Another day, and another reference to these bangers. Contemporary causal inference has fundamentally changed the way I think about control variables and mediation analyses. These can show you why: doi.org/10.1177/2515... doi.org/10.1111/spc3... doi.org/10.1177/2515...

The 2026 Guarda Summer Course in Evolutionary Biology is now accepting applications. Amazing place, amazing course, amazing opportunity for early grad students. tb.ethz.ch/education/gu...

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Fifty years to the day since the death of Hannah Arendt. This is (still) such a fantastic interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVSR...

Our preprint is out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Peter Skovorodnikov and I are excited to present FERAL: a new video-understanding toolkit that maps raw video directly to behavior, no pose estimation required. It works across species, from lab to field, and even in collective systems. (🧵1/n)

Biological Theory is now on Bluesky! We have a new team of editors and a new editorial board. We will soon be posting about all our articles. Find out more about the journal at link.springer.com/journal/13752

Make sure you don’t miss our key dates for abstract submission and registration!

Are you working on a project where you need to infer whether individuals are socially learning? pathways, correlates of, and individual variation in sensitivity to social transmission? Consider joining the hand-on STbayes workshop to learn about the latest update to the NBDA framework

now out, post peer review, led by @ehowaspi.bsky.social: empirically informed ABM suggesting that in orangutans dietary"know-what" requires social learning to develop

Apply now for a NERC-funded PhD position with @andyradford.bsky.social & Patrick Kennedy at @bristolbiosci.bsky.social (with me as friendly 2nd supervisor down the road in @crab-exeter.bsky.social). Network cognition, cooperation, competition...what's not to like? www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Postdoc position in individual-level incentives, social learning, and payoff-biased imitation shape group-level accuracy in complex prediction and decision-making tasks in Konstanz files.newsletter2go.com/l3slzozn/s_i...

We are hiring: 4 PhD Positions in Ecology / Data Science and one Ecological Data Scientist. For more information, see www.uni-regensburg.de/universitaet...

To give an idea of the status quo, the customary tactic in animal social networks is to not only aggregate across time but also to divide out the sample size by using various ratio outcome variables. If we could get ppl to stop using ratio variables, that alone would be a victory.

New paper! We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Award alert! 🎖️🚨 Every other year, the Ethologische Gesellschaft awards the Niko Tinbergen Award to outstanding post-doc level researchers in Behavioural Biology (<=6yrs post PhD exam). ...and this year is one of these years! Please send us your nominations! 🫵 Infos: www.etho-ges.de/wordpress/aw...

I am excited to announce two PhD opportunities! Come and join our interdisciplinary team in Sheffield, UK. - Destroying forever chemicals with microbes and cold plasma: tinyurl.com/mth8ymx5 - Learning how motile bacteria make decisions: tinyurl.com/2hmc9a8u UK and overseas students welcome to apply!

Now that it has a title page, this all becomes very official

When there is a random way to do something, there is a less random way that is better but requires more thought. In this case, regression models that make no sense don't belong in a multiverse analysis. An inferential regression without a causal justification is like an opinion without reasons.

Applications for the MEME programme (www.evobio.eu ) are now open! MEME is a research- and mobility-oriented master’s in evolutionary biology (& I’m a proud alumna!), jointly run by the Unis of Groningen, Uppsala, Montpellier, and LMU Munich, with Harvard and Lausanne as partners. Spread the word!

People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. James Baldwin

It’s become fashionable in some circles to reject decision theory (and other basic statistical ideas) for vaguely political reasons. There are valid critiques—but also some worth being wary of. Some thoughts: statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/10/17/s...

Do any stats nerds have a good reference/examples for how to write about Gaussian Processes models and communicate them to readers? I am estimating spatial autocorrelation of things measured in grids and need some inspiration to guide my writing.

Wild female gorillas live long after their last baby is born. Do they go through menopause? https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2510998122

The second seminar of the year is on Thursday, October 16 at 10am Eastern. @salazarafra.bsky.social + @ellenclarke.bsky.social Join us! internalconflictsstn.wordpress.com/seminars/

⚠️Paper Alert!⚠️ Excited to share this paper with @roccoro.bsky.social where we examined whether ceramic technology in Saharan Africa was the result of a single or multiple episodes of innovation & diffusion rdcu.be/eJi3g

Want to know more about monkeys kidnapping other monkeys?🐒 I had an amazing chat together with @bjjbarrett.bsky.social on @sidedoorpod.bsky.social about the Coiban capuchins and their wild antics. Science really is stranger than fiction! Listen 👂 here: www.si.edu/sidedoor/mon...

