Look at academia giving me a little hope

When the labels for a bunch of abstracted trees (opening moves in Go!!) are already bridging fantasy and scifi genres: Early Modern Era Imperial Era International Era Internet Era Superhuman AI Era

Cool new paper (and a thread about it) by @babeheim.bsky.social on the cultural evolution of Go games! Check out these colourful decision trees 🔥 doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

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!

🚨 Excited to share a new paper 📃, years in the making, with Zach Wood. We propose that human evolution is characterized as an Evolutionary Transition in Inheritance and Individuality (ETII). Explainer and OA paper below:

last update: 48 years ago lol

What do Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Mortal Kombat have to teach us about #cultural #evolution? As a social-technological phenomenon, #arcade game genres evolved like cultural species—some diversified, while others became "living fossils." 🕹️🧪 👉 doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

I have always loved linguistics, coming from Baltimore. This is awesome. I follow a bunch of linguistics and language people on TikTok, but my children have been watching it with me off and on and well, things have gotten a bit weird for me there.

I'm very excited to share the central paper from my PhD out now in Science Advances. We investigated how social effects among neighbors shape the evolution of reproductive cooperation and the pace of adaptive population growth among the Indigenous Tsimane of Bolivia. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I'm playing around with the decision tree for professional openings in the game of Go, and I've almost re-created the @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social logo

Ian Dunt's piece on the politics of Superman is brilliant, but I don't think anything can quite live up to the insight from this 1940 UK newspaper article. iandunt.substack.com/p/immigrant-...

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

I am really happy to share this new paper with Konstantinos Alexiou on Steady-State and Dynamical Behavior of a PDE Model of Multilevel Selection with Pairwise Group-Level Competition, which is now published in #BulletinMathBio. link.springer.com/article/10.1... 🧪

Glad to see the old Broad Street Pump myth finally getting some public criticism. Terrible causal inference - I think we should stop teaching it altogether, or maybe teach it as an anti-model of good reasoning.

Big cities are vibrant hubs of culture, but why exactly is that? Now out in @natcomms.nature.com, we analysed music listening patterns of over 2.5 million people and demographics to examine mechanisms driving cultural diversity. With @researchdeezer.bsky.social @norijacoby.bsky.social Highlights ⬇

The reason Putin threw the richest man in Russia in prison and destroyed his fortune and redistributed his assets to his own cronies is so that the second richest man wouldn't have to choose. bsky.app/profile/bapt...

Great to see @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social now on BlueSky! - a pre-/post-print server for works related to ecology, evolution, conservation - empirical or theoretical, reviews, guides protocols, etc. - accepts preprints in several languages - run by @sortee.bsky.social preprint your work! 🧪

Please enjoy these delightful images from a 1993 paper on walrus vision, showing estimated visual fields in different poses (I especially love how they look like alternate covers for a scifi novel about space walruses with ray-shooting eyeballs) Source: www.aquaticmammalsjournal.org/wp-content/u...

The funniest thing about How to Train Your Dragon is that the Viking parents all have thick Scottish accents and the kids all have American accents.

AOC: We need to be talking about ICE agents and the cowardly policy of covering their faces — and, in many cases, their identification… The idea that we’re going to allow a paramilitary force to bloom, one that isn’t accountable to the Constitution… we’ve got another thing coming.

This is an absolute disaster. If we don't stop this, they will turn NSF into a pawn of the Trump administration. There will be no research on climate, biodiversity, or anything that isn't eugenics or AI or how to more efficiently destroy the planet for profit. This cannot be allowed to happen.

The new Pope didn't tweet once in 2024. In 2025, he's posted 5 times, in which he: - Criticized JD Vance's views on Catholicism and Jesus - Posted an article opposing Trump's immigration policies - Retweeted twice about the Pope's health - Retweeted a criticism of Trump & Bukele's laughter at KAG.

Yes Nintendo-Senpai, whatever you want

I’m overwhelmed by the expressions of sympathy and support. And still this pales in comparison to what they are doing to immigrants and to undermine the Bill of Rights. If you could do one thing for me, call your representatives and demand accountability for their white supremacist terrorism.

We all need to play to our strengths at this time, so I recommend leveraging your existing networks (even if it's reposting this!), but if you're not sure where to start, here's where you can find and contact your elected officials: www.usa.gov/elected-offi...

yes... ha ha ha... yes!

beyond parody

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

new preprint: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/9055 Code used in research is key to the methods and scientific output and we should ensure it’s not just "available" but easy to verify and build on. We present a practical tool to code review for scientists 🧪 work with @animalecol-nioo.bsky.social

My daughters' friends weren't understanding her incessant FE: Three Houses stories, so (entirely on her own) she made a powerpoint presentation explaining the political context of Faerghus and the age breakdown of the Gaareg Mach Monastary student body.

Strategies in the ancient game of Go mirror deep societal shifts, from feudal traditions to today’s AI age. Analyzing 118,000 games over 424 years, this study uncovers cycles of innovation and stagnation tied to population structures and technology. By @babeheim.bsky.social osf.io/cewst

these people hate DEI because they would be unemployable in any system where they couldn’t rely on favoritism and nepotism

Almost every line of this story would have been simply unbelievable a few months ago: —Pioneering cancer researcher; —*Arrested* at airport in Boston; —Now indefinite ICE detention in Louisiana; —"Crime": not declaring some frog-embryo samples for research. Read it. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

#ehbea2025 is now listening to the New Investigator plenary by @turecek.bsky.social, the first EHBEA NI to have published both a children’s book and volume of poems!

With @sheinalew.bsky.social: Teaching is associated with the transmission of opaque culture and leadership across 23 egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, in @naturecomms.bsky.social #evolution #culture 🧪 #LeadSciSky #CultEvo www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Here's the stable link to the most recent version 👀 osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨 New preprint! 🚨 I looked at 400+ years of cumulative cultural evolution in the Game of Go from feudalism to superhuman AI. Did AlphaGo etc. completely disrupt human play? No! More like human-machine convergence, rather than revolution. Check out these decision trees! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Postdoc opening in beautiful Stockholm 🇸🇪! Join us at Karolinska Institutet to explore how interdependent traits shape social learning and cultural evolution. 🧠 Behavioral + computational work 🤝 Work w/ labs in Amsterdam @lucasmolleman.bsky.social & Leuven Details: shorturl.at/Wzy9o

The Fourth Circuit is famously succinct. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

🚨Job alert! Two-year postdoc to join the Rep2SI project at @lsemethodology.bsky.social! We're looking for a modeller to join our team of ethnographers & experimentalists studying the role of reputation and reputational concern in perpetuating social inequality. Apply by 4 May: tinyurl.com/yjccd3vv

val kilmer’s turn in TOP SECRET is one of the single best comedy performances ever committed to film, both in terms of comic precision and mechanical virtuosity. just watch this whole clip in its entirety; it’s stunning

New preprint in collaboration with @babeheim.bsky.social: Vocal mimicry in corvids. We describe vocal mimicry, i.e., copying of sounds produced by another species or the environment, in 31 out of 128 corvid species (24%). (1/2) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

yes, very good