New paper out today with Zhian Chen. We argue that modern intensive parenting is not only exhausting for parents, but in some cases disrupts healthy child development. What is 'overparenting'? And can evolutionary theory help us understand how we got here? academic.oup.com/emph/advance...

New paper out on the important role of social learning in breastfeeding! academic.oup.com/emph/article...

Simplistic stories about the dangers of polygamy can be compelling & intuitive, but what is the evidence that monogamous marriage is advantageous for society? theconversation.com/rethinking-p...

If one man marries two women, another man must go unmarried, right? No. Demography matters. If sex ratios are skewed towards women, then polygyny can exist alongside universal marriage for men (who want to marry women). If only more people understood demography 😊

"Public health is under siege in our country. This time it is not from fringe communities scattered across the nation but from our appointed leaders, who were nominated by our president and confirmed by our elected officials in the Senate." A must-read anonymous piece www.bmj.com/content/390/...

From a colleague: NSF proposal received FOUR "excellent" ratings (the highest possible...that almost never happens). Rated "highly competitive" in panel summary. 👎 ...but still rejected. Likely reason: It studied a topic disfavored by this admin.

Fun fact: even as UCLA is being extorted for $1B by a fascist government, its administration is requiring all faculty to install a “security” program that surveils everything we do and shares that information with the federal government.

Very disappointed that we were forced to cancel our field season and return early, following the suspension of our NSF grant as part of Trump’s attacks on UCLA. Particularly sad for our students, who spent significant time and effort to join us this year.

Still a projection, but a devastating projection: 30-40% drop in international students at U.S. universities this fall www.nafsa.org/about/about-... Hard to wrap your head around the full implications of this for universities

My new paper "Post-pandemic inequalities: Evolutionary anthropological frameworks for long-term impacts of the 1918 influenza pandemic" is now published in Evolutionary Anthropology! Please check it out at the link below! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Pleased to present our new preprint on sleep and circadian rhythms among the Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia. This is a fascinating system for exploring sleep biology. Lots of variation in light exposure, housing type, and subsistence. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 below.

Federal kindergarten vaccination data shows national rates for four major vaccines, which had held steady before the COVID-19 pandemic, have fallen significantly since. In fact, measles vaccination rates were below herd immunity in most states in 2023. ➡️ Read more: propub.li/40KnM8n

The university of California is a powerhouse of innovation, healthcare, and social mobility for California and the US.

🚨🚨 Friday night news drop from National Science Foundation!! 🧪 NSF just released its detailed budget request for next year: nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF... We knew it was going to be bad...and it lives up. Guts direct NSF support for a **quarter million people** 🧵 on some highlights...

Happy to see an update to this classic from the Wall Street Journal (Tynan DeBold, Dov Friedman), this time by @scientificdiscovery.dev and @spoonerf.bsky.social at @ourworldindata.org. 📊 New: a log chart, new colours and three relevant annotations. Source: ourworldindata.org/measles-vacc...

In other news, my engineer father has published a book! Looks like a spicy read! link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...

New paper on malaria in NW Namibia, highlighting significant differences between cultural models and biomedical ones that could be detrimental to malaria eradication efforts. malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

New at Can We Still Govern: An anonymous NIH employee maps out the GOP budget gameplan to permanently gut our most important science agency. Impoundment, delay and red tape will create artificial "savings" that become the new benchmark for NIH budgets. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...

A new study forecasts more than 850,000 measles cases over the next 25 years if US vaccination rates stay the same. Millions of infections are possible if rates drop. www.wired.com/story/scient...

New paper out exploring the relationship between medical mistrust and vaccination beliefs and decisions in Namibian pastoralists, with some COVID stuff thrown in for good measure doi.org/10.1007/s406...

This statement from the NSF is insane. Science is, in essence, designed to separate the true from the false. Understanding how falsehoods spread is key to the scientific endeavor. It is not a violation of free speech to be proven wrong.

I look at close to 100 stories a week and even more outside of work. I’ve done this ten years. This is among the most horrific things I’ve ever read — testimony from dying children whose access to medicine has been cut off by the Trump administration. www.npr.org/sections/goa...

