If you’re wondering why your friends in academia are a little on edge right now, it’s because an eighteen-year-old who hasn’t done the reading, doesn’t look at the assignment, and has does no critical thinking skills more complex than “because I think it’s in the Bible” can literally end your career

There’s nothing wrong with common sense until you dig a little and learn that common sense is wrong. Thanks @profgalloway.com for providing a great example of common sense that I’ve gotten a kick out of doubting. Thanks @prosocialworld.bsky.social for hosting. www.prosocial.world/posts/whats-...

This smells distinctly like collider bias and/or selection bias and/or regression to the mean... You simply can't select teen prodigies, and world class athletes rom databases, and go run regressions without serious consideration of the selection process!

14 two-year postdocs for academics of any nationality who cannot continue their research due to US politics. Do share if you know of such.

A recent study purports to have found that multilingualism protects against accelerated ageing. I've taken a closer look at it, and it doesn't look good. New blog post: "Does multilingualism really protect against accelerated ageing? Some critical comments" janhove.github.io/posts/2025-1...

You remember that Nature Aging paper about how multilingualism protects against accelerated aging? Well…

Noise pollution from electric passenger rail harms babies' health. "I estimate that the annual cost of noise pollution due to harms to health at birth is $9.8 billion." Black, Hispanic, and the poorest Americans disproportionately bear these costs. This is such a cool paper!

Hi everyone! I'm co-organizing this retreat/workshop June 15-19 for those looking to get started in mathematical/computational modeling of biological processes. Location is a beautiful farm in NC. Please share with students and others who want to build modeling skills. Interdisciplinarity welcome!

Depressing late Friday holiday news dump: Northwestern agrees to pay $75 million to the federal government. The faculty vote against doing this, @heidikitrosser.bsky.social points out, was 595-4. That's the kind of margin where going the other way reflects a major failure of university governance.

All NSF SBE DDRIG solicitations have been archived and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Grants currently submitted will be processed, but as always, chances of funding remain very low. This means anyone aiming for the upcoming deadline will not be able to submit. 1/3

The NSF Bio Anthro Program DDRIG, Cultural Anthrpology DDRIG, and Archaeology DDRIG have all been archived (as of yesterday afternoon). Please speak with your grad students and plan accordingly. To say I am angry and depressed about this is an understatement.

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features." There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

Somehow I spoke to more anthropologists for my silly little podcast than Yuval Harari did for his bestselling book

Episode 46: Sapiens It's an ambitious goal to write the entire history of humanity in just 400 pages. It's even more ambitious to do it without reading any research.

Now this is how you detect whether an election was stolen. Humans choose rounder numbers. by @TheEconomist

In between things I've been checking in on the emails that mention "university" and uhh did we all know about this connection?

Look I’m willing to say it: maybe James Watson got two things right

A little cloudy, but was so worth the 20 minute walk to the lake to see the northern lights over Chicago

Billions of regressions ≠ robustness. My new PNAS Letter shows how unjustified models can drown out justified ones — and why thoughtful model selection matters👇 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

When there is a random way to do something, there is a less random way that is better but requires more thought. In this case, regression models that make no sense don't belong in a multiverse analysis. An inferential regression without a causal justification is like an opinion without reasons.

We're excited to share the final version of our paper, where we demonstrate how confounding remains a thorny problem for claims about causal genetic influences on human behavioral and socioeconomic outcomes. (w/ @jedidiahcarlson.com @oliviarxiv.bsky.social Ruth Shaw @arbelharpak.bsky.social) 🧵👇

Ouch

UGA is hiring a biological anthropologist. Come work with me! www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/457...

What a hell of a story. This reporter moved mountains in this one. 70+ sources, threats from officials, and more but he just kept on it

My wife & I went through the appeal & external review process—on our own, without support of a healthcare provider’s insurance staff or a lawyer—and won coverage for her previously denied surgeries. We learned 2 things: 1) insurance companies are sloppy & 2) they assume you are too dumb to notice.

honestly the only piece worth reading on the platner situation. @tressiemcphd.bsky.social is absolutely cooking here. (gift link)

🚨Social scientists! @psuanthro.bsky.social & @ssripennstate.bsky.social are hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor exploring how social & ecological environments shape reproduction, growth, &/or development. Review starts soon! Please share widely! psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic...

We wrote an article explaining why you shouldn't put several variables into a regression model and report which are statistically significant - even as exploratory research. bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/.... How did we do?

And you can pray em-dashes from my cold dead hands, too

Excited to finally have this article out with @robingnelson.blacksky.app. Although we have nominally centered populations as our unit of evolutionary analysis in biological anthropology, we have no coherent understanding of what a population is. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

One day you're grad school roommates in the dankest apt in Ann Arbor; 20 years later you write a paper together. To friendship and scholarship - On populations & our poor operationalization of the concept w/ @apv2600.bsky.social onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/doi/10.1002/...

🚨 The Economist has been telling you for years that polygamy causes civil war by locking men out of marriage. A new article with @rebeccasear.bsky.social and @anthrolog.bsky.social explains that the demography of marriage markets doesn't actually work that way. 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

An ambitious state government would fund its university system *better* right now and scoop up the talent that places like Harvard are going to be shutting out over the next few years....

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs - Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75% - Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60% - Social Sciences by 50–70% - History by 60% - Biology by 75% - The German department will lose all PhD seats - Sociology from six PhD students to zero

The recording is now available so that you can confirm that I indeed have a German accent and color-match my outfits with my Zoom background. youtu.be/YL0co26ng-g?...

#NoKings Chicago

My water bottle leaked on my laptop and fried it. Of course it‘s on the day I have an article deadline and week I’m trying to submit job applications. 🙃 (My data is backed up and my insurance covers water damage…I can write from my iPad and my janky Bluetooth keyboard for now)

I'm starting to explore {simDAG}, a nifty #rstats package that has a nice API for specifying DAGs and then simulating data from them: robindenz1.github.io/simDAG/

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

I have to fan-girl for a minute here. My friend @rosvall-lab.bsky.social built an app to gather data on bird behavior during the 2024 solar eclipse. 10,000+ citizen scientists contributed (including my kids), and the resulting paper was published in Science today! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This moment from our latest episode with science writer @edyong209.bsky.social is 🔥 We asked Ed — how do we talk up the benefits of science in the face of government cuts? He told us that's the wrong approach. 🧪 Listen wherever, or watch on Spotify 👇 open.spotify.com/episode/7Evh...

Terrible news. Thinking of my collaborators in Cebu...

Six people were killed in a strong earthquake in the Philippines on Tuesday night, according to officials and news reports. The 6.9-magnitude earthquake shook the province of Cebu, home to 3.2 million people, just before 10 p.m. local time.

This covers some important sources of bias that arise from naive control strategies. Of value even if you don't care about the life-satisfaction ~ age association.

at the passport office and there is no way I’m getting out of here in the next three hours 🙃

Excited to be reading this great new book from @mgurven.bsky.social! Already loving the first chapter — so helpful to have a book like this on the evolutionary anthropology and demography of aging as I’m writing up my dissertation

"Rather than offering a prescriptive checklist, we frame this toolkit as an opening: a step toward anthropological causal inference that integrates transparency, theoretical & methodological coherence, & the epistemological commitments of the biocultural synthesis in human biology & anthropology"

Vaccines cause adults Tylenol causes pain relief Neurodiversity is good

This ought to be engraved somewhere.