"I did not duplicate data intentionally. Those formulas found their way into my Excel data files by accident too." 🙄

Is the psychology replication crisis (at last) catching up with animal cognition? "Our results indicate low statistical power and inflated effect sizes in both primary studies and meta-analyses." Preprint here: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Understanding this balance may be critical to developing more equitable innovation systems. Increasing population density in metropolitan areas does not automatically boost innovation.

"Simple Neanderthal art wasn’t about lesser minds, it was about social life. Culture and connection shaped art evolution."

Just out - "Art Beyond Cognition: Reframing Neanderthal art through social connectivity and cultural transmission" by Straffon & Tennie

The people who would vote for Farage's ReFuk and support axing the NHS (to fund a tax cut for the extremely wealthy elites) need to know how much health insurance costs. In the UK, a lot of people think health insurance is a £50 a month premium to Bupa. No grasp on reality...

April 5, 1925: Wolfgang Köhler, an eminent German psychology professor, cancels a planned lecture in North Carolina about the language and habits of chimpanzees. Although his studies have nothing to do with evolution the suggestion of a human-ape link is highly sensitive.

Monty Python understood p-hacking

🐦 Exciting news! Our new paper is out in PLOS Biology: “A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia.” Led by the #ManyBirds Project - 129 researchers, 82 institutions, 24 countries 🌍 🔗 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... @themanybirds.bsky.social

Wanted to make a joke that the 99.7 percent accuracy might include your main take-home message being reversed by AI-insertion of the word "not". But the real joke in all this is much better even.

📢🚀 Are you an early-career researcher working on anything related to culture, behaviour or learning? 🧠🌍 Join ESLR, an interdisciplinary research community! We have a NEW website and our membership is now FREE. 👉 Sign up here to get updates and become a member: www.eslrsociety.com/membership

Watched it a few years ago. Still recovering.

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...

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