New special issue on "Cultural evolution of the arts" led by @sobchuk.bsky.social and @masonyoungblood.bsky.social confirms my intuition that this field has taken off in the past two decades, with a particularly strong representation from music! doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

IMO the best current option is @peercommunityin.bsky.social. Won’t solve all problems, but it’s a start at liberating peer review from evil for-profit publishers!

Drawing From Your Memory 1 is out! A story with a time-travel element that’s also a mystery is so down my alley, I’m beyond excited to be translating this. The mystery only ramps up from here, with some really sweet moments to ease the sometimes heavy themes. Stay tuned!

Good question Emily, and the reason is because this research is smoke and mirrors - there is zero justification for the wholesale deployment of linguistic assumptions in this work and to be frank I'm disappointed that @whysharksmatter.bsky.social isn't using more critical thinking before sharing...

Until now, scientists have identified only a few dozen variants that went through natural selection in humans in the past 10,000 years. A new study claims to find hundreds--maybe thousands. Here's my story on the provocative research, and the mixed reception it's getting. Gift link: nyti.ms/4tSJH9G

Well, in brief, this paper addresses none of the original criticisms of 'vowel' and commits further egregiously wrong use of linguistic assumptions. Might as talk about the phonology of farts as far as I'm concerned! This nice satire sums it up 🤣 oddnews.com/article/ai-s...

Curious to hear reactions from other whale song researchers like @lrendell.bsky.social (thinking of his very critical reaction to previous similar claims from this team: bsky.app/profile/lren...)

The paper does not mention “music” or “human song” once, even though human song also uses vowels in complex ways and is probably more similar to whale song than language is. Still no evidence whale song is a “language”. doi.org/10.1093/9780...

We have over 100 abstracts submitted already and are expecting a big spike in these last couple of weeks! EPC/APCV are very rarely in NZ (last was 15yrs ago). If you're kiwi, this is a great opportunity for a nearby international conference. If you're not, this is your chance to see beautiful NZ :)

I used this to open my "(Un)ethical Science" class yesterday. Asked my students if they knew where the quote was from. No one knew!!! 👴

1. In this paper, we included this word cloud of the top 200 words in the volume Man the Hunter. A reader wondered how could the top 200 words in a book with the title "Man the Hunter" include "woman" but not "man"? Doh! 🧪 #rstats #BioAnth #AcademicSky 🧵

Survey research is often interpreted as showing that belief in conspiracy theories can be surprisingly widespread, including belief in conspiracy theories that would be astonishing if true. For example, in The Atlantic we learn that “12 million Americans believe lizard people run our country”

Sorry to be a party-pooper, but this is a low-quality study. Underpowered (two groups of 14 participants each), non-randomized, numerous statistical fallacies, doesn't cite key studies, etc.). Also, says peer review history is available, but I can't find it... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A great read on NZ’s current science strategy.

Enjoyed some gorgeous weather with friends and family the past few days before the cyclone hits. Feeling very lucky to live in this beautiful country! 🥰🇳🇿

“Feel free to adapt and reuse. No attribution needed (…) If you make an adaption that you also want to share, I’d love to know about it, too.” irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/04/08/r...

The authors have now responded to our critique. Basically, they say that because humans don't always agree on the same beat, the two macaques don't have to agree with humans, or with each other, or even with themselves, to count as evidence of beat synchronization. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

What worries me most about the directions of NZ's science reform is that it now matches closely what our extensive 2022 Te Ara Paerangi submission highlighted as 'what to avoid'. (1/3)

Seeing Bret McKenzie in our shared hometown was awesome, but especially awesome to see this unannounced Flight of the Conchords reunion ✈️✈️🤯

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

I wrote today about a big study on replication--and why it's so hard to know if a study will hold up or not. Gift link: nyti.ms/4sNu3MF

SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

Periodic reminder that citation ethics are “a crucial, though underappreciated, part of academic reading and writing” osf.io/preprints/ps...

@culturalevolsoc.bsky.social conference draft programme is up: airess.fgses-um6p.ma/CES2026 Psyched to see so much music! (at least 13 presentations on human music, plus more on bird/whale song etc.)

@zixuanjia.bsky.social's Registered Report on Mandarin song-speech relationships is now published in its final form in @peercomjournal.bsky.social. First time publishing with them, but won't be my last! Editor (Denis Bourguet) was great, and it's free (diamond open access)! doi.org/10.24072/pcj...

