You were not kidding when you said it's like doorstopper size, @jeremykendal.bsky.social :-)

📃 Check out the paper in BioScience: "Cultural inheritance is driving a transition in human evolution" academic.oup.com/bioscience/a... But, wait, is this bullshit?

From up the hill in Tübingen. Congrats!

Absolutely astounded that the UCU and Unison branches at Kent and Greenwich were not consulted, and that staff only found out about the merger this morning via BBC news and Kent Online. Solidarity to all colleagues.

Still waiting for your recommendations! In the meantime, given the need to understand healthcare news, I recommend following @trishgreenhalgh.bsky.social @wiringthebrain.bsky.social @carlbergstrom.com

Journal publishers *are* bundling your papers up in "data licensing agreements" for big tech companies to use for AI model training. Our publisher, T&F, got £75m from Microsoft for that last year alone.

This is also why, whenever I eventually manage to get a recipe I like, I hold on to it for dear life (and so I save the actual recipe part in my phone's telephone book - as if it were a person)

It's been a great week for weird biology: ants defying the species concept, fluorescing birds of paradise and now forehead teeth in ratfish

Supraindividual know-how is (pretty much) everywhere.

2025. The Phoneme as a Cognitive Tool. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Physical copies of this 71-chapter tome now exist. Do encourage your library to buy a copy…also doubles as excellent door stop! Co-edited with Jamie Tehrani and @rachkendal.bsky.social. @oxunipress.bsky.social @durhamanthropology.bsky.social

'we find that, based on current evidence pertaining to these costs, the case for inferring know-how copying abilities in Oldowan or even Early Acheulean stone toolmakers is weak..this points to a later date for the establishment of this crucial human skill' link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Just in: insect application to wounds happens also in East African chimpanzees: share.google/WwKqxSy4t0e2...

🔔 New paper out on Social evaluation of skill and competence in primates @mariehirel.bsky.social, @williamohearn.bsky.social and @julxf.bsky.social made this happen www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Exciting workshops coming up @ruhr-uni-bochum.de. Check out CfP & join us! Part of research-oriented seminars we are teaching on work by @heddamorch.bsky.social and @susanamonso.com. @timcrane.bsky.social @ctennie.bsky.social @richardmoore.bsky.social @marriah.bsky.social @lukeroelofs.bsky.social

Trying to put out old projects this summer. Here is one: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... With many thanks to Annette Killian, who has sadly passed away - and with many thanks to Alenka Hribar who tirelessly ran this study.

Because of this, Gelman and King (2025) point out that only a small fraction of articles would need to be given post-publication peer review in order to assess an outsized chunk of claims by citations count.

9.2% of all citations go to just 0.32% of psychology articles. To have the most impact, post-publication peer-review should focus on these influential articles with ≥30 citations per year. @error.reviews will systemically sample from such articles. Blog post: mmmdata.io/posts/2025/0...

The grave risks for science as the whole of leaving fundamental scientific infrastructure in the hands of for-profit capitalist company. Essential scholarly services should be internationally curated by value-based societies/orders/colleges. 🧪

Lauren Reed is now on Bsky - (welcome!) - I recommend following her for anyone interested in language evolution and home signing: @laurenwreed.bsky.social

A whole lot of responses were made, it seems: www.sciencedirect.com/journal/evol...

🪨 🛠️ news: "we propose that distinctive early Acheulean artifact forms may have arisen as *secondary accommodations* to the primary goal of increasing tool size" New empirical paper by Stout et al. argues heavily against culturally transmitted early Acheulean forms. doi.org/10.1007/s108...

Hi @goatswhostare.bsky.social - as one who is involved in one of the manyX projects: Is there discussion/practice among manyX projects to have studies pre-registered & advertised as open-access preprints, to ask for wide peer-review of the methods/interpretation strategy prior to running a study?

haha. This paper has been ignored for 35 years. Glad if its moment has come at last.

Come and work with me, ye scribblers, ye wretched and ne’er do wells, come one come all hacks and presswomen. Job specifics: see ad. Attitude toward pirate language: yaarrrrs please. Tricorn purchase: encouraged but not required.

