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...

This was a fun paper on the history of science. Despite all the pressures to standardize measurement, that good old informal unit of measure – the "drop" – persists in both medicine and chemistry. 💧 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I made a tiny tool for quickly sharing small datasets (< ~1000 rows) without uploading any data to a server. 🔗 ziptbl.com It compresses the data into the link itself, so there’s no account, hosting, or storage layer involved. Here's Florence Nightingale's famous 📊 data: ziptbl.com#d=eNpdlE-LGz...

Did you know that the spinning top is one of the most common forms of traditional play worldwide? Our research found tops to be nearly universal across human cultures. Wherever you come from, your ancestors probably spun tops. New preprint: Top of the World osf.io/preprints/so... Thread:

Baumard and André (B&A) responded to the (many) comments that their original piece (www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...). Their response is linked in Alberto's post. I just got a pdf copy and will read it now; this will be a thread with my first thoughts...

1/6 Excited to share the call for posters & registration for the 2nd XSCAPE Workshop: "Varieties of Externalism" ! 📅 Friday, April 10th, 2026 — Gallery Room, Bramber House, University of Sussex Registration is free but places are limited. 🧵

OK, it finally happened! My new article, "Gradience as a cognitive principle for evaluating numerical notations", is now out today in @pnas.org. By focusing on numerals' use for communication instead of arithmetic, we have a new tool to assess their efficiency. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Apply at this link: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

A much-needed critique of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) as applied to human evolution, by @evoroseman.bsky.social and Ben Auerbach (2026). Evolving a Field: Can Evolutionary Theory Provide What the Study of Human Evolution Requires? 🧪 #BioAnth onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

1/ New paper from @brunelpsy.bsky.social CCE in Evolution & Human Behavior looks at secularisation in Mauritius 🇲🇺 Nachita Rosun, @matthewmgervais.bsky.social and @aiyanakoka.bsky.social have been testing big theories outside the usual Western settings 🌏 🔗 👇

Many thanks also to @elena-moos.bsky.social, who just joined bsky. Elena was the master knapper in the new study who made the application of the new method possible. Follow Elena, and I am sure you'll see amazing stone tools (and even dice!) made by her.

Demographic shifts, inter-group contact and environmental conditions drive language extinction and diversification. #linguistics

Delighted that @conradhackett.bsky.social will be visiting Brunel to give us a talk on “Is the world becoming more religious or less religious?”, this Thursday 29 January. All welcome, talk will be live-streamed 😊

Post 1/13 📢🧵 Call for activities proposals ! You are invited to submit proposals for three activities to be held during the upcoming CES2026 conference:

Looking for something new to integrate into an #evolution or #microbiology course? Useful for lectures, labs, homework? Have a look at our STEPS program, which simulates bacterial evolution, including the #LTEE. Easy web-based interface & lab manual w/ exercises to help develop students' intuition.

Who here nostalgic for Reader?

Dusted off the ol' blog after years of heavy disuse because I'm h*ckin' excited to tell y'all about some of the exciting things we're trying in our stats/methods/skills curriculum at Brunel! Read! Share! Tell us what you think! #psychscisky 🧪 #philsci #methodology #teaching

We are pleased to announce that the first LEVANTE data release is now publicly available! To access and download the pilot data, follow instructions on researcher.levante-network.org/data. This data release accompanies the preprint linked in the thread.

In our new preprint, @chrisvonrueden.bsky.social and I argue that "equality" is a red herring. To understand hunter-gatherer political organization, we must focus on process, not outcome. Got something to contribute? BBS is accepting commentary proposals! resolve.cambridge.org/core/journal...

1. My new preprint has its own bluesky account. Why? The problems facing social media & scientific publishing are similar: both are dominated by powerful oligopolies. The @atproto.com tech underlying bluesky that aims to solve the social media prob might also help solve the scientific pub prob 🧪 🧵

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

New article in Hunter Gatherer Research! Foraging societies practice consensus-based politics. We conduct a xc review and argue that it helps to boost collective intelligence. Consensus, cooperation and collective intelligence in foraging societies liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/...

Happy new year! I wanted to share my new Python package called chatter that streamlines the process of applying AI/ML models to animal communication 🦜🦇🐋🐵👨‍🌾 masonyoungblood.github.io/chatter/

"Why agent-based modeling could happen in economics. Eventually." Good piece by @mikemakowsky.bsky.social economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/12/29/p... I'd argue that the "new era of theory" is already underway, though, led not by economists, but by comp social sci/cultural evolution folks.

My co-authors and I are happy to present our framework "Collective Intelligence as Collective Information Processing (CIP)." Here we propose decomposing different information processing mechanisms to unify disparate phenomena traditionally classified as "collective intelligence."