I'm looking for a doctoral student with Bayesian background to work on Bayesian workflow and cross-validation (see my publication list users.aalto.fi/~ave/publica... for my recent work) at Aalto University. Apply through the ELLIS PhD program (dl October 31) ellis.eu/news/ellis-p...

⭐PhD position available!⭐ Come join us @imprs-qbee.bsky.social to study communication and collective behavior in animal groups! We're looking for someone excited to use computational approaches to tackle biological questions, using our full-group tracking datasets imprs-qbee.mpg.de/121465/analy...

Are you studying animal sociality? My (now published) first PhD chapter proposes a Bayesian + causal framework to infer the factors shaping the social relationships that animals form with one another. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

3yr PDRA at @exeter.ac.uk with @york.ac.uk and Centre for Whale Research, studying how killer whale social relationships change with prey availability, partner loss and social info. A fantastic team & unique longterm dataset. Deadline 19 Oct! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOT336/postdoctoral-research-associate

It's hiring season at @iast.fr! - 2y research postdoc contract - Full autonomy, you are your own PI - Awesome multidisciplinary environment - All social and behavioral sciences welcome - Seed funding for projects and workshops - Gorgeous city in the south of France www.iast.fr/research-fel...

When thinking about causal inference, mechanistic or process models are important. I think that the association of “causal” with black-box models leads to lots of problems. statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/09/19/w...

'The Desperation of Causal Inference in Ecology' "What’s the solution? If you ask me, be less gaga over any statistical method and teach everyone basic biological models, simulate data from it and then fit their statistical model to it." […]

Are you studying animal sociality? Confused about the "non-independence" of social network data: what on earth are they? are they threatening your results? should you attempt to get rid of them? A thread summarising a part of our new paper (ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...).

I’m especially proud of this article I wrote about Gaussian Processes for the Recast blog! 🥳 GPs are super interesting, but it’s not easy to wrap your head around them at first 🤔 This is a medium level (more intuition than math) introduction to GPs for time series. getrecast.com/gaussian-pro...

"Being Bayesian in a Frequentist World" New post on "Bayesian dynamic borrowing" in R 📚 Link 👇

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

New paper from my group led by Odd Jacobson, former PhD student & current postdoc @livingingroups.bsky.social : How do animal groups simultaneously balance between- and within-group competition in dynamic environments and does this impact movement and space use? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

It’s publication day for this wonderful anthology on cinema in which I have a contribution on time and memory, life and death, and the poet’s journey in Eternity and a Day (1998) and other films by Theo Angelopoulos. “Come. We are going to the island.”

Fantastic work. Great case for using generative network models.

🐒🕸️ New preprint! Confused about how to model animal social networks? ASNA can be confusing—but also full of opportunity. We break down 5 common misunderstandings in animal social network analysis and share solutions from behavioural ecology, anthro, stats, & network science. Hope it helps! A 🧵

⭐🎓The Department of Sociology in Vienna @univie.ac.at‬ invites applications for a Tenure Track Professor in Sociology with focus on Quantitative Social Science Research Methods | #Sociology | quant methods Apply here (17 Sept 25): jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Tenure-T...

Call for Applications: Wiko Early Career Call for #fellowships 2026/27 in the #NaturalSciences and #LifeSciences. Apply online by November 1st for a 3–5 month fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin – Institute for Advanced Study: wiko-berlin.de/fellow-werde... #cfa

🚨 Lecturer in Animal Ecology position @jcuofficial.bsky.social. Candidates with expertise in terrestrial animal ecology are encouraged. 📍 Townsville, AU Closes: 8th Aug 2025 🔗 careers.jcu.edu.au/jobs/lecture...

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

New #rstats blog up! solomonkurz.netlify.app/blog/2025-07... This is the first in a brief series where we use {brms} to learn {Stan} code. Many thanks to @fusaroli.bsky.social and @stephenjwild.bsky.social for their helpful reviews.

How do we build theory in cogsci? traditional physics w its rich data and experimental possibilities is often used as parangon. We argue historical sciences provide an equally rich source: "Lessons for Theory from Scientific Domains Where Evidence is Sparse or Indirect": doi.org/10.1007/s421... 🧵 1/