Why do social norms work differently when we interact with AI? In a new paper (N = 1,108), we found that people are less sensitive to prosocial norms when interacting with AI because they are less accurate at predicting AI behavior. Read the full working paper: osf.io/8fhwg/

Did the evolution of consciousness begin with smell? I have a piece arguing it might well have done (in response to @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's recent vision-centric picture). Free to read here: drive.google.com/file/d/1ZhrI...

The uncritical adoption of AI in science is alarming — we urgently need guard rails. Two years ago, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I made some predictions about how AI would impact scientific research. Here we take stock of what we got right and what we missed. 2/4

Great essay by @philipcball.bsky.social looking at the messy, complex *deeply physical* nature of the genome and the processes of gene regulation... 1/n

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Such an excellent explanation

Precise genome editing of human embryos triggers praise and alarm www.nature.com/articles/d41... ... I have some thoughts...

How do social networks become adaptive? From self-organisation and phase transitions to cultural learning, social networks are shaped by feedback between individual interactions and collective dynamics. Check my new @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social paper www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Can we engineer ecosystems before they collapse? In our new perspective on "emergent bioengineering" we argue that the key challenge is not simply controlling living systems, but designing interventions that can adapt and sustain functional ecological networks. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Applications are now open for our 2026 CIFAR Brain, Mind, and Consciousness Winter School, to be held in Nairobi, Kenya 🇰🇪. Attendance is competitive & fully funded thx to generous support from @templetonworld.bsky.social. Apply by June 10: cifar.ca/next-generat...

@fluketc.bsky.social and @dudman.bsky.social have hit it out the park again. In my (perhaps biased) opinion this - along with their previous papers - is field-defining work. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Today in research that is cooler than mine

Now out in Nature Neuroscience: "Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand". www.nature.com/articles/s41... Our eyes don't linger because recognition is hard; they linger to remember. Let me take you on a quick tour. 🧵

🔥 Individual or system change?🔥 This debate has been at the center of much of my social media engagement for years (causing a fair bit of frustration). Yet I have never published research directly addressing it. Until now. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In a Nature study, aging mice showed higher accumulation of medium-chain fatty acid-releasing gut bacteria. Fatty acids bind to GPR84 receptor on immune cells, suppressing vagus nerve activity. The result: hippocampal dysfunction & impaired memory, revealing age-associated gut-immune-brain link. 🧠🧪

✨New paper out @nature.com ✨ For 8 weeks around the 2024 US election, we randomly assigned 2,000 people to use social media algos we built ourselves. Do engagement-based algorithms amplify intergroup, moral & emotional (IME) content—and does that distort how we see political norms? 🧵🔗 👇

Semantic knowledge is key for human innovation and cultural evolution! Our paper (thread in repost), led by fantastic @anilyaman.bsky.social & rising star @ts-brain.bsky.social is out in @pnas.org! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... I will present this work at APS Barcelona (29/5), happy to chat!

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞, 𝐂𝐡𝐨𝐢𝐜𝐞, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐥: 𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐢𝐧 𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐞 link.springer.com/article/10.1... - really delighted that this paper with Henry Potter is now published in Synthese! 😀

𝗦𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 I've shared book suggestions on the brain, conceptual foundations of biology, and much more. Check out the collection from past years. (interface not perfect at this point). sparkling-trifle-93b8c9.netlify.app

Some incredibly exciting news that still feels a bit surreal: I am starting my research group @mpicybernetics.bsky.social! The best part? We are hiring at all levels! Curious about the science we plan to tackle, read along :) #NeuroSky

It is publication day for The Organism-Environment Pairing (@mitpress.bsky.social)! This 📗 has been deeply formative for me as a scholar, and it owes so much to so many wonderful people. I truly hope it finds many readers! mitpress.mit.edu/978026205282... #booksky #philsci #histsci #philsky #evosky

“Long After Us: Voyager I” is a powerful reminder that humanity once built something not for profit, war, or conquest but for wonder. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is now the most distant human-made object ever created,carrying our fragile voice into the cosmic dark. www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh7w...