NZ research funding is in truly dire straits. Prof Deardren: "If you want new things that economically benefit the country, then you can’t afford to let your best and brightest exit research, or exit the country, because you have broken the research system" peterkdearden.substack.com/p/on-not-scr...

*Sharing code for research publications* Here's the process that I've ended up with, through various collaborators like Robert Forkel, @simongreenhill.bsky.social , Stephen Francis Mann and others. Not perfect perhaps, but works pretty ok. A student asked, so I made this illustration.

sigh…*adds to TOMORROW’S syllabus*

Yes non-human animals have culture too! This Phil Trans B special issue includes contributions from many CES members, and discusses its taxonomic breadth and implications for conservation.

Robert Trivers (1943-2026): what a complicated legacy. Of course his Epstein (and other) behaviour is disgusting, but as someone with family who have also suffered from bipolar disorder, I empathise with how hard it must have been for him... (NYTimes gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/s...)

Music is not a universal language www.nature.com/articles/d41...

It took my way too many years before I learned to BOTH cache intermediate data, AND to have a single pipeline which I regularly run without using cached data to make sure it works.

Why does live music hit different? Our new paper has a neural answer: EEG in a concert hall showed stronger brain-rhythm phase locking during live vs. recorded Bach violin — and that predicts higher pleasure & engagement. 1/2

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

Bless open peer review

Congrats to all those journal editors & peer reviewers who legitimised Lynn’s “national IQ” database by letting it into their journals. Truly, it’s a victory for academic freedom to publish papers which claim that children living in a refugee camp constitute a nationally representative sample 👏👏

after much deliberation and giving AI the benefit of the doubt, Wikipedia editors have had enough of AI slop. New policy bans LLM generated content, periodt www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...

My first book, "Comparative musicology", is now fully published by Oxford U. Press: 
 -digital (free! academic.oup.com/book/62353) 
 -print (US$45; global.oup.com/academic/pro...)
 -short Nature summary (free! rdcu.be/e5gLE).

 Here's a thread with chapter summaries and reviews (1/11)

Latest rankings show most of the highest-ranked subjects at the highest-ranked university in NZ are in the social sciences and humanities. Why is the government trying to kill the goose that lays the golden egg by gutting our funding? www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2026... www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

A really nice story about how 'Pō Atarau' ended up on the soundtrack of Project Hail Mary. One thing I would add is that the 1976 master tape was preserved and digitised by the Alexander Turnbull Library. That's why it was discoverable. thespinoff.co.nz/pop-culture/...

And here is an interview I gave about the book/essay last night on Radio NZ: www.rnz.co.nz/national/pro...

My first book, "Comparative musicology", is now fully published by Oxford U. Press: 
 -digital (free! academic.oup.com/book/62353) 
 -print (US$45; global.oup.com/academic/pro...)
 -short Nature summary (free! rdcu.be/e5gLE).

 Here's a thread with chapter summaries and reviews (1/11)

Dear Author, Please be aware that WE are the a predatory publishing group and we will NOT STAND for scammers and phishers preying on you by imitating us! MDPI

Thank you NPR for this great coverage of our research!! you can read the paper here: doi.org/10.1126/scie...

**LION KING INTRO BLARING** 🎶🎶 IT’S THE CIRCLE… THE CIRCLE OF LIFE 🎶🎶

Super proud of my (now former) student Gakuto Chiba, who just received his PhD! Congratulations, Dr. Chiba!!!

I'll be on Radio NZ tonight (www.rnz.co.nz/national/pro...; probably around 9:30pm) to talk about my new book if anyone wants to listen live! (Will share the recording once it's available for anyone interested who can't listen in real time)

My Timeline of Music Notation gets a mention in Sean Williams' latest book "Music at the Threshold from the Sacred to the Dangerous" ( Oxford University Press | doi.org/10.1093/9780... ). Screenshot is from the online edition (print edition not available till May).

"The AI Grad Student": A Harvard professor describes working with Claude. Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: "It faked results, hoping I wouldn't notice." But he ends the essay with "Now I'm doing 100% of my research with LLMs". Am I losing my mind?

New paper out today! When baby zebra finches are tutored with manipulated songs with shuffled syllables, they transform them to be consistent with linguistic laws 🐥 Reanalysis of data from James and Sakata (2017) link.springer.com/article/10.1...