Our institute @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social starting a new Masters program with the University of Leipzig. If you are a bachelors student graduating soon, and would like to get involved with our research during you MSc, consider applying :) www.uni-leipzig.de/en/studying/...

Russians, again 🤬 Destroying everything beautiful

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Play was historically quite neglected in anthropology and archaeology. So much so that one of the most widespread games in human history has never received a systematic cross-cultural study. To amend that, we systematically compiled a dataset of 1391 spinning tops from 347 societies.

My book, MIDDLEMEN: LITERARY AGENTS AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN FICTION, comes out in six weeks!It shows how literary agents went from "cankers" to "mere peripheral necessities" to "the center of the literary establishment" to "the biggest fish in publishing." press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Monotheism has swept the world in just a few thousand years, making it one of the most important cultural innovations in human history. In this week's New Yorker, I offer an explanation for what makes it so powerful. (It's not about belief in one god.) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Yay! This week I started working at the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt as a group leader. Lots of work ahead, but super exciting kind of work 🔥

I'm intrigued by this new book. The claim that scientific discoveries are often preceded by major methodological innovations is not new. But looks like this book claims that this is *always* the case. Gotta read to find out, I guess... academic.oup.com/book/62274

Out in Evolutionary Human Sciences! With @mikekestemont.bsky.social, @jbcamps.bsky.social, @remcosleiderink.bsky.social & Anne Chao New work on unseen species models for cult heritage to the question: how many stories were _shared_ between medieval French and Dutch literature? lnkd.in/exyAWtir

Happy to see our second study testing the "drunk hypothesis" published in PNAS 🎉 After analyzing the role of alcohol in the rise of sociopolitical complexity on a global scale www.nature.com/articles/s41... we have now focused on the role of kava in Oceania www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Written English has barely changed in 300 years. If you can read Harry Potter, you can read Robinson Crusoe (1719).

On the eve of the 4th anniversary of Russia’s full-scale war, we raise the Ukrainian flag at our headquarters. So it can fly proudly at the heart of our Union, where it belongs. One day Ukraine will be safe. Ukraine will be free. Ukraine will be part of our European family.

Four years have passed since Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia was supposed to win in three days. Instead, Ukraine reinvented modern warfare, built a drone industry, and can destroy a thousand Russian soldiers in a day. Ukraine can win.

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

A cool opportunity to do PhD with Olivier Morin in Paris! I was supervised by Olivier in the past, and it was extremely interesting and productive. Don't miss!

Doing *robust* LLM-based annotation may be challenging. So we need more papers like this one, developing reproducible pipelines for various kinds of data royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

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/...