Happy new year! I wanted to share my new Python package called chatter that streamlines the process of applying AI/ML models to animal communication 🦜🦇🐋🐵👨‍🌾 masonyoungblood.github.io/chatter/

Out today in @plosbiology.org (1/5) Siblings and non-parental adults provide alternative pathways to cultural inheritance in juvenile great tits 🐦🧩 Link to study: 10.0.5.91/journal.pbio... Co-authors: @lucymaplin.bsky.social @galarconnieto.bsky.social

⚠️Paper Alert!⚠️ Excited to share this paper with @roccoro.bsky.social where we examined whether ceramic technology in Saharan Africa was the result of a single or multiple episodes of innovation & diffusion rdcu.be/eJi3g

Y'all these titles are getting out of control 😅

ESLR is currently undergoing a transition, and a new committee (@alexschakowski.bsky.social, @ahnisnaahsi.bsky.social, @katebonner.bsky.social, @lucahahn.bsky.social, @mariapykala.bsky.social) is working on reinstating its presence and shaping its future. Please feel free to get in touch!

My first PhD project is out there. Thank you to my advisor @psmaldino.bsky.social and to mentor, co-author and friend @babeheim.bsky.social for encouraging and helping build this exciting and insightful collaboration. Onwards!

Fancy joining us? Check out this excellent @royalsociety.org Career Development Fellowship: royalsociety.org/grants/caree... If you're eligible & are interested in social behaviour, vocal communication or anthropogenic impacts on wildlife, feel free to DM or email me. @bristolbiosci.bsky.social

This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

**PhD POSITIONS** I am recruiting 1-2 PhD students to work on sociality and cognition in Monk Parakeets, starting Fall 2026. Full ad is here: hobsonresearch.com/index.php/20... (please help spread the word!)

Tomorrow!

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go! 400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

The count down starts for #CESRabat! Follow @ces2026.bsky.social and join us May 11-13 next year for an exciting meeting in Rabat, Morocco. Massive thanks to the #CESRabat organising committee: Sarah Alami (co-chair) Mathieu Charbonneau (co-chair) Zachary Garfield Edmond Seabright

Keep yours eyes out for some incredible work from @sobchuk.bsky.social in the coming years 🥳

Performing "Alaka'i 1777" at Index Space (NYC) on 9/21 for TechnoMirage—a creative gathering exploring AI and speculative futures. Come hear extinct birdsongs in immersive spatial audio! 🦜 lu.ma/xda8t4h1

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...

🧠 Want to integrate cultural evolution into your course using award winning materials created by the field's experts, and get paid $2000 to do it? 💵 🚨 The Cultural Evolution Society is seeking applications for the ACE Teaching Innovation Awards. 🔖 Apply here: vuw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

I'm pleased to share this new article by @svenkasser.bsky.social, Laura Fortunato @anthrolog.bsky.social, Marc Feldman and myself. The article extends gene-culture coevolution to recognize evolutionary effects of culture arising through drift and migration. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

We are pleased to announce our newly elected committee members of the Cultural Evolution Society: Minhua Yan @minhuayan.bsky.social Helena Miton @helenamiton.bsky.social Wataru Toyokawa @watarutoyokawa.bsky.social & Mason Youngblood @masonyoungblood.bsky.social Welcome and congratulations!!

Such a pleasure to be the first guest on the new bioacoustics podcast Wild Resonance! 🦜🐳 youtu.be/1gEI7Ihibac?...

Our latest study on ant acoustic communication originated from a project about soil health monitoring. A picture being worth a thousand words, I will let my abstract explain it all! Here's the paper in #OpenAccess: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... #acoustics #animalbehaviour #entomology

How much does it cost to caw? @wascherclaudia.bsky.social @masonyoungblood.bsky.social report that in 3 crow species, there is a strong negative relation b/t call sequence length & call duration --> they obey Menzerath's law of efficiency 1/2 #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics

Crow vocalizations show Menzerath’s law (indicator of efficiency), with some interesting age and sex differences! 🐦‍⬛

Posted a new preprint! Re-analysis of data from James and Sakata (2017) shows that zebra finches transform random songs to exhibit linguistic laws 🦜 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Bielefeld University seeks a postdoc for a 6-year scientific assistant position in Animal Behaviour, starting March 2026. Apply by Sept 10, 2025. More info: www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/biologie/forschung/arbeitsgruppen/behaviour #job

My new installation Alaka’i 1777, which imagines the lost song culture of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, debuts in NYC 6/21-22! Come hear real-time simulations of extinct birdsongs in 24-channel spatial audio 🦜 Made possible by @cornellbirds.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social @divintelligence.bsky.social

Two paper just out from the #clevercockieproject! @julia-penndorf.bsky.social reveals how cockies play politics when deciding who to aggress: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.... & @barbaraklump.bsky.social describes a new 'drinking innovation': royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Impressive new analysis of music streaming data from @harinlee.info!

