We need your input ☺️ Please help my MSc student Mia with her work on emotion expression and how humans perceive valence in artificial sounds (based on animal sound features) by filling out this very short and anonymous survey: ‭‭https://www.survey-xact.dk/LinkCollector?key=96FZC8CDL532‬‬

Check out our new paper! (1/5) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @err-ring.bsky.social @kkshimizu1.bsky.social @markstoneking.bsky.social @balthasarbickel.bsky.social @chiarabarbieri.bsky.social @isle-uzh.bsky.social @nccrlanguage.bsky.social

Couldn't wait to give this news! English edition of Technopanic will be out at end of this month. It will appear under a new publishing project led by @danielnettle.bsky.social , which I am very glad to be part of. More details soon. And thank you to @hugoreasoning.bsky.social for the endorsement!

🎉🦜NEW PAPER ALERT 🦜🎉 Which social learning biases underly the acquisition of novel food in wild parrots ? We (@lucymaplin.bsky.social, @bjjbarrett.bsky.social, @sonjawild.bsky.social, @drjohnmartin.bsky.social) presented >700 cockies with a novel, artificial food (🧵1/6)

My group at the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics now has a name: Cultural Evolution of the Arts! You can read a bit more about the idea behind the group at the group's web page: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/research/... And here's the obligatory door nameplate :)

Just had a paper desk-rejected by an editor on the grounds that it's identical to a previous paper I've published. Except the previous paper doesn't exist. I sure hope editors aren't using chat GPT to screen papers, or we all may as well give up.

A new episode of Transmissions is out! We feature Dr. Aiyana Willard, Reader in Psychology at Brunel University London. We talk about the adaptiveness of religion, including alternative beliefs such as witchcraft, tarot reading and other local healing practices. www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2m5...

Nice coincidence that a big study of cooperation decline in microfinance in Sierra Leone has appeared in Nature just after our meta-analysis. Hints that partner choice, reciprocity and punishment were involved, but sadly no explicit focus on non-proximate explanations www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Looks like a useful way of detecting trait coevolution in both genetic and cultural phylogenies. Also, we are truly lucky to be living in a time when methods papers come with free R packages, rather than having to order it on a floppy disk that arrives in the post.

Extremely excited to start my 8-year @royalsociety.org Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship @uniexecec.bsky.social focussing on understanding the role of individual cognitive variation in reintroduction biology. With 2x 4-year Postdoc and PhD positions being advertised shortly - do get in touch if interested!

Lots of stuff in this interview with Joel Mokyr that's relevant to cultural evolution: the role of causal understanding on technological improvement, population structure and fragmentation, information sharing and social networks, etc. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/o...

Are gender gaps in partner preferences larger in countries with stronger gender norms? In our new preprint (w/ @jinwenxie.bsky.social ), we addressed this question using an open access dataset (Walter et al, 2020; >14k participants, 45 countries). 🧵1/4 #ehbea #psychscisky 🧪 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Applications now open for the UNIL Summer School on Modelling for Evolutionary Biology (31 Aug–5 Sep 2026, Lausanne)! For PhD & postdocs interested in formal approaches to evolutionary ecology (incl. social evo, life-history, species interactions). Scholarships available, Pls RP! shorturl.at/fo1GA

The Cultural Evolution Society is delighted to announce that Mason Youngblood (he/they) @masonyoungblood.bsky.social, Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook University, is the recipient of the 2026 CES New Investigator Award. Congratulations Mason on this well-deserved award!!

New special issue on "Cultural evolution of the arts" led by @sobchuk.bsky.social and @masonyoungblood.bsky.social confirms my intuition that this field has taken off in the past two decades, with a particularly strong representation from music! doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

Phil Trans Roy Soc B theme issue ‘The evolution of collective intelligence’ is out! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

Simulation Models of Cultural Evolution in R by Alex Mesoudi #RStats https://bigbookofr.com/chapters/social%20science.html#simulation-models-of-cultural-evolution-in-r

There is a fully-funded PhD position at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to pursue dissertation research among the Mayangna of Nicaragua, expanding a longitudinal study of subsistence strategies and behavioral ecology. Please share the posting! www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...

Final version of this paper is now published. Find out what the microfinance literature can tell us about the evolution of human cooperation

New preprint with Rafael Leite, Sandro Reia and Paulo Campos Cumulative Cultural Evolution in Structured Populations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... In which we take an old model of cumulative cultural evolution of mine and see what happens if you add social networks

In the Stanford Daily today. stanforddaily.com/2026/04/13/a...

I took the German or Autistic diagnostic. Result: Both. The Wittgenstein Result. I don't know whether to be proud or concerned. german.millermanschool.com

I am reminded by this critique of a computational social science conference I went to not long ago, where many of the talks were along the lines of 'humans do X, so we tested different LLMs on X too to see if they can do it', without much theoretical justification or consequence

I'm hiring! 📢 Fully funded 4-year PhD position in Language Evolution using Communication Games at @mpi-nl.bsky.social. Come work with me on how different social pressures shape the evolution of new communication systems in the lab! Deadline for application is May 18th! share.google/fGTKbFS4v4Gb...

The call for the PhD programme in Sociology and Social Research at Trento is out, with deadline 14 May. Interested in a PhD in cultural evolution / social media / cultural analytics? Get in touch! www.unitn.it/en/phd/socio...

New paper out in Evolutionary Human Sciences (unformatted early access): Testing Evolutionary Theories of Human Cooperation via Meta-Analysis of Microfinance Repayment with Dougie Foster, Shakti Lamba & @erikpostma.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

New paper out in Evolutionary Human Sciences (unformatted early access): Testing Evolutionary Theories of Human Cooperation via Meta-Analysis of Microfinance Repayment with Dougie Foster, Shakti Lamba & @erikpostma.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This project (with Stacy Rosenbaum and Nick Grebe) began in the dark days of Covid, and is finally ready to share. We've built a living database of primate paternity data (52 species, 3000 paternities) and completed first wave of analyses of paternity distribution. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New masters programme in Evolutionary Anthropology - University of Leipzig & Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, teaching in English www.uni-leipzig.de/en/studying/... #EHBEA

The preliminary programme for @ces2026.bsky.social is now out. What a fabulous line up! airess.fgses-um6p.ma/CES2026?__cf...

Completely passed me by that Robert Trivers died more than two weeks ago jjffh.com/tribute/deta...

Interested in the weirdness that is humanity? Ever suspect human evolution itself may be changing? Join my colloquium at the KLI in Austria to learn about: The Science of an Evolutionary Transition in Humans kli.ac.at/en/events/ev... (3pm CET, 9am US Eastern, on zoom and live)

Very good attempt to quantify how powerful an engine of ecological adaptation cultural evolution is: “Cultural evolution accelerated human range expansion by more than two orders of magnitude” 🧪 www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Interested in the Big Questions of human evolution, culture and society? In the Vienna area? Come join my colloquium at the Konrad Lorenz Institute on March 26 at 15:00. I will be speaking on: The Science of an Evolutionary Transition in Humans kli.ac.at/en/events/ev... Also online.

With @saramitri.bsky.social, @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social and L. Lehmann we’ve launched the UNIL Center for Theory in Ecology and Evolution @unil.bsky.social🇨🇭 To kick things off, we’re offering short visiting fellowships for theorists in ecology & evolution. Apply & pls RP 😀 tinyurl.com/2wem36zz

Transmission of human handedness: a reanalysis | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core - www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

We're pleased to announce the call for the 2026 Richerson Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research, for a recent PhD dissertation that significantly contributes to the field of CE. Recipients receive a $300 award, a 3-yr CES membership and CES conference registration. forms.gle/p4MqcskCs2Yz...

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏

From Apr 1, 2026, I’ll launch my own lab at Tohoku University as an Assistant Professor! I’m happy to host applicants for the JSPS International Postdoc Fellowships. If you’re interested in mathematical models of human history, feel free to DM me!

My book is now published! 🌏🎶🧪
 You can download it for free at academic.oup.com/book/62353 - I’d be grateful if you do! I also published an accessible summary with audio/video today in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41... Try reading that first, then give the whole book a read if you like it!

The Culture Conference 2026 is already starting next week! 🥳 If you plan to attend in-person, please register ‼️before Sunday 22/02‼️ We are almost full, so don’t wait 😊 Online registration will remain open 💻 See you next week in Utrecht 🌇 To register:👇 culture-conference.com/registration/

My kind of papers. "Can LLMs Cook Jamaican Couscous? A Study of Cultural Novelty in Recipe Generation" arxiv.org/pdf/2602.10964

Interested in the interface of evolution 🧬 and ecology 🌳? Then you cannot miss #ExE2026! Hosted by @uniexecec.bsky.social in beautiful #Cornwall, this #conference has a stellar line-up of speakers and lots of pre-and post-conference workshops. Space is limited, so register now at evoxeco.uk!

I have been sceptical of using genAI in my work so far, and still am with respect to writing and literature reviews, but my god it's useful when trying to write and debug Stan models

Cultural evolution in the Epstein files! Quite aside from the petty rudeness of Trivers towards Pete Richerson (one of the nicest and most respectful people I've ever met), how on earth did this two-bit pedophile financier scumbag inveigle himself into so many networks of scientists?

🚨 New Paper Alert! We investigated the developmental trajectories of intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic social norm acquisition among BaYaka and Bandongo in northern Rep. Congo, a community where inter-ethnic cooperation is common. We found that... journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Very happy to see our ice-fishing paper on the cover of @science.org this week! 🎣🎉 We tracked large groups of Finnish competitive ice-fishers to study how social foragers use social information when searching for resources. 🐟 Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (contact me for open access)

Post 1/13 📢🧵 Call for activities proposals ! You are invited to submit proposals for three activities to be held during the upcoming CES2026 conference:

"The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution" with @ndersen.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @felixthehauskat.bsky.social out in Proc B royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...