New Open Access book edited by Cristina Moya @hyperadapthyrax.bsky.social and Wolfgang Wagner on identity and culture. Many great chapter by great folks. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

I've changed my mind about the origins of essentialist intuitions quite a bit over the years, and it was great to have Wolfgang Wagner renew my attention to the puzzle. So many clever contributors have refined my beliefs about the phenomena and changed my mind about what we know.

It's an all-star cultural evolution / evolutionary psychology / human behavioural ecology panel, with Joe Henrich, Fiona Jordan, @edhagen.net and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder

Phenomenal plenary at CES 2026 by Nicole Creanza on the links between birdsong and human language

This is happening NOW in the Applied Cultural Evolution session. Come join us. Room B-K2-02 😊

If you at the Cultural Evolution Society meeting this week - come check out Dunstan Matungwa presenting on Tanzania’s extraordinary contributions to anthropology and the priorities of Tanzanian scholars for the future of cross-national collaboration. 🇹🇿 🌍 🌎 🌏

Sneak peek at the US cover for THE THINKING ANIMAL, coming Jan '27. Looking forward to sharing more - soon! @stmartinspress.bsky.social @zcosini.bsky.social

The call for the PhD programme in Sociology and Social Research at Trento is out, with deadline 14 May. Interested in a PhD in cultural evolution / social media / cultural analytics? Get in touch! www.unitn.it/en/phd/socio...

Couldn't wait to give this news! English edition of Technopanic will be out at end of this month. It will appear under a new publishing project led by @danielnettle.bsky.social , which I am very glad to be part of. More details soon. And thank you to @hugoreasoning.bsky.social for the endorsement!

Congrats to Hampton, and to all other winners of the IPUMS Research Awards competition for "outstanding research using IPUMS data to advance or deepen our understanding of social and demographic processes" 🎉🥳

Despite my face in this thumbnail, I really enjoyed this conversation about a project I've been working on lately! Thanks for having me on again, @epthepod.bsky.social

This week, we talk to @dconroybeam.bsky.social about sex and gender. youtu.be/MwB7cemCfgM podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... www.podbean.com/eas/pb-xiemw...

Are gender gaps in partner preferences larger in countries with stronger gender norms? In our new preprint (w/ @jinwenxie.bsky.social ), we addressed this question using an open access dataset (Walter et al, 2020; >14k participants, 45 countries). 🧵1/4 #ehbea #psychscisky 🧪 osf.io/preprints/ps...

There is a fully-funded PhD position at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to pursue dissertation research among the Mayangna of Nicaragua, expanding a longitudinal study of subsistence strategies and behavioral ecology. Please share the posting! www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...

My book (!) How Economics Discovered Women is now available for pre-order from the University of California Press. The book is a survey and critique of how the economics of gender has developed since the mid-1970s. www.ucpress.edu/books/how-ec...

📢 News: Dr. @alexalvergne.bsky.social is assuming a new position as President of the @ehbea.bsky.social. She is Director of Research at the Evolutionary Anthropology Team at ISEM Montpellier

Why is NSF SBE important? Over 25 years, it has funded research on the impact of terrorism on social systems, how social, cultural, & econ factors affect interactions w/the environment & how communities adapt to environmental change, human origins, & how people interact w/new technologies etc!

Once again it is time to contract your representatives: The FY27 budget request for NSF (see nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...) would get rid of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.

The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

This project (with Stacy Rosenbaum and Nick Grebe) began in the dark days of Covid, and is finally ready to share. We've built a living database of primate paternity data (52 species, 3000 paternities) and completed first wave of analyses of paternity distribution. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I am shocked to see this language from the NSF. “The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”

The preliminary programme for @ces2026.bsky.social is now out. What a fabulous line up! airess.fgses-um6p.ma/CES2026?__cf...

Thoughtful piece: “Rather than focusing on a crisis of boys or girls, many specialists say the priority should be supporting young people overall, sometimes in a gender-neutral way” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The deadline applications to the CES New Investigator Award has been extended until April 2 - don't miss out getting your application in!

This week, we talk to @amyboddy.bsky.social about the weird and wonderful world of microchimerism. youtu.be/pFi5DGFpavA podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... epthepod.podbean.com/e/amy-boddy/

"Urbanization appears to introduce new incentives for men to support women’s empowerment, including social prestige, access to novel employment, and increased adaptability to urban life" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thanks to all who have signed so far. We have 73 signatories across a variety of disciplines. Let's see if we can break 200 before we send it off next week. Please re-post and send on to your colleagues. Thank you!

