One of the few downsides about living in Leipzig (and eastern Europe more generally) is the absolutely atrocious air quality. Definitely regretting biking into work today....

I just read the declaration that Kira Kelley asked J. Blackwell to consider. This immigrant describes being -unlawfully arrested -taken from one overcrowded & filthy prison to another over 19 days -held incommunicado & ICE never telling him a court ordered his release He describes an American gulag

as I'm revising my course materials, I keep stumbling upon cool @mc-stan.org developments. Current favorites: 1. your model has funnels and you exhausted reparametrization ideas: metric = "dense_e" makes your HMC learn about covariance btw parameters. Sloooow, but effective! 1/

My dog's post-surgery face is a pretty good signifier of the state of my household right now

Today at the Leipzig Hauptbahnhof - a novel solution to the trolley problem

As a side note, it’s funny to see so many of these emails with thirsty academics repeatedly enact Marx’s bit in the 1844 Manuscripts about the power of money. “Oh Mr Epstein, your house in New York is enormous and, unrelatedly, your questions at dinner were so intelligent, so insightful, so deep.”

Very happy to see our ice-fishing paper on the cover of @science.org this week! 🎣🎉 We tracked large groups of Finnish competitive ice-fishers to study how social foragers use social information when searching for resources. 🐟 Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (contact me for open access)

timeline is terrible, time for cozy office vibes

New blog post!!🚨 Michael Chimento gives an overview of the new R package STbayes, designed for creating, fitting and understanding Bayesian models of social transmission 🌍 🧪 Read the blog here 👇

May be of interest to the reproducibility folks: New tutorial on computational reproducibility for simulation studies just dropped! felipelfv.github.io/Why-risk-it-... by @felipefv.bsky.social, Jason Geller & @brodriguesco.bsky.social

Some trivia to keep me off the newsfeeds - I remember when @rmcelreath.bsky.social's stats course was just called "Statistical Thinking"

Voting NO on the DHS funding bill is the bare minimum. Backing Kristi Noem’s impeachment is the bare minimum. Holding law-breaking ICE agents legally accountable is the bare minimum. ICE is beyond reform. Abolish it.

The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.

I noticed my BEC talk is up on youtube: "Planck's Principle, Price's Theorem and the Forces of Cultural Evolution".

A colleague at MPI asked how to get better at math. My vote is Thompson and Gardner's classic *Calculus Made Easy* (originally published in 1910!) I've uploaded my own (almost complete) worked problem sets from this classic book. A few thoughts.../

"I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace"

Beautiful business research people: The Leibniz Information Centre for Economics has created an accessible introduction to Open Science that you can download in both English and German here: expedition-open-science.org You can even order the German print version for free!

Our new paper in Hunter-Gatherer Research! We explored women’s decision-making power within households in two subsistence communities with different gender norms (BaYaka foragers & Bandongo fisher-farmers) in the Congolese rainforest ✨ www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3...

It's time to officially let X/Twitter go. That platform's decline from a vibrant public square to what is now a platform for hate & disinformation has been painful to experience. I’ve already in this great community & look forward to continuing our conversations. www.reuters.com/business/med...

If you work on corvid ecology, behaviour, cognition, or conservation, this might be useful for you 👇 I’ve just published CORVIDATA in Scientific Data 🐦 doi.org/10.1038/s415... (1/4)

Since I've been grumpy about distant-reading of lyrics, let me share this spectacular figure from Sobchuk & Beheim 2025, which traces two themes in Eng fiction 1850-1940, and decomposes change to new-authors, author-exits, and individual-change. Real progress in our understanding here.

Oxytocin varies across the lifecourse in a sex-specific way - new paper in @pnas.org working with Tsimane communities. For women, OT looks like a sex hormone and is linked to breastfeeding and childcare. For men, probably more related to health and aging. www.linkedin.com/posts/uzh-me...

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...

welcome to the future, it sucks ass

Very happy to see this collaboration with @babeheim.bsky.social published in Animal Cognition: 'Vocal mimicry in corvids'. Since posting the first preprint, we have identified evidence for vocal mimicry in 8 more species, thanks to the community highlighting additional sources #communityscience

I will never not repost this (Sound on for maximum effect)

"Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that." Looking forward to seeing Jimmy back on the air.

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...