New paper with Ángel Jiménez, @keith-jensen.bsky.social, Lei Chang and Hui Jing Lu Limited evidence that reputation-based partner choice facilitates information sharing in humans royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

New paper with Ángel Jiménez, @keith-jensen.bsky.social, Lei Chang and Hui Jing Lu Limited evidence that reputation-based partner choice facilitates information sharing in humans royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

My department has funding for 2-year MByRes studentships (full tuition fees and research allowance) on ecosystem resilience, broadly defined. Apply to do a project with me modelling social-ecological networks. #culturalevolution #socialnetworks ecologyconservation.exeter.ac.uk/masteer-coho...

My department has funding for 2-year MByRes studentships (full tuition fees and research allowance) on ecosystem resilience, broadly defined. Apply to do a project with me modelling social-ecological networks. #culturalevolution #socialnetworks ecologyconservation.exeter.ac.uk/masteer-coho...

New preprint led by @lucasmolleman.bsky.social investigates social information use across the human lifespan. Testing >40,000 participants aged 6-80 in museums in Berlin and Japan. psyarxiv.com/hec96

🚨 ACE Seminar We’re excited to host Dr. Patrick Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social in our upcoming ACE Seminar! 🗓 Tuesday, Jun 16, 2026 🕖 2:00 PM JST (UTC+9) 💻 Online via Zoom 🔗 To receive the Zoom link, please send a blank email to [email protected]

New episode!! 🎙️🎉 A conversation w/ @vivek123.bsky.social about Man the Hunter. The idea that male hunting propelled our evolution is old and contested. Yet it endures, especially in the popular imagination. Is it merely a "paleofantasy," or is there more to it? Listen: disi.org/is-man-the-h...

Our latest episode of Transmissions is out! This one features Prof. Dr. Lucy Aplin, a leading cognitive ecologist from the University of Zurich and Australian National University. This marks our very first episode dedicated entirely to understanding animal culture! youtu.be/M7qCTKRNVuA?...

Here's a proper mathematical model of the interaction between conformity and migration www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... mostly coming to the same conclusions as the simulations I did here journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Great opportunity for anyone wanting to get involved in the direction Cultural Evolution institutions go. You get to work with lovely people and help guide this nascent organization.

Here's @ruthmace.bsky.social giving the inaugural Tinbergen lecture @uniexecec.bsky.social today, asking why there are so many celibate monks in Tibet

Thanks to the organisers of @ces2026.bsky.social : @anthrosarah.bsky.social , @zhgarfield.com , @matcharbonneau.bsky.social and @edseabright.bsky.social plus their student helpers for organising an amazing conference

Rob Boyd reflects on his and Pete Richerson's early work on cultural evolution

It's an all-star cultural evolution / evolutionary psychology / human behavioural ecology panel, with Joe Henrich, Fiona Jordan, @edhagen.net and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder

Supercool work by @sobchuk.bsky.social mapping dynamic networks of books / literature

Or this one. It was a great talk.

Phenomenal plenary at CES 2026 by Nicole Creanza on the links between birdsong and human language

would this one work?

Sadly I couldn't get a photo of @stephenvaisey.com 's earlier plenary, which placed the field of cultural evolution in sociological context, but that was great too

Now it's @michelleakline.bsky.social 's fascinating plenary on cultural evolution and childrearing / childbirth

Our host turns speaker: @matcharbonneau.bsky.social on how open-ended cumulative cultural evolution works

Here's @maximederex.bsky.social on the role of causal reasoning in cumulative cultural evolution

Sergey Gavrilets now on how tightness-looseness changes cooperative dynamics

CES 2026 continues with @twaring.bsky.social talking about food clubs as an example of cultural group selection

🚨 CES Elections 2026–2029 🚨 We’ve got SIX Executive Committee positions open — including President-Elect, Treasurer, Secretary, Executive Ordinary Members (x2), and Student Rep! 🗓 Nominations close: May 31 🗳 Voting: June 15–24 📢 Results announced this summer forms.gle/9yX2SLcf82Vk...

Final keynote of the day by Abdellatif Bencherifa @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

More @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social conference talks! @babeheim.bsky.social on norm psychology, and in particular escalator standing norms in Japan

Egor Lappo telling us about social learning in chess playing (not in cats sadly, despite the photo)

Here is @alexschakowski.bsky.social on social learning strategies in Finnish fishing competitions

Now Tom Morgan on how conformist behaviour emerges from anti-conformist beliefs

In Rabat for the @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social conference. Great start with a fascinating keynote by @helenamiton.bsky.social on constraints on cultural evolution

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