Goal selection through the lens of subjective functions: arxiv.org/abs/2512.15948 I welcome any feedback on these preliminary ideas.

🎉🍾 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

1/ In a recent @britishacademy.bsky.social video @rebeccasear.bsky.social from @brunelpsy.bsky.social takes a clear-eyed look at the 21st‑century rise of eugenics - an ideology that should have been left behind, yet is now re‑emerging in a number of troubling ways ⚠️🧬 🧪 Watch the full talk here 🎥👇

This week, we talk to @hugoreasoning.bsky.social about all things "epistemic". Are we gullible and prone to misinformation? Are we vigilant in favor of our interests? Enjoy the wide-ranging conversation! www.podbean.com/eas/pb-wphps... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... youtu.be/nf42LNg6y-A

𝗕𝗲𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀: 𝗧𝗼𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗮𝗱𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗯𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘅𝗶𝘁𝘆 Discusses how more standard network models miss key points of brain complexity. And some more radical points at the end. Wrote paper having in mind younger researchers more open to new ideas :-) #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1016/j.pl...

Oleg Sobchuk @sobchuk.bsky.social @cudanlab.bsky.social "Evolution of Literature and the Arts." www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLnZ...

This will be screened, along with a Q and A with the director and Hrdy herself, at the 2026 HBES meeting at UM6P in Rabat! Deadline for applying: January 15th @hbes2026.bsky.social

God bless Szamado. He's completely correct and has been soldiering away at this for years - but the complexity of the topic is just slightly too high to outcompete Zahavi's (misleading) golf analogy. academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

In a new Review for @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social -- and my first first-authored paper! -- @manvir.bsky.social and I argue that experience shapes the emergence and evolution of seemingly extraordinary beliefs. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

On a roll with papers this week. PNAS paper with @michealdebarra.bsky.social giving some evidence to the idea that people turn to the supernatural because of uncertainty about causal processes. BONUS of curing whooping cough with donkeys and warts with snails 🐌

📣 Very happy to announce a new BBS target article with Nick Chater in which we propose a new theory of cultural evolution, highlighting the importance of bottom-up social interaction in explaining the emergence of cultural complexity 🧵 1/8 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

1/ 🎙️ New paper by Dr Aiyana Willard argues it’s time to retire HADD = “we’re hardwired to see agents EVERYWHERE” and replace it with something that *actually* fits the evidence 🪦➡️📚 @brunelpsy.bsky.social 🔗 Read it 👇

🧵 1/ Excited to share this work from CCEs Francisco Gómez Jiménez, whose research explores gender diversity across cultures 🌍 Francisco introduces the muxes of the Istmo Zapotec community in Oaxaca, Mexico - a remarkable example of longstanding, culturally grounded gender diversity 🏳️‍🌈 🎥👇

Wow! I have to say that this is where the @elife.bsky.social model really shines. Super interesting paper that makes a very strong claim. Reviewers feel interpretation goes beyond what the results show. Paper published with both sides. We all benefit much more than just a publish or reject. Bravo!

Only 4 days left!

The deadline has been extended - there is still time to get your abstracts in to join us in Morocco!

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

🚨Only 2 days left to apply

🎉 New preprint: Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information search If someone knows that Venus is the only planet in the Solar System that rotates clockwise, will they also know what Earth’s only natural satellite is? What about which planets have no moons at all?

How “intelligent” is a slime mold? When it solves mazes, it might not be thinking:it’s obeying physics. Our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social shows how it follows a least action principle,letting physics do the job arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08531 @drmichaellevin.bsky.social @docteur-drey.bsky.social

Oops…“Principal components (PC) axes identified by a PCA are not necessarily the most informative biologically. Nevertheless, paleoanthropologists frequently interpret proximity in PC space as indicative of morphological and thus evolutionary affinity or relatedness” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 New paper on ArXiv: “Uncertainty quantification and posterior sampling for network reconstruction” TL;DR; We present an efficient method to sample the entire ensemble of possible network reconstructions that are compatible with an indirect observation, e.g. a dynamics. Short thread: 1/N

Is #innovation born or made? Why do some places keep innovating while others fall behind? Is innovation the product of cities—or of deeper laws? Our new paper in npj Complexity explores these questions through the lens of a century of US patent data.🧵👇 nature.com/articles/s44...

Spoiler alert: it's better to have a good theoretical understanding and design appropriate statistical models than it is to throw zillions of superficially "okay, fine" models at a poorly specified (and often deliberately vague) target. A bit of good thinking >>> lots of poor thinking. Shocking!

Paper in Language and Cognition with @marktorrance.bsky.social and @seriousstats.bsky.social We show that semantic contrast shapes timing of pre-planning in speech and writing. doi.org/10.1017/lang... If you're into how context shapes how we plan language, check it out!