Margaret Farrell on "palaeoanthropomorphism" (sensu Kortlandt 1986 JHE) in current inferences about human evolution. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Bielefeld University seeks a postdoc for a 6-year scientific assistant position in Animal Behaviour, starting March 2026. Apply by Sept 10, 2025. More info: www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/biologie/forschung/arbeitsgruppen/behaviour #job

Book reviews assigned to an issue are always free to read for six months at Philosophical Psychology. Here Andra Meneganzin reviews Kim Sterelny's book The Pleistocene Social Contract doi.org/10.1080/0951... #FreeAccess #philsky

A more accurate headline would be "... but find it difficult to get them published". I try to publish every null result that I am sure is robust (e.g., not due to me making a stupid mistake in the method) and it is always harder than with positive results.

Aaaaand AI generated animal cognition videos are now here, too.

Congrats Elisa and Sofia on the first (of many) papers that derived from their @einsteinberlin.bsky.social price-winning project (paper available here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...)

Needless to say, the Peer Community In outperforms all of the major publishers on this criterion, despite a budget many orders of magnitude smaller - again illustrating that the big money we pay for publishing is not used for the good of science. (5/5) @peercommunityin.bsky.social

Turns out the most fantastical aspect of the new Superman movie is there being *only one* insanely wealthy tech guy bent on destroying society for his own personal gain.

For a long time we been wondering how the human “WEIRD” syndrome also is present in comparative cognitive research. In our new Paper led by @elisa_bandini we report on the existing biases in chimpanzee research 🚨👇🏼 @Einstein_Berlin

Into the afternoon now, Elisabeth Bik makes case that peer review cannot really detect fraud, because researchers don't know how to recognize it. Need professional fraud detectors. Elsevier rep in morning said they see more and more fraudulent submissions. Becoming a stress on system.

Important new work (from Elisa Bandini, @ctennie.bsky.social, @sofiaforss.bsky.social et al.) addressing an elephant in the room - how weird are our weirdest apes, and how is that skewing research efforts? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Costs of Early Stone Toolmaking cannot Establish the Presence of Know-how Copying link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I love Registered Reports because it's no fun wrestling with reviewers about design decisions that we can do nothing about after data collection. But still, SO few journals in my research area accept them. So I just fired off a load of this email. Here if you want to do the same: osf.io/n6bx9

So what can we do in response? A key problem: The transformation from long- to short-term funding leads researchers to flit from topic to topic, and move across fields chasing 'sexy' stories. Science is done better when you leave someone to geek out on a single topic for their whole career. 5/n

Today, I am taking the train to Bath to join some very old friends in visiting a very much missed one. I say ‘the’ train, but for a journey that is basically Hertford>London>Bath, here are my tickets. Hard to think of a better illustration of how f*cked the railways are. 🤪

A new proposal by Baumard and André nicely frames human culture ecologically - but risks denying that important things must be transmitted in any ecology. As I argue, such a view would not see the trees for the forest. Open-access link (valid till Sept/25): authors.elsevier.com/a/1lNUM3tz49...

Can we use the costs of stone tools as a 'smoking gun' to infer that special ways of social learning existed millions of years ago in our lineage? See this thread.

Since no one is getting paid anyways, the experience for editors, reviewers, and authors would be identical. But instead of going to a journal, the preprint would earn a "passed peer review" stamp and authors would put the paper in their publications list as, e.g., "ArXiv Peer Reviewed".

well done Lior. There seems a subset of scientists who don’t understand probability and are convinced that statisticians are just pedantic killjoys determined to take their significant results away from them.

Join our @erc.europa.eu funded lab @ki.se! We're hiring a postdoc to explore how humans learn from each other — with fMRI, modeling, & behavioral experiments. 🧠👫 A chance to lead cutting-edge work in social neuro & computational psychology. Apply: shorturl.at/GJQuW

The new edition of 'Sense & Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour', co-authored with @kevinlala.bsky.social , is available! Get 30% off (promotion code ASPROMP8): global.oup.com/academic/pro... Ebook is available on Kindle. Thank you to Prof. Clark Barrett for the endorsement! 🧪

Interested in the evolution of human language and in understanding the pressures that shape languages today? Come do a PhD with me! Fully funded PhD position available in my group @mpi-nl.bsky.social, application deadline June 2nd: www.mpi.nl/career-educa...

Big shoutout to @pci-regreports.bsky.social for their fantastic work offering Registered Reports across all disciplines! 🌟 #Archaeology researchers, if you're curious about Registered Reports and their benefits for our field, check this out: youtu.be/XIOy1zl35BQ?... 🏺🧪

Delighted to announce the publication of a collaborative effort, co-led by @limorraviv.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social, showcasing the ways in which researchers have made language evolution an empirical issue: A handbook of experimental approaches to the fascinating problem of language evolution 🧪