why has no-one written a book on the evolution of cooperation titled "Decent with Modification"? #evolution #culturalevolution

Today I learned that Grizzly Bears and Polar Bears can hybridise to become Pizzly Bears (or Grolars). Although all 8 known examples come from the same female polar bear, who I guess, has a certain taste in men. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly...

Rats have better taste than I do 🍷 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

All languages are their sisters badly pronounced www.frenchclasses.com/tablettes-de...

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

From the archive. New DNA analysis has revealed surprising diversity among remains from burial sites in Peru. A genetic anthropologist explains what this suggests about the 15th century Inca palace. Read more: www.sapiens.org/biology/inca...

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

Excellent science is extremely fragile.

Language can be tricky to parse without context. For instance, the sentence “Rowan fed his pet chicken” is ambiguous. Is the chicken Rowan’s pet or his pet’s meal? Some AI models can recognize the syntactic differences between these two possible meanings.

yesterday on RNZ I talked with Kathryn Ryan about cuts to NZ science funding and the risk of losing talent www.rnz.co.nz/national/pro... here's some correspondence about the opposite problem: kiwi scientists who want to return home to work, but can't, given the bleak funding environment #nzpol

basic research funding is vital. Cant harvest the fruit without feeding the trunk.

“Bonferonni correction”, an invaluable method in #statistics, refers to the act of repeatedly correcting misspellings of the word Bonferroni at multiple places in a draft manuscript. #science #academia

The person Musk is quote-tweeting refers to himself as an “evolutionary behavioral scientist”. Having people like this “representing” us in the public eye, without much obvious pushback, is doing enormous reputational damage to the field

So proud to see our new paper out in PNAS spearheaded by @emilypigott.bsky.social She found a tiny 46,000 yr old Neanderthal bone at Starosele (Crimea). DNA work revealed long-distance connections across Eurasia, supported by stone tool evidence @heasvienna.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The problem with linguists proposing attention to language in the world is that their solution often seems to be just make people linguists. Which isn’t tenable, nor reasonable.

I'm sure OpenAI is being very compassionate and empathetic about how they're handling this :eyeroll: techcrunch.com/2025/10/27/o...

#CrowCoG is hiring🚨MULTIPLE PAID RESEARCH ASSISTANT POSITIONS 🚨for our 2026 field season (May - Sep)! Field and aviary-based positions - come help us study the remarkable tool-making New Caledonian crows. Apply here: bit.ly/3WlxxHE

an MP pushing for this is literally the science minister, Shane Reti (he's in the district the road would service, obviously). Any journo can quote me: Chris Luxon is an idiot if he thinks the country needs a single road more than it needs an entire science establishment. Reti too. #nzpol

our govt wants to spend 327 times more on a single road ($18b) than they are currently spending yearly on all of basic science in new zealand ($55m) #nzpol

Hey seabird folks - have you ever thought "*ANOTHER* talk about <species X>?!" So did we. So we reviewed 3000 conference abstracts to see which species get the spotlight. Huge work from @ingridpollet.bsky.social with me and @seabirdsentinel.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The world is drowning in AI Garbage and I think most people have yet to notice: 82% of the books in one section on Amazon.com “were likely written” by AI. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

There is a form of mosquito that lives in subways and tube tunnels across the world - did it evolve recently to take advantage of this urban environment or has it been around for much longer? www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Just so we're clear about the scale of the problem: Half a million occurrences of `random_state=42` on github, and another almost 200k occurrences of `random.seed(42)`. (And that's just Python. There are also ~20k cases in R.) 1/2

Sometimes tidyverse drives me mad by being too clever. Just spent 20 mins debugging this:

Interesting Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. B theme issue: "A solid base for scaling up: the structure of numeration systems". Edited by Andrea Bender, Jean-Charles Pelland, @simongreenhill.bsky.social, & @coollinguist.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

My paper "Base structures across lexical and notational numeral modalities" (PhilTransB) addresses a whole class of questions around the role that semiotic modality, and specifically number words vs. number symbols, plays in the structure of numerical systems.

In a new paper led by Jiaqi Yang we trace the distribution of Denisovan introgressed DNA in ancient modern human genomes over time. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Surely I can't be the only person who has too many github repositories for osf.io or figshare or zenodo to handle?!

New paper out in the Journal of Language Evolution, with @bonniemclean.bsