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:

Call for papers for an exciting interdisciplinary conference on „The Cultural Evolution of Migration and Diversity“ 25-26 Sept. 2026 at WZB Berlin. Confirmed speakers include @michael.muthukrishna, Peter Richerson and @alexmesoudi.com. www.wzb.eu/de/veranstal...

"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...

We received a TON of submissions for @ces2026.bsky.social ! This is definitely a trend you'll want to conform to. If you didn't submit, still come for the amazing speaker lineup. Registration will open soon. @hbes2026.bsky.social abstract submission closes today!

Call for papers for conference on "The Cultural Evolution of Migration and Diversity”. This is the 12th Annual WZB Conference on Migration and Diversity, to be held at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, from September 25-26, 2026.

Excited for the new Transmissions episode on ASU's Sarah Mathew on how human warfare evolved, and her fieldwork in Kenya. Watch here: youtu.be/eUqEcxf5uBQ?... New Episodes monthly! Created by @ferylbadiani.bsky.social and @ahnisnaahsi.bsky.social CC: @arizonastateuni.bsky.social

Very cool paper here. I'm particularly intrigued by the finding that population size negatively predicts innovation since that has a nice resonance with some of our recent work (doi.org/10.1098/rstb...).

Proc B with @sampassmore.bsky.social! We used simulations to explore the innovation strategies of speed climbers 🧗‍♀️ Innovation is higher among slower athletes and lower when the population size is larger, and the overall balance of innovation and copying appears to be suboptimal 🔗 bit.ly/499QjZM

After a short hiatus, we are delighted that our student outreach initiative is back with a new episode from their interview series! Featuring former president Dr. Sarah Mathew, in it we explore how human warfare evolved, alongside her fascinating fieldwork in Kenya. youtu.be/eUqEcxf5uBQ?...

🎉🍾 very excited to see this out before 2025 ends doi.org/10.1111/2041... with Will Hoppitt in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social. This paper is an overview of our new R package STbayes, a user-friendly toolkit for performing Bayesian NBDA analyses. @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

I got wonderful news: I was granted a position of Max Planck independent group leader at the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics ⬇️ (@ae.mpg.de) in Frankfurt, which I'll join in early 2026. It's a huge honor: being trusted with academic freedom offered by MPG. My group will study the evolution of arts. 1/3

Excited to get this paper published! 🌟 We argue that men exaggerate patriarchal beliefs in an effort to signal conformity to others, which in turn fuels misperceptions about peers - making patriarchal norms resistant to change. royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Today sees the publication of the Theme Issue featuring the CES Transformation Fund grant scheme. Enjoy! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3... @durhamdcerc.bsky.social @durhamanthropology.bsky.social @cultevolfunding.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

New paper out in Phil Trans with Angel Jimenez, Keith Jensen and Lei Chang From information free-riding to information sharing: how have humans solved the cooperative dilemma at the heart of cumulative cultural evolution? royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

This week's Cooperation Colloquium: Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com Experimental evidence that reputation-based partner choice facilitates information sharing in humans Date: December 5 Time: 15:00 UTC+1 (Vienna) / 9 am ET (NYC) Sign up: list.ku.dk/postorius/li...

Working my way slowly through the @manymindspod.bsky.social back catalogue. This one with @iyadrahwan.bsky.social is really good on a cultural evolution analysis of machine / digital culture podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/m...

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...

The submission deadline for #CESRabat has been extended to 30 November @ces2026.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

Come and do a PhD at Exeter with me and Chico Camargo (Computer Science) on human-genAI coevolution "Leveraging Natural Language Processing for Data-Driven Agent-Based Modelling of Online Cultural Dynamics" www.exeter.ac.uk/v8media/recr... More details here: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...

Congratulations to Andoni Sergiou for defending his PhD thesis today! And special thanks to @psmaldino.bsky.social and @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social for examining his thesis

A week before his defence @rug.nl, the publication of @euantheyoung.bsky.social's chapter on the lifespan cost of reproduction in @science.org Advances - with @hannahdugdale.bsky.social, @lummaalab.bsky.social and myself - couldn't have been better timed! 👍 🥳 🥂https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adz6422

BehaveAI is live! Our biologically inspired video analysis tool sees motion as colour. Track animals or objects, classify their behaviour, and handle complex natural scenes with ease. Semi-supervised annotation, no GPUs required, user-friendly, free & open source. Pre-print tinyurl.com/BehaveAI

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...

👉 A reminder that the deadline for submitting your abstract to the CES 2026 #CESRabat is the 16th of November. 🔗Submit here: airess.fgses-um6p.ma/ces2026 We look forward to seeing you in Rabat!

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... Apply by Nov 12! Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

Excited to announce the first ACE Course Design Awards for excellent cultural education teaching. Those award winning classes will be placed in an open teaching repository for anyone looking to enhance cultural evolution content in their courses. culturalevolutionsociety.org/news-and-eve...

Agreed! It was one of my 5 recommended books on cultural evolution here: shepherd.com/best-books/c...

We're pleased to announce and congratulate the winners of the Advancing Cultural Evolution Course Design Awards! This competition recognises leading educators in the field of cultural evolution and their existing efforts to advance its teaching. We have 7 winners and 2 runners up (listed below):

ACE Teaching Innovation Awards empower scholars to incorporate high-quality cultural evolution course materials into their teaching. This is a great opportunity for those from majority-world countries and ECR academics, but everyone can apply! culturalevolutionsociety.org/grants-and-a...

We are hiring - PDRA position exploring how information access shapes social dynamics in killer whales. Collaboration with @samellisq.bsky.social @drwhale.bsky.social Prof Dan Franks (York) start 1st Nov (or ASAP) end 31st Oct 2028. Apps close on 19th Oct. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOT336/p...

The next Asian Cultural Evolution seminar is happening next Monday!! Come join the talk & discussion if you are interested in philosophy + agent-based modelling!

🚨 Last days to submit! 🚨 Join the Workshop on Cultural Evolution of Planet X at @alife2025.bsky.social (Kyoto, Oct 7). We welcome abstracts on cultural evolution and emergent culture in artificial systems. Work presented elsewhere too! 📅 Deadline: Sept 20 🔗 sites.google.com/view/planetx...

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go! 400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

Abstract submission now open for the next Cultural Evolution Society conference in Rabat, Morocco next May @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social @ces2026.bsky.social

Abstract submission now open for the next Cultural Evolution Society conference in Rabat, Morocco next May @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social @ces2026.bsky.social