AI letters are flooding the medical literature. (gift link) Thanks, Altman.

I'm sure it's totally coincidental that the AoNZ government's changes to the Marsden Fund have been followed by successful applications led by female investigators dropping from 55% to 33%, and successful applications led by Māori investigators dropping from 13% to 5%. 🫠 🧪

This story is grim - and one outcome of the ‘business’ model of higher education. Academic freedom at risk not (just) within a country but from external forces…

👉 A reminder that the deadline for submitting your abstract to the CES 2026 #CESRabat is the 16th of November. 🔗Submit here: airess.fgses-um6p.ma/ces2026 We look forward to seeing you in Rabat!

Something for everyone to hate here! Plenty to agree with, but also strawman arguments, conflating preregistration, replication and Registered Reports, attacking Jussim as preregistration advocate but promoting his anti-wokeism…

Already getting targeted ads in Canada mentioning the World Series loss

The despair when your niche interest appears has a brief appearance on social media but you miss it by half a day because of time zones / your own kin-ties get up at 4am so you go to bed early 😅 Please check out kinbank.net for all your kinship terminology variational needs!

Here's my more comprehensive proposal for a whole course's worth of good cultural evolution papers: bsky.app/profile/patr...

This thicc 71-chapter book (academic.oup.com/edited-volum...) arrived just in time to use as the textbook for my new "Cultural Evolution" class I've just started teaching! Featuring this chapter from @cailinmeister.bsky.social @psmaldino.bsky.social & Jingyi Wu as well as much more including...

Kinship terminology rarely perfectly reflects biological kinship. The root meaning of the Indo-European word "mother" isn't even "biological mother". The ancestral Indo-European system, the patrilineal Omaha system, calls your mother's sister and all women on mother's side "mother" (B in diagram).

This is bizarre - I’m white, and I call my parents’ cousins “Aunt Cathy” “Uncle Ted”, etc. What do other people call them: “1st cousin once removed Cathy”?! Where are my anthropologists studying kinship terminology when we need them? @sampassmore.bsky.social

New blogpost on @elife.bsky.social's new Replication study type deevybee.blogspot.com/2025/10/prob.... tldr = I think it's doomed. #Replication #Publishing #Reproducibility

i do feel a bit silly constantly complaining about having to write the code and also go to the meetings when I think about Rumi being able to merge two demanding professions like that

> “Universities are not tech companies,” Olivia Guest and Iris van Rooij, two computational cognitive scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands[.] “Our role is to foster critical thinking,” the researchers said, “not to follow industry trends uncritically.”

Beyond parody that these guys would publish a book called “The War On Science” in 2025 praising Trump as defender of science

check out this absolutely terrifying ancient babylonian lullaby

"wow i never would have predicted there would be a big scandal involving athletes and the mob when you legalized sports gambling" said no one ever

This article is quite good and balanced, but I find these numbers pretty insane.

thx to @nature.com @helenpearson.bsky.social for including our words & letter‼️ > unis are allowing or even encouraging the use of AI tools — many of which are controlled by companies, have unknown cognitive impacts and are dogged by ethical and environmental concerns. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Replication Research (R2), a diamond open access journal, has joined our growing list of PCI-friendly journals 🎉 Learn more about them here is.gd/r2_journal #PsychSciSky #SciPub

Got my first potential cover art for my book! Publication now scheduled for February (preprint available at osf.io/preprints/ps...). (I'm hoping to get a slightly less abstract final cover with more of a sense of some of the title keywords like "music", "science", "world", etc...)

Genuinely least self-aware motherfucker in Washington.

Finally had a proper read for journal club. Very cool dataset & analyses! I'm not convinced by the idea that the adaptive function of chant/music is relaxation though - surely this is a proximate mechanism for deeper functions like social bonding! doi.org/10.1017/S014...

I just posted a preprint of my commentary on Manvir's important target article. It's titled "If lullabies and hero stories are super-attractors, what are music and language? Absolute universals imply genetic mechanisms": doi.org/10.31234/osf... Looking forward to seeing the other commentaries!

I put some time into reading the SSAG reports today and what really worries me is that they suggest a huge change but with no real value proposition - so there will be no new money. Unless someone at MBIE has the chops for this, the reforms will really just be a lick of paint that masks the rot.

My newest for The New Yorker! I wrote about the project, centuries-old and surprisingly successful at times, of recovering lost mythologies that still resonate in modern storytelling.

Here’s my response to the NZ government shakeup of science funding today, on top of their reductions in bluesky funding and lack of accountability for climate issues. 🧪 We need urgent action on what the SSAG report describes as a fragile and chronically underfunded research system.

Next time an institution tells you how seriously it takes research misconduct, ask them if it's *this* seriously. www.bmj.com/content/297/...

Converted NAs to 0

Good to be back home after a week-long trip to Germany for a symposium at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology on "What Makes Us Human?" (www.eva.mpg.de/events/2025-...). I spent about the same amount of time traveling as I did at the symposium, but it was worth it.

Probably the most dystopian thing I’ve ever heard

We're pleased to announce and congratulate the winners of the Advancing Cultural Evolution Course Design Awards! This competition recognises leading educators in the field of cultural evolution and their existing efforts to advance its teaching. We have 7 winners and 2 runners up (listed below):

I’ve just finished a symposium in Leipzig where I got to meet Svante. It’s mind-blowing how much his work has revolutionized our understanding of human evolution 🤯 www.eva.mpg.de/events/2025-...

The always brilliant Anjana Ahuja calls out the Royal Society for failing to stand up to Elon Musk. www.ft.com/content/d4eb...

The only correct take on a fundamentally anti-human technology.

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

I never met Jane Goodall, but she loomed over much of my reporting over the years. With @emilyanthes.bsky.social I wrote a piece about her scientific legacy. Gift link: nyti.ms/46PGBtd

Relatedly, I’m curious: how do people feel about reading books vs listening to audiobooks? It was only really with audiobooks I was able to rediscover the joy of reading for fun since feeling like I didn’t have time to sit and read (especially after becoming a parent)

Hi! Did you know that you aren’t pronouncing axolotl correctly? Suppression of indigenous languages by the Spanish is one of the Four Wounds of Colonization. This is a small subversion of colonial power you can use! Axolotl is a Nahuatl word, and it sounds like this:

Although we cannot offer to move your review request further, we believe Communications Tomer may find it of interest, see the link to transfer your review there. I'm sorry to not respond more positively, and I hope that you continue to see Tomer Ullman as a venue for your future review requests.

I really like our paper published today. It is written directly for Māori and Pacific prospective and current PhD students in STEM www.journal.mai.ac.nz/10.20507/MAI...

The working link to Tara's latest, share this with the Māori and Pacific grads around you!

Honored to have been interviewed for this week's issue of @currentbiology.bsky.social!

Teaching advice please — I’m deciding if I should replace traditional paper assignments with an alternative now that we are all battling AI generated student papers… But what is the best alternative?

HEY GUYS Let's take money from basic science and use give it the outcome of basic science 🤡 #NZGovtAntiScience www.nzherald.co.nz/business/ret...

New paper alert! 🧪 www.doi.org/10.1057/s415...

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