The first rule of Darwin Club is: you do not talk about non-random variation.

"I've studied him for over 30 years, I've written a book about him, and – the more I thought about it – the more it seemed that Nietzsche's philosophy needed a musical." As you do www.manchesterjournal.com/arts_and_cul...

Ghostwriters frame material and framing matters. Even in science. A great write up on Nick Hopwood’s research into the history of Edwards and Steptoe’s book A Matter of Life. #histmed #histsci

The @washingtonpost.com story on Tylenol & autism leaves out a MAJOR 2.5M sibling-controlled study of children in Denmark, which "found no evidence that acetaminophen use during pregnancy was associated with children’s risk of autism, ADHD or intellectual disability." jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Get. Off. Twitter.

The Economist is hiring a science and technology correspondent

I took paracetamol in both my pregnancies for minor joint troubles. I had a better pregnancy experience because I wasn't in pain. Neither of my kids is autistic. The high-quality studies and reviews confirm there is NO evidence that paracetamol taken by the mother causes autism in the child. 🧪

I’ve been training my whole life for this moment

The Philosophy of Science Association makes experts on various topics available for conversation with graduate students anywhere with its "Office Hour" program. Other associations should consider doing this.

A new #HOPOS paper from Tivadar Vervoort on the relations between Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School and the French epistemologists including Michel Foucault. “Nous Sommes Tous Néokantiens”: Foucault, Lukács, and the Critique of Social Forms www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

The first rule of Darwin Club is: you do not talk about non-random variation.

When people asked what they believe about important political, economic, or cultural Qs, they don't say what they think is best supported by evidence or argument but usually report what they think group they belong to "believes". Mythbusting is ineffective because it targets individual

“Having previously resisted calls to kick Musk out of the Royal Society, its president Adrian Smith has now written to fellows to say its governing council will discuss the matter at a meeting on 1 October” www.researchprofessional.com/0/rr/news/uk...

Gaze into the middle of this image! via @akiyoshikitaoka.bsky.social

Best agent-based modelling textbook you've read? Preferably R and Python examples (or translated into these languages).

I really don’t want to read the new bsky TOS at this point 🫥 But I guess I should

When I was still in primary school my teacher put up disparaging cartoons of leading politicians on the classroom wall as part of a lesson about what it meant to live in a free country.

Always check the signage ...

To me, this is theoretical (=scientific) *psychology* at its best. Thanks to these authors, we now know some new, fairly universal (abstract), undeniable (proved), and useful facts about *affordances*.

How’s that for university marketing: “with the accessibility and availability of our faculty you won’t need an LLM!”

A new article in Current Opinion in Psychology: Willful ignorance is the deliberate avoidance of information that is relevant but uncomfortable or threatening. We argue that when attitudes are strong, people are more likely to engage in this behavior. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This makes me want to die. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/t...

I remember when my “popular with friends” feed was mostly science.

Elephant, 1637 Rembrandt Van Rijn (Albertina, Vienna)

The field of neuroscience makes a lot more sense if you see it as a generation-long battle between the “Marrian” program of focusing on function and hoping a brain falls out and the “Markramian” program of building a brain and hoping function falls out and tbh I think they’ve both failed.

In 2011 I wrote a review of Alan Turing's 1948 paper Intelligent Machinery where he considered the case for embodied intelligence. My review was intended for a 2012 centenary celebration of Turing's birth, but no proceedings were published. So here it is. rodneybrooks.com/alan-turing-...

I'm going to start posting my Realtime Techpocalypse Newsletter articles on YouTube. Here's the first one -- on the diabolical reasons that Peter Thiel is obsessing over the Antichrist and Armageddon! www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EuU...

Despite being a major antagonist in the early chapters of my book, Michael Ruse provided a gracious and supportive peer review of my book before publication, and penned this early review. Remapping Biology with Goethe, Schelling, and Herder is now available in paperback. Check it out! #philbio #hps

Some new theoretical economics papers modelling the implications of AGI on the economy. These two papers argue that a true AGI-level AI (equivalent to a human genius), if achieved, would eventually displace most human labor and reduce the economic value of remaining human work to near-zero.

Anyhow I saw the best garden hedge in London today A+++ no regrets

Doing some philosophy of science

Massive sibling regression study finds that human traits are largely environmentally driven (average heritability = 0.3)

Did you know that 21% of Israeli citizens are Palestinian, while 25% of doctors in the Israeli healthcare system are Palestinian?

Don't need to hear one more 'Bluesky is an echo chamber' post ever again. Meta is scraping parents IG 'back to school photos' of their daughters in schoolgirl uniforms and using them in ads to entice men to sign up for Threads. It's all pedos and perverts running the country. All of em.

Going to create a starter pack with all the people who forgot to put me in the starter packs. Or am I thinking of a block list? Hm.

Every time you don’t include me in a starter pack an angel gets his wings. No, I will not DM you.

I created a starter pack for #PhilosophyOfAI and #DataEthics here: go.bsky.app/72k3w4X #EthicsOfAI

I should mention that while this is a first class work of history it touches on many questions that play a central role in contemporary research: neuro and cognitive plasticity; the origins and function of hierarchical organization and modularity; role of agency in evolution; complexity. #philbio

Yup. I have a version of this too and it's super handy.

This puzzlement confirms the survey results discussed in this article by @federicobrandmayr.bsky.social Indeed the identity of a social scientist is secondary to most economists, anthropologists, political scientists. Sociologists are most ok with it bsky.app/profile/anna...

Use philpapers!

My favorite scholars have one indispensable publication every decade AND NOTHING ELSE.

“The big perspective change from ancient DNA study is that people living today are almost never the descendants of the people in the same place thousands of years before” news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

So true.

this is wild - i was aware of Mary-Claire King's absurdly important discoveries on BRCA / inherited breast cancer but I had no idea that her first PhD paper (King & Wilson 1975, Science, not bad lol) is the "99% of protein coding shared btwn chimps and humans" result www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1...

C. elegans uses an "accept-reject" behavioural strategy, based on learned features of its environment, to make decisions about food. This research tackles a core problem in #neuroscience: how neural circuits mediate decision-making. buff.ly/AXcsRVX

TLS on Yudkowsky & Soares: "These stories are filled with scientifically dubious, if narratively compelling, anthropomorphism, including the language of AI’s wants and desires.' www.the-tls.com/science-tech...