My new installation "Alaka'i 1777" debuts at the Reforesters Laboratory in Brooklyn on 6/21-22! Come hear real-time simulations of extinct birdsongs in immersive spatial audio 🐦 6/21 @ 2:30 PM: lu.ma/db1o64b7 6/22 @ 12 PM: lu.ma/h90muqr5

How are humans able to make sense of time? Not with special biology but with “time tools”—ideas, practices, and artifacts that render time more concrete. My new paper explores this vast, varied toolkit—one that makes use of knots, nuts, hands, flowers, mountains, shadows, and much more. (link 👇)

🙉🥁🌲 Buttress drumming dialects 🌲🥁🙉 @nakedprimate.bsky.social et al. show: 🙉 chimp drumming is rhythmic (w/help from @andrearavignani.bsky.social) 🙉 & has regional diffs (see 🧵👇) Raises lots of interesting ?s about cultural evolution!! (cc @masonyoungblood.bsky.social) #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics

📢 CES launches Advancing Cultural Evolution (ACE) Course Design Awards! 🎉 $4000 award + global impact for your cultural evolution course materials. Course must be college/grad level with 10+ hrs content. Application link: vuw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... #CulturalEvolution #Education #Grants

Catching up on big animal culture papers! Herrings have shifted their spawning locations northward, after overfishing wiped out collective knowledge of historical spawning grounds 🐟 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Kicked off our new research group at @IACSComputes with a 3-day workshop on "Collective Creativity" last week! Incredibly inspiring to bring these folks together for a few days 🫶 @gemschedel.bsky.social

New paper out with @heidicolleran.bsky.social in @pnasnexus.org academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ad...

Two super cool postdoc positions with @norijacoby.bsky.social and colleagues!

Interesting and optimistic analysis of @xrglobal.bsky.social’s success, from a bit of a cultural evo perspective (thanks @twaring.bsky.social for sharing) theecologist.org/2024/oct/21/...

Cool new preprint from @taylorhersh.bsky.social et al! African penguin display songs "get faster (i.e., accelerando) and louder (i.e., crescendo) as they progress" 🐧 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy to have a new piece in @science.org with my friend Lydia where we draw attention to the significance of animal material culture for understanding human technical evolution and why we should digitally preserve and protect primate tools and tool use sites. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Bird colouration varies a tremendous amount. But why? In a new paper, @j-dunning.net , John Endler, & I look at the relationship between plumage and viewing conditions in 2610 species of birds, finding strong, non-sexual effects (esp. on females). 📷Zak Pohlen (tanager), Darren Clark (thrush)

The cultural evolution of distortion in music (and other norms of mixed appeal). New paper (w Greg Bryant) on a weird social phenomenon, with a general model of how such phenomena evolve as ways to distinguish subcultures. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

New research project: Lluminate - an evolutionary algorithm that helps LLMs break free from generating predictable, similar outputs. Combining evolutionary principles with creative thinking strategies can illuminate the space of possibilities. www.joelsimon.net/lluminate

Finally, a stochastic parrot I care about Mike Long's group shows a topological mapping in budgie brain area that projects to vocal motorneurons, similar to what we see in analogous area of human speech motor cortex, unlike what we see in the same area in zebra finches #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics

Pleased to see our work published: The Ties That Bind: Computational, Cross-cultural Analyses of Knots Reveal Their Cultural Evolutionary History and Significance We analysed knots across 12,000 years and 82 societies. Time to tie a thread 🧵 about why knots matter. doi.org/10.1017/S095...

Theory tells us that demography, i.e. pop turnover, immigration & age structure, must be important to animal culture but evidence is rare. Here this cool study on song in the famous great tits of Wytham Woods shows what is possible 🐦 www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

New paper on the demographic drivers of cultural evolution in Great Tit song published today - epic work led by @nilomr.bsky.social with help from @andreaestandia.bsky.social Ella Cole & Sara Keen. Why did we do this, and what did we find? 🧵 follows: 1/n www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Great turnout for #StandUpForScience NYC!

#StandUpForScience today! NYC is 12-3 PM EST in Washington Square Park, details about other cities here: standupforscience2025.org

We are please to release Transmissions Ep 1, featuring Dr Cristina Moya @hyperadapthyrax.bsky.social in conversation with Feryl Badiani @ferylbadiani.bsky.social Cristina and Feryl chat about Cristina's work in Peru and discuss CE in human and non-human societies: youtu.be/2otT0PkhPkw?...

Applications for DISI extended to Monday, March 10th! Cannot recommend more - I've attended as a scientist and a storyteller and both experiences were transformative :)

Due to the Musk/Trump Administration’s draconian cuts, the National Science Foundation is significantly scaling back its program to provide college students with paid summer research internships. Many of my colleagues attribute their start in science to this program. www.science.org/content/arti...