I've been thinking a lot about the foundations of cultural evolutionary theory. While there's been a lot of work on transmission mechanisms, there has been far less work on cultural *selection*. Here's a new working paper presenting a taxonomy of cultural selection processes. osf.io/preprints/so...

Some evidence that humans have adaptations (immune & wound-healing responses) to better survive burn injuries than other primates onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... Something to add to our paragraph on 'Fire-shaped humans' academic.oup.com/bioscience/a... 🧪🌍🔥🏺 #ecoevo #evolution #Anthropology

Do plants develop cancer? Since trees live long and have many cells, shuld we expect to see "tumoral forests" as the on in the image (my drawing)? Spoiler: negative answers to both questions (with exceptions). Understanding why is a fascinating story @guimaguade.bsky.social

Finally! Here is our perspective on why cooperation maximizes diversity and how it promotes additional coexistence mechanisms that do not occur under competition journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1... This is a hard topic with strong opinions... Thanks @asn-amnat.bsky.social for publishing it! 🧵👇

Scandinavian Mesolithic hunter-gatherers abstractly engraved bones & other materials. What can we learn from their visual complexity? New paper w @ll-herskind.bsky.social , @helenamiton.bsky.social & @felixthehauskat.bsky.social . (doi.org/10.1016/j.ja...). 1/

Oh gosh. Remember the excitement about frontier models understanding medical images and acing tests? "In the most extreme case, our model achieved the top rank on a standard chest X-ray question-answering benchmark without access to any images." Fei-Fei Li is an author. arxiv.org/abs/2603.21687

What if intelligence comes from interaction rather than reasoning? In his early, provocative 1990 paper, Rodney Brooks argued that intelligence emerges from agents embedded in the world, tightly coupling perception and action instead of relying on abstract symbols. www2.cs.sfu.ca/~vaughan/tea...

Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.

fresh off the press from yours truly: oecs.mit.edu/pub/b61joemo... I offer an overview of algorithmic bias. I trace its historical roots, examine canonical scholarship and notable real-world incidents, and explore how algorithmic bias emerged as a field of study 1/

How are the fluctuations in electric field organized across the whole brain? We analyzed the 3.4 M samples from the international brain lab using a combination of deep learning and graph theory. We found a surprising structure made of communities and landmarks. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

This is an awesome discovery: A single-celled organism with no brain called Stentor seems capable of Pavlovian learning. Yes, it can actually learn to associate two things despite having no neurons. My latest for @newscientist.com. 🧪 #science #memory #learning www.newscientist.com/article/2519...

Thank you @arvidagren.bsky.social - I'm really looking forward to delving into this.

It’s clear to me that the argument is actually about what you think the point of doing research is. If it’s papers, AI will be faster. But I don’t think it’s papers I think it’s the process and I want to do that process

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

🔺 New preprint 🔺 Why does poverty increase time discounting? With W. Frankenhuis and @danielnettle.bsky.social, we argue that current models do not account for discounting in *persistent* poverty, and show that a desperation threshold can! A quick 🧵

𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗺𝗮-𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗯𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 Giovanni Pezzulo et al introduce hierarchical model of goal attainment in PFC. Looks very impressive. #neuroskyence arxiv.org/abs/2601.189...

I am assembling resources for @aial.ie to mitigate/reduce risks (due to our research) from potential: 1)retaliation, defamation lawsuit etc for work on politically charged topics 2)emotional harm from dealing with sensitive issues (CSAM, hate, etc) know of any helpful resources? pls share/repost

According to this, just over a third of people (36%) think AI understands their emotions or is conscious. 58% trust AI chatbots to act in their best interests more than they trust governments to do so.

Writing is thinking "On the value of human-generated scientific writing in the age of large-language models." www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Psychophysics is a human-facing science with interventions arguably more robust than medicine.

Paper accepted! 😊 "Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is Not Deterministic" will appear in Synthese. Final version available here: arxiv.org/abs/2503.19672 - with Henry Potter and George Ellis

3/3 The key novelty is showing that genome instability is both relieved by sleep and sufficient to induce sleep in cnidarians, this implies that DNA damage was an ancestral driver of sleep evolution, long before brains or complex cognition existed.

