CES postdoc and PhD alert! 🚨

Natural history on canvas: Brueghel knew about bird-eating noctule bats Just published in @pnas.org, OA for all eyes Led by the one-and-only @romero-vidal.bsky.social, with the amazing @elena-tena.bsky.social and Sonia Sánchez-Navarro @ebdonana.bsky.social LINK: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

📣 I'm hiring! Two positions (PhD student & Postdoc) in my ERC project Macroevolution of European Literature. Let's study the cultural evolution of literature using massive data 📚📈 📍Frankfurt | Apply by August 15 Details: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo... Please repost to help spread the word!

I am definitely applying! But, seriously, you should.

Look and share widely! A new center starting up with great ideas and cool vibes! Highly recommended for digital humanities, cultural evolution and related folks interested in literature, history, and the arts. #culturalevolution #digitalhumanities #jobs

📣 I'm hiring! Two positions (PhD student & Postdoc) in my ERC project Macroevolution of European Literature. Let's study the cultural evolution of literature using massive data 📚📈 📍Frankfurt | Apply by August 15 Details: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo... Please repost to help spread the word!

All talks are now available including mine: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZmF... Luckily the video became online on the same day as the paper I talked about at the end of my talk "confidentially" 😅

New interactive blog! "Why Adjusted Regression Coefficients Are Less Descriptive Than They Look" rpsychologist.com/descriptive-...

Some of the first work related to my ERC is now available as a preprint 👉 arxiv.org/pdf/2606.20623 We model the learning of real-world melodies as resource-constrained inference over generative programs, with new implications for Rate-distortion theory: learning changes what is cheap to encode! 🧵👇

Hello! Pleased to share the UK (& commonwealth) hardback cover for The Thinking Animal. We went back and forth a bit with this one, and I wasn't sure at first, but it has really grown on me. What do you think?

LLMs are used widely in the behavioral sciences. But we have no good standards for how to do so. We introduce a consensus-based reporting checklist to improve transparency, reproducibility and ethical accountability of LLM-based research in the behavioural sciences. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Here's a proper mathematical model of the interaction between conformity and migration www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... mostly coming to the same conclusions as the simulations I did here journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

1. How common is LLM use in scientific publishing, and how does it vary across field, publisher, journal prestige, author demographics etc.? @kylesiler.bsky.social has new paper in PNAS that addresses this question on a massive scale: 7.3 million papers from Elsevier, PLOS, MDPI, and Frontiers.

Amazon and eBay give star ratings for seller trustworthiness — but should we trust eBay? Institutions that publicize reputations, from e-commerce to religious authorities, benefit from user participation. Hiro Okabe studied how such institutions will behave. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Reptiles with longer Wikipedia pages tend to be bigger. The relationship is a power law with exponent = 0.85. I guess humans really like writing about big lizards? The longest article is the Komodo Dragon.

New paper published with @andreskarjus.bsky.social as shared 1st author: We show experimentally that professional artists' skill set can transfer to making images with generative AI; tested with artists, laypeople, and GPT-4o copying an image or creatively diverging from it, only by prompting.

🚨New paper alert!🚨 In our new paper with @oliviermorin.bsky.social, Rowan Hall, and Marie Halo published in the Journal of Language Evolution, we explored the relationship between word length and ambiguity on a large-cross linguistic dataset. 1/6

Had a chance to present our new work on literary evolution at @ces2026.bsky.social conference. What you see on that slide is a dynamic network of influences between genres of fiction

More @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social conference talks! @babeheim.bsky.social on norm psychology, and in particular escalator standing norms in Japan

I just received my copy of the latest book by my @sfiscience.bsky.social colleague Douglas Erwin. A fascinating exploration of how innovation and novelty emerge in evolution. Looking forward to reading it. @multicellgenome.bsky.social @sfelena.bsky.social @manlius.bsky.social @brigan.bsky.social

New #ecoevo paper @pnas.org: Evolution of species’ range and niche in changing environments. I show that feedback between evolutionary and population dynamics can create a tipping point where genetic variance erodes, and species’ ranges contract or fragment www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #popgen 🧬🧪 🌎

Out today in @science.org: with the amazing Haochuan Cui, Yiling Lin, & @lingfeiwu.bsky.social, we analyzed 3.6 million scientists publishing 1960–2020. The findings reshape a century-old debate about age and scientific creativity.

New paper 🚨 "Cultural evolution – of the arts". Together with @masonyoungblood.bsky.social we wrote a short paper – half essay, half bibliometric analysis – aiming to describe this emerging research area (1/3) doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

Check out our (@sobchuk.bsky.social) special issue on the cultural evolution of the arts in Evolutionary Human Sciences, with papers from @mikekestemont.bsky.social @babeheim.bsky.social @svalver.bsky.social and more! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

New paper 🚨 "Cultural evolution – of the arts". Together with @masonyoungblood.bsky.social we wrote a short paper – half essay, half bibliometric analysis – aiming to describe this emerging research area (1/3) doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

My group at the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics now has a name: Cultural Evolution of the Arts! You can read a bit more about the idea behind the group at the group's web page: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/research/... And here's the obligatory door nameplate :)

A computational theory of Aha! moments! New paper explaining why Aha! moments occur & why they feel so good. TLDR: They are a form of meta-cognitive prediction errors i.e. they occur when we surprise ourselves about our own abilities! @rachitdubey.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New theme issue of #PhilTransB: The evolution of collective intelligence. Read #OA: buff.ly/f0gWUxH

Does anyone know a German labour law expert? I have a very specific question, and I'm struggling to get advice.

The call for the PhD programme in Sociology and Social Research at Trento is out, with deadline 14 May. Interested in a PhD in cultural evolution / social media / cultural analytics? Get in touch! www.unitn.it/en/phd/socio...

I would have preferred to have the "draw the rest of the owl" meme on the cover, but this will do. Seems like it is on schedule, and we'll leave some typos so you know we didn't write it with AI.

"One test, many tongues: Surveying language proficiency across the globe" out now in @pnasnexus.org A practical challenge in online experiments with global participants is testing language proficiency. We automated the generation of language tests across nearly 2,000 languages.

I've been thinking a lot about the foundations of cultural evolutionary theory. While there's been a lot of work on transmission mechanisms, there has been far less work on cultural *selection*. Here's a new working paper presenting a taxonomy of cultural selection processes. osf.io/preprints/so...

Easter EP As AI agents get smarter, are we entering a golden age of hypercreativity? Or are we entering an age of homogenised culture where we all just recycle the same AI-generated ideas? @adigitaltanay.bsky.social & Jay explore this and much more with @babeheim.bsky.social youtu.be/coQnyaEw50s

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...