Now there's a memorable stat! "Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined." wapo.st/3EvzMCI

The NYT has profiled Rufo repeatedly but never come close to asking the vital questions that Larry lays out so well here:

The real problem about science isn't about loss of trust. It's about not having a voice, a counter. @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41... Whai if the 300,000 scientists supported by NIH stood up? Or even half of them. Instead of <1%

The title tells the story and the 5 graphs amplify it www.nature.com/articles/d41...

New paper exploring how cultural models of vaccines influence vaccine decision-making. Implications for the KAP framework, historical mistrust on healthcare decisions, & health promotion where formal education is rare. Share link: kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...

It’s crazy to me how bad this argument is, and how consistently it is used by lab leak people

"Grants are getting killed “without any scientific input anywhere. It is purely political,” said a member of a senior NIH leadership team. “The science in this country is going to be destroyed if you can change what the priorities are going to be every four years. You can’t do science that way.”"

DOGE/Musk preferentially cancelled grants and contracts to recipients in counties that voted for Harris in 2024. Among cancellations with election data available, 92.9% and 86.1% cancelled grants and contracts went to Harris counties, representing 96.6% and 92.4% of total dollar amounts.

I'm on the @science.org podcast this week with @maartenlarmuseau.bsky.social & @bscelza.bsky.social talking about genetic genealogy, cuckoldry and extra-pair paternity: www.science.org/content/podc... (Starting around 15:00)

The Trump administration terminates funding for polio, HIV, malaria and nutrition programs around the world. “People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi of the African Population and Health Research Center, “but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”

Upon learning that yesterday would be my last day as a program officer at the National Science Foundation, I shared this parting message with my colleagues. The next few months will be frenetic and stressful for them. Here are some things that you can do to help them with the mission ahead. (1)

In response to headline “Cruz-Led Investigation Uncovers $2 Billion in Woke DEI Grants at NSF, Releases Full Database” I want to re-emphasize that all these grants were public record and written in response to public solicitations supporting DEI content. No “uncovering” or “releasing” was done here

Our grant on vaccine decision making is in here. Apparently it is too woke for Ted Cruz. Flagged for "status" and "social justice."

NEW: RFK Jr. said a new study linked vaccines to autism in his confirmation hearing. We found that the study's author had a hard time getting it published. Then he got help from Andrew Wakefield, who is famous for the first debunked study linking the the two. GIFT: www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/u...

Make no mistake, this is an intentional dismantling of US science and academia. They’ve said as much themselves

Cannot stop thinking about how Octavia Butler wrote a book in 1993 about climate change. It opens with deadly fires in LA in 2025. In the story, a fascist President has just won office with the campaign slogan "Make America Great Again." She was a modern day Nostradamus. If only we'd listened.

Postdoc #job! My lab is hiring an in-person postdoc to help with our newly funded NIEHS #R01 longitudinal study to examine the effects of drinking water salinity & heat stress on hydration, kidney function, & BP in N. Kenya! Job link: psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic...

Today is #GivingTuesday Please consider donating to the OnePencil project to help fund water wells in rural Namibian schools and scholarships for Tsimane students. This is a really great org. See link below:

OnePencil is on Bluesky! Please follow us for news and updates about our work in Amazonia and Southern Africa. 🧵 on what we do:

"children who receive more care from mothers experience less illness but availability of high-quality alloparents mediates relationship between maternal work & child health...important implications for policy interventions in LMIC, which assume positive relationship btw maternal work & child health"

(This starter pack will no doubt expand as more people migrate to Bluesky.) go.bsky.app/KVUQFms

Today seems like a good day to share this Scientific American story on how vaccines have saved more lives throughout history than any other intervention www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-...

new paper out with @bscelza.bsky.social & Helen Davis on prestige bias learning about vaccination in rural Namibia. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper out today on why we need better research on medical mistrust in LMICs in order to increase vaccine uptake link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Drafts of the first chapters of my brms Book: Applied Bayesian Regression Modelling Using R and Stan are online: paulbuerkner.com/software/brm... Check it out and let me know what you think!

New opinion piece in Scientific American! www.scientificamerican.com/article/here...

Researchers should stop paying to publish their papers. Tom Morgan and I wrote a short piece about it. (1) osf.io/preprints/os...