Excited for the new Transmissions episode on ASU's Sarah Mathew on how human warfare evolved, and her fieldwork in Kenya. Watch here: youtu.be/eUqEcxf5uBQ?... New Episodes monthly! Created by @ferylbadiani.bsky.social and @ahnisnaahsi.bsky.social CC: @arizonastateuni.bsky.social

Competition for heritable wealth, not cultural group selection, drives the evolution of monogamy | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

New paper, led by Estelle McLean, on the value of data from Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems. These data sources are particularly suitable for complex longitudinal analyses which require consideration of household and familial contexts, but their complexity may result in their under-use

This week, we talk to Sara Mathew about the psychology of killing, PTSD, and the relationship between our evolved psychology and cultural evolution. youtu.be/mgDerXD0djI www.podbean.com/eas/pb-qypm9... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

My first PhD paper is published! 🎉 We compared how wild bonobo and chimpanzee infants (0-5.5y) become independent from their mothers. Here is the open-access link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... 🧵(1/5)

Work (also) with me! Two years postdoc in the @weaponisedpasts.bsky.social project, based in Edinburgh. Will do transmission chain experiments to understand the spread of heritage-based hostility, online and elsewhere. More info ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Congratulations to Hanna Kokko for receiving this year’s ASAB medal! Hanna has done extraordinary work and we are so pleased to honour her at #ASABWinter2025

In this blog post, Guest Editor @rachkendal.bsky.social discusses their #PhilTransB issue, 'Transforming cultural evolution research and its application to global futures': royalsociety.org/blog/2025/12...

Each semester I go in my classroom and I try to figure out what we would use to block the doors, if it would be safe to crawl out the windows, where we could hide if there was a mass shooter in campus. It’s such an indictment of this country how we have normalized these preventable tragedies.

A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the invention of smartphones and the advent of social media, which both appeared around the same year, 2008. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

"misinformation is widespread in biological systems spanning levels of organization, and [...] is probably an inevitable property that inherits from fundamental constraints on biological communication systems, rather than a pathology" royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article...

🚨New article on gender differences (Rajasekhar et al 2025): 'self-reported empathy appears to be related to social desirability and broader social attitudes, which suggests that a range of cultural and social factors might contribute to gender differences in empathy'. 🧪 dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Thanks to Adeela Shafi, @drtwymanghoshal.bsky.social, Acheampong Charles Afriyie, Samuel Copland & Omar El Masri for their hard work in bringing together this excellent collection of articles.

Innovations in Decolonising the Curriculum: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. – a new book about how to decolonize the curriculum, by Adeela ahmed Shafi et al. www.emerald.com/books/edited... Here is our chapter:

New special issues in Philosophical Transactions B highlight advances in cultural evolution and why they matter for challenges like inequality, cooperation, conservation, and education. 🔹 Transforming cultural evolution research and its application to global futures 🖇️👇

Don’t forget to submit your #EHBEA2026 abstract before Dec 15! See you in beautiful Leiden in April! @ehbea2026.bsky.social @ehbea.bsky.social

This new issue of #PhilTransB expands the field of cultural #evolution and shows why it matters for today’s biggest challenges. It highlights research funded by the @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social's Transformation Fund, which focused on #DEI: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

Super proud of this paper with @apvelilla.bsky.social and @babeheim.bsky.social, now out in Psych Review. Non-paywalled version (preprint) here: osf.io/preprints/so...

End of quarter vibes.

"This Issue stems from the Cultural Evolution Society Transformation Fund, designed to bridge the social & natural sciences, promote equity, diversity & inclusion & support work with policy relevance. This diversification of the CE field strengthens its capacity to positively shape global futures"

Was great to contribute to this conversation about advancing equity, diversity and inclusion in the evolutionary behavioral sciences. Still a LONG way to go, but I'm optimistic things are moving in the right direction. royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Excited to get this paper published! 🌟 We argue that men exaggerate patriarchal beliefs in an effort to signal conformity to others, which in turn fuels misperceptions about peers - making patriarchal norms resistant to change. royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Today sees the publication of the Theme Issue featuring the CES Transformation Fund grant scheme. Enjoy! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3... @durhamdcerc.bsky.social @durhamanthropology.bsky.social @cultevolfunding.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social