When AI hits the scientific incentives fan, more discipline-defying research is not what you get. At least not according to this study of 40 million + papers. It found that researchers who adopt AI publish and get cited more, but collaborate (22%!!) less and work on less varied research topics.

New paper out! How do species coexist through invasion cycles (like the classic✂️🪨📄) in nature? We introduce a general framework linking the structure of species interactions to the emergence of complex ecological cycles esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

So much insight squeezed into this hour, a great episode. Do not miss the supplemental chat at the end where cybernetics is shown to be a victim of a) its own success (many fields are effectively cybernetics w/o the name), b) its socialist associations, c) of bad blood between Minsky and Wiener.

“we analysed data for 1436 mammal species, confirming that group-living and pair-living species exhibit longer lifespans than solitary species…findings suggest that while group-living may reduce predation risk, pathogen transmission costs in larger groups may constrain longevity benefits”

A stunning visualization born from a collaboration with @manlius.bsky.social : 55,486 galaxies and 29,555 streamlines tracing how matter flows across our local universe, built on data from the CosmicFlows-4 project. Article in the first reply 👇

Utterly grim series of papers there. As things get worse voters increasingly turn to parties who actively exacerbate the decline. Accelerationism but for bad stuff.

1/7 Our papers may seem to address different themes, but they coalesce around the deep human past as a process of niche expansion and feedbacks, into the transition to human dominated landscapes. A starting point was the pan-African structured theory of human origins: www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

The evolution of symbolic artefacts: How function shapes form🏺🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Experimental work that systematically addresses the relation between properties of intentional markings and their cognitive implications to support inferences about their past functions.

This paper is most interesting for us. It'll take us some time to digest; the amount of information in it is near infinite! doi.org/10.1021/acs....

Why does music exist, and why does it move us so deeply? Beyond being a universal source of emotion, music reveals something fundamental about how the brain works: we are constantly predicting. Check this @nature.com review www.nature.com/articles/s41... @manlius.bsky.social @gemmadlc.bsky.social

I am happy to share this new review on Intrinsically Motivated Intelligence academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

In a nutshell, the ANES data shows: 📉 Social media use is shrinking; engagement collapsing 💥 Twitter/X posting has moved ~70 POINTS to the right 🧩 Platforms are splintering 🔊 Fewer people are talking — but those still talking are more politically extreme

Is social media dying? How much did Twitter change as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has changed Here are the key take-aways 🧵 Full paper out now in in JQD:DM!

Very good @natneuro.nature.com review by @janetsong.bsky.social M. Greenberg D. Reich & C. Walsh, capturing progress made by genomic approaches to understand the evolution of the human brain 🧪🧬🧠 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

What function did ~100k-year-old engravings from Blombos Cave & Diepkloof serve? Decoration, identity marking, proto-writing? osf.io/preprints/ps... uses transmission chains + cognitive experiments to find out & help answering one of the hardest questions in cognitive archaeology. long thread! 1/

New preprint with Rafael Leite, Sandro Reia and Paulo Campos Cumulative Cultural Evolution in Structured Populations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... In which we take an old model of cumulative cultural evolution of mine and see what happens if you add social networks

Contribution to the collective defense provides both direct and indirect benefits and that individuals regulate their contributions mainly based on the social environment, resulting in variation within and among natural populations. #Evolution #ComplexSystems www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

First "Civil War" among chimpanzees documented Polarization led the Ngogo chimpanzees to form two factions that killed one another. My opinion (in Spanish) here: www.eldiario.es/sociedad/doc... in @eldiario.es by @aberron.bsky.social (paper) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New paper out in Adaptive Behavior! On why cognitive scientists need a better account of purposive of behaviour, why cybernetics and dynamical systems won't do the trick, and how biological autonomy might. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

“The rich complex nature of human social ecologies creates new challenges, which select for cognitive capacities that support distinctive forms of communication & facilitate creation of linguistic conventions in turn.” @thomscottphillips.bsky.social & co in a valuable eLetter response to our paper.🧪

When people use AI for writing assistance, it can shift their political attitudes by autocompleting sentences in biased ways. Yet people are often unaware of the AI bias & it's influence This is not merely about the facts presented, but how autocomplete worlds www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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...