OK, it finally happened! My new article, "Gradience as a cognitive principle for evaluating numerical notations", is now out today in @pnas.org. By focusing on numerals' use for communication instead of arithmetic, we have a new tool to assess their efficiency. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

📣 NEW! I’ve just released the BIGGEST and perhaps most creative project I’ve ever worked on! “Searching for Birds” searchingforbirds.visualcinnamon.com 🐤 A project, an article, an exploration that dives into the data that connects humans with birds, by looking at how we search for birds.

I will start using this comic to remind the skeptics that birds are dinosaurs

Why did consciousness evolve at all? A superb special issue of @royalsocietypublishing.org brings together experts across disciplines to explore the functions of consciousness and why it emerged in some species but not others. @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

Demographic shifts, inter-group contact and environmental conditions drive language extinction and diversification. #linguistics

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.../

A neat paper I worked on, begun over 2 years ago when our concerns were more myopic, was just published today. It came out an excellent set of workshops at the Santa Fe Institute, led by the indefatigable Joshua Garland. The gist: sometimes inefficiency is good for you www.nature.com/articles/s44...

📆 Mark your calendars: the 7th edition of CHR will take place 5–8 January 2027 in Manchester, UK, organized by the Center for Digital Humanities, Culture and Media at The University of Manchester. We hope it’s the perfect way to beat the post-Christmas and New Year blues. See you at #CHR2027!

Proc B with @sampassmore.bsky.social! We used simulations to explore the innovation strategies of speed climbers 🧗‍♀️ Innovation is higher among slower athletes and lower when the population size is larger, and the overall balance of innovation and copying appears to be suboptimal 🔗 bit.ly/499QjZM

⚡ 16th European Summer University in Digital Humanities will happen in Besançon, from July 6 – July 18, 2026! ⚡ Save the dates; dm me for any questions; if you'd want to teach at ESU, we will open call for workshops very soon as well! previous year: esudh.github.io/esubesancon/

New paper in AI & Society w/ @hoytlong.bsky.social + @teddyroland.bsky.social! We simulated 101 "AI authors" to see how LLMs imagine creativity & cultural distinction + compared them to real historical authors. What do AI authors want & how do they pursue success? link.springer.com/article/10.1...

father: how do you spell 'elegy' me: e-l-e-g-y, but .. are you sure that's the word you're after? him: of course I'm sure. You sure that's how it's spelled? Looks wrong me: it was the major focus of my PhD, I am 💯 sure. him: OK. Well I have SMS'd the restaurant about my friend's seafood elegy. me: 🤦

Wow! My author copies arrived early for my new book from @bloomsburyling.bsky.social, Speaking in Pictures, about language, cognition, comics, and visual communication. It looks beautiful, and after working on it for 7 years I’m so glad it’s out in the world soon! www.visuallanguagelab.com/sip

🎉🍾 very excited to see this out before 2025 ends doi.org/10.1111/2041... with Will Hoppitt in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social. This paper is an overview of our new R package STbayes, a user-friendly toolkit for performing Bayesian NBDA analyses. @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

I got wonderful news: I was granted a position of Max Planck independent group leader at the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics ⬇️ (@ae.mpg.de) in Frankfurt, which I'll join in early 2026. It's a huge honor: being trusted with academic freedom offered by MPG. My group will study the evolution of arts. 1/3

A curated global dataset of social contact between diverse language communities www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

I was kindly invited to talk about my research at @cudanlab.bsky.social, and here's a video of that talk. And no, it's not about Steve Jobs 😄, but about evolution of the arts – 🎸📚🎨

I'm a big fan of these workshops organized by Dariia. They offer a chance 1️⃣ to learn useful skills fast (usually, practical & hands-on) & 2️⃣ to help Ukraine (all the payments, at least 20 eur/person, go to well-established charities). I attended many times, planning to attend this one too.

Today sees the publication of the Theme Issue featuring the CES Transformation Fund grant scheme. Enjoy! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3... @durhamdcerc.bsky.social @durhamanthropology.bsky.social @cultevolfunding.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

More images in a scientific paper that can be described as low quality, of questionable accuracy, environmentally damaging, job stealing and copyright infringing. Hey, maybe it's time for scientific journals to just stop accepting AI-generated images?

Join us today @cudanlab.bsky.social for a lecture and discussion feat. Oleg Sobchuk @sobchuk.bsky.social, of @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social on "Evolution of Literature and the Arts" 16:00-18:00 Tallinn time (UTC+2) i.e. 60 minutes from this post. Details & zoom: cudan.tlu.ee/events/2025-...

