugenic dehumanisation of many people of colour, of those individuals with learning disabilities and so on”

Study finds “polarization surrounding universities’ societal roles” but its methodology defines those societal roles as not part of universities “core mission”. This reinforces the damaging narrative that DEI, for example, is in opposition to doing good research, not an integral part of that mission

"His signal achievements, and the way he accomplished them, inflated his belief not only in his genius but also in how to succeed" This is (IMO) a prevalent and harmful feature of the way academia and funding systems work. www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/j...

Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of DNA. Stop saying that they discovered DNA! This was done by another guy you probably haven't heard of! And therein lies a story. academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

We're excited to share the final version of our paper, where we demonstrate how confounding remains a thorny problem for claims about causal genetic influences on human behavioral and socioeconomic outcomes. (w/ @jedidiahcarlson.com @oliviarxiv.bsky.social Ruth Shaw @arbelharpak.bsky.social) 🧵👇

“the study of how and why people vote can offer more than electoral post-mortems that explain why candidates won or lost. The study of political identity can open a window into understanding identity more broadly, and its dynamism, and offer lessons for how society operates and where it is headed”

Women are not ruining the workplace because women are not so very different from men: “In personality and evolutionary psychology, the consensus is clear: Men and women evolved under shared pressures for cooperation, mutual dependency and parental investment, not perpetual conflict or exploitation”

The elimination of USAID was an unforgivable moral atrocity that should haunt Trump, Elon Musk and Marco Rubio for the rest of their days and beyond

Interesting discussion of why fertility rates for men and women may differ here: "adjusting for demographic and socio-economic factors significantly reduces the fertility differential. Residual differences may stem from measurement errors, selection biases, or unmeasured variables"

"Heckenberger relied on the Kuikuro to guide him to the ancient earthworks—which they already knew about—and help him dig and map them. “We built a relationship of trust,” he recalls. “They taught me about their culture, and I taught them how to do archaeology.”" www.science.org/content/arti...

“Financial restrictions oblige funders to reject vast numbers of sound proposals. Why not retain them for other funders to consider?” www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/comm...

“A new initiative to encourage collaboration between leading African researchers and European Research Council grantees opens opportunities for researchers supported by the African Academy of Sciences to temporarily join teams led by ERC grantees in Europe”

This #WplusEBSWednesday, we're highlighting that #EHBEA2026 is soliciting abstract submissions until December 15th!

Positions are also open on the EHBEA Committee! Submit nominations for EHBEA president and secretary by December 16th! #WplusEBSWednesday

Really enjoyed this podcast with @sheinalew.bsky.social and @dorsaamir.bsky.social on evolution and childhood. Super-smart people talking about a super-interesting topic podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/m...

Don't hesitate, apply for our Advancing Cultural Evolution Teaching Innovation awards - The deadline is the 17th of November, so you've got one more week to get your application in! culturalevolutionsociety.org/grants-and-a...

“At a time when state leaders are promoting distrust in science and attacks on the social sciences are multiplying…. We firmly believe that social sciences and academic freedom are intrinsic to democracy and must be protected and promoted” www.isa-sociology.org/en/about-isa...

Curious about using census microdata in your research? 📊 Join us for a webinar on IPUMS International, the world’s leading repository of harmonized census data. 🗓️ 12 Nov 2025 | 🕒 15:15–16:30 UK | 💻 Zoom Register: forms.gle/oqTDNU4Zpn2s... Hosted by the LSE Historical Economic Demography Group.

After an investigation which took >2 years, the journal Cross Cultural Research has retracted a paper which used Lynn's "national IQ" database, on the grounds that "Post-publication review raised serious concerns about the validity of the data & the article findings"

Another recommended read from Andrew Winston: “I show how post-WWII neoliberals and libertarians could employ ideas of “innate intelligence” to promote the reduction of government funding of social programs….IQ data could also be employed in the fight against “egalitarianism.”

Evolutionary psychologists have long believed that men prefer physical traits in women which are cues to high potential fertility. A new review concludes: “current evidence base is too weak to support the claim that women’s feminine morphological traits are associated with reproductive potential”

Not mentioned in the article, but the exact same reasoning applies to things like race science.

“Science deniers undermine scientific integrity when they fail to recognise the expiration date on valuable misunderstandings. Once the hard work of generating & testing other hypotheses has been done, we might ask whether repeatedly responding to the same dissent or misunderstanding is valuable”

My first paper, out in PsychReview!! Along with @orbenamy.bsky.social, Nik & @jaeggiadrian.bsky.social, @realadamhunt.bsky.social & I revisit an old theoretical question using concepts from evo psychiatry and anthro: Why do mixed associations exist b/w social media & mental health? A 🧵

Yeesh, the Journal of Controversial Ideas sure publishes some garbage articles, usually to justify bigotry. freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2...

"“Normal” testosterone levels are largely based on studies from high-income populations that do not account for diverse ecological conditions known to influence physiology. This study highlights complex relationships that exist among age, adiposity & testosterone patterns in subsistence populations"

"Simplistic stories about the dangers of polygyny can be compelling but they risk misleading the public, reinforcing notions of Western cultural superiority & disrupting global health policy by sidelining pertinent initiatives. Building healthier societies necessitates paying attention to evidence"

I wrote a book with Quinn Slobodian called MUSKISM. It'll be published in the US in April 2026, and I hope you'll consider pre-ordering it. The elevator pitch is: if Fordism defined the capitalism of the 20th century, Muskism may well define the capitalism of the 21st.

Can confirm. The entries for hereditarians could have been written by them. If they were written by AI, it's an AI being fed some very biased sources www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

An interesting fact about the 2019 version of Richard Lynn's "national IQ" database is that, for the first time, "Muslim" is considered a race, and an average IQ calculated for Muslims (76.89)

Richard Lynn was criticised for using a sample of children with intellectual impairment to calculate the "national IQ" of Equatorial Guinea in 2002. In 2019, he calculated the IQs of Native Americans from children referred for psychoeducational evaluations, including those with learning difficulties

Lancet series on ‘Innovations in sexual and reproductive health’ aiming to understand “the driving factors behind global epidemiological trends in sexual and reproductive health” www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

New paper! We found that intensifying market integration in Rep. Congo does not uniformly shape BaYaka and Bantu adolescent behaviour and consumption, and that adolescents may be contributing to shifts in norms regarding the sharing of money. rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

'Study in SHAPE disciplines – social sciences, humanities and the arts – develops the skills that underpin a modern workforce: critical thinking, communication and creativity. These are not peripheral to the industrial strategy but essential to it.' 1/3

ERC starter grant applications from US researchers nearly triple in 2025 compared to 2024 as Trump restricts funding. Good for "Choose Europe" initiatives, but dire for global and national science, given the limited volume of non-US funding available.