2/3 It is important to remember that we already knew that jellyfish sleep, and that their metabolism is affected by sleep (or lack thereof) in a similar way to ours. The breakthrough in this study is that they have studied how DNA damage leads to sleep (paper, 2020) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1/3 Jellyfish and anemones also sleep, despite not having a brain Not only do they sleep, but their behavior is affected if they lack sleep; they become clumsier and need to catch up on lost sleep. Interestingly, they sleep 8 hours a day, just like us. (paper) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy just published a revised entry on Animal Consciousness! By Michael Trestman, Jonathan Birch, Colin Allen @wileyprof.bsky.social @birchlse.bsky.social plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons...

Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...

Crowdsourcing: Scales for degrees of evidence I'm looking for simple scales (eg 0-5) that capture degreees of evidence for (scientific) claims. A bit along the lines of this one proposed by @shansiddiqi.bsky.social et al but perhaps a bit more generic. Know any? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is how the Andromeda galaxy would appear at night if it were not obscured by interstellar dust. It’s hard not to wonder how this might have shaped human history: the realization that we live in one galaxy among many could have emerged millennia earlier, changing everything @manlius.bsky.social

The surge of AI slop, deceptive synthetic videos & images flooding our feeds, is driven in large part by Agentic AI Accounts (AAAs). aiforensics.org/work/agentic... Key findings: -Over 43,000 mostly AI-made posts generated 4.5 billion views -More than 65% of accounts were created in early 2025 1/

🚨 What if evolution is the ”law”… and networks are the machines that do the work? In this paper (just published) I try to formalize how living systems are non-equilibrium, information-processing, adaptive matter. With a great biological flavor! 🧪🌐🌍🧬🦠 👉 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... 🧵 1/

We’ve seen research showing LLM chatbots can reduce belief in conspiracy theories in experimental settings: scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=e... But in the wild, it seems that these tools likely contribute to strengthening belief in conspiracy theories for many.

🚨Out in PNAS🚨 Examining news on 7 platforms: 1)Right-leaning platforms=lower quality news 2)Echo-platforms: Right-leaning news gets more engagement on right-leaning platforms, vice-versa for left-leaning 3)Low-quality news gets more engagement EVERYWHERE - even BlueSky! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Loved this paper by @kristinandrews.bsky.social and Noam Miller. A very convincing argument for the function of consciousness.

Postdoc position in individual-level incentives, social learning, and payoff-biased imitation shape group-level accuracy in complex prediction and decision-making tasks in Konstanz files.newsletter2go.com/l3slzozn/s_i...

New preprint 🌟 Psychology is core to cognitive science, and so it is vital we preserve it from harmful frames. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I use our psych and computer science expertise to analyse and craft: Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf... 🧵 1/

New Phil Trans B issue on the ‘Evolutionary functions of consciousness’ royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

The intelligence of slime mold is that of its materials All of Physarum's intelligent behaviors can be explained by physics, as in non-living materials (e.g., water following the path of least resistance), and do not require a representation of the problem. (preprint) arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08531

1/🧵 Out today in @frontiersin.bsky.social : “Consciousness science: where are we, where are we going, and what if we get there?” By @axc.bsky.social @liadmudrik.bsky.social, & me (a CIFAR & @erc.europa.eu production 🧠). www.frontiersin.org/journals/sci...

Beliefs about one's own beliefs in chimpanzees. Five experiments have demonstrated that chimpanzees evaluate their beliefs based on evidence and the source of that evidence (by epistemic defeat). Language is not needed for any of this. (paper) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Does biology play dice? by @elisecutts.bsky.social Some thoughts on nature, nurture, and chance in development www.reviewertoo.com/does-biology... Yes it sure does, is the answer! 🎲🎲👋

Ada Lovelace, first AI denigrator

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... Apply by Nov 12! Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

Excellent and insightful critique of the recent "Definition of AGI" paper, from @philipcball.bsky.social philipball86.substack.com/p/can-we-fin...

I said it before and I'll say it again: Cognition is rhythmic Contents of visual predictions oscillate at alpha frequencies www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... #neuroscience

Good news: carbon intensity has declined Bad news: carbon emissions increased, due to the rapid rise in world GDP Also bad news: the chance of staying below 2°C remained low, at 17% Better news: chance of going above 3°C has gone down substantially, from 26% to 9%

1/5 Birds around the world use the same alarm call to warn of the presence of brood parasites. They studied 21 species from nine families that were separated by 50 million years of evolution. Perhaps the most interesting finding: the alarm call is learned. (paper) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/4 Psilocybin has evolved twice in fungi The process by which it occurs in the genus Psilocybe is completely different from that in Inocybe. The most interesting thing is that both genera have very different ecological niches. (paper) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

How do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone? Our new preprint, led by @anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837