AI was so close to getting it right...

Before the monstrous transformation of Twitter to X, it was considered normal to be active on academic Twitter. Now, even though we've migrated to Bluesky ("safe space"), I feel that many ppl (including myself) are less active in posting anything. Have you noticed this trend? Or am I imagining this?

After a long time in development, {traktok} #rstats is now finally on CRAN! Whether you have access to the Research API or just want to scrape some pages, traktok has you covered jbgruber.github.io/traktok/

it's interesting to project the chatgpt's style into the past -- read historical texts with an LLM detector. What are its precursors? What are the linguistic registers on which it depends? Back-cover publisher texts seems like one good candidate to me

📚 MajinBook: an impressive new dataset by Antoine Mazières & @tpoibeau.bsky.social. Metadata for 500,000 books from Library Genesis & GoodReads. Mostly books from the last 100 years or so, see the plot ⬇️ arxiv.org/abs/2511.11412

What happens when we model the detective archetype at scale? 🕵️‍♂️📚 Our new paper, accepted for #CHR2025 combines literary history and computational modeling to trace how the figure of the detective evolves across 150 years of French fiction. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00627

I have just discovered that Apple brought back the C/AC button in the calculator app in iOS 26, an act I take full credit for.

A reminder that we are accepting submissions for a themed issue at Computational Humanities Research journal 📙 Deadline is end of February 2026!

How do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone? Our new preprint, led by @anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837

Joel Mokyr received a Nobel! It's a wonderful signal for cultural evolution scholars. Mokyr was defending an evolutionary approach to economic history for 40 years. Check out A Culture of Growth, The Gifts of Athena, or The Lever of Riches: some of the books that inspired me the most. I interpret...

Happy to share our new paper introducing the Animal Culture Database in Scientific Data: We’re putting together a resource consolidating primary research on cultural behaviors in wild animal populations and how they’re affected by human activity (1/5) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Why does Western Paleolithic cave art strongly prefer animal side views and often use abbreviations? Our new paper in Topics in Cognitive Science challenges long-held assumptions about these artistic choices using cognitive science experiments. A thread 1/n onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The UC Berkeley School of Information is hiring an assistant professor in the broad field of Information--including areas of info seeking/retrieval, digital humanities, cultural analytics, info viz, & philosophy of information (among others). Deadline Nov 1! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014

Delighted to announce the publication of 'From Questions to Knowledge', my new and updated statistics and data analysis handbook. www.danielnettle.eu/2025/09/14/f...

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....

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

My copy of the Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution has arrived! Looks gorgeous – and massive. And somewhere on page 554 (which is roughly the middle of the book 😅) you can find my chapter. Big thanks to the editors for organizing this!

1. What does a Cold War-era game theory problem known as the silent duel have to do with high-risk research strategies, publication in Cell/Nature/Science glamor journals, and the academic job market? Kevin Gross and I tackle these questions in our latest arXiv preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.06718

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

"Is it getting harder to make a hit?" – asks this new paper. Short answer: yes. "The inequality in song lifetimes has increased rapidly since the turn of the millennium. Top-10 songs are lingering on the chart for longer and longer" epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10....

For decades, linguists assumed kids drive language change through ‘imperfect’ learning. New research by Raviv, Blasi & Kempe (Psychological Review) show that instead, adolescents and young adults are more likely to spread, normalize, and cement linguistic shifts. www.mpi.nl/news/young-c...

Great news from the @erc.europa.eu today: I received an ERC Starting Grant to study the cultural evolution of literature 🔥 www.eva.mpg.de/press/news/a...

Humans are in fact a venomous species (Figure 6 from "A global database on blowguns with links to geography and language" Aguirre-Fernández et al doi.org/10.1017/ehs....)

🪦 New in @pnas.org: we analyzed 38 million U.S. obituaries to ask what signals a life well lived: What values are people most remembered for? How do legacies shift with cultural events? How do age and gender shape what it means to have lived well? www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

I happened to accidentally find this edited volume on quantitative approaches to literature, from 1969. Never heard of it - even though it was co-edited by one of the big figures in narratology: Lubomir Doležel (another surprise). The minimalist plots here are ⚡️

🧠 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 was looking through an old laptop and came across a thing on overused academic book cover art I put together years ago that I thought might raise a chuckle or two 🗃️ web.archive.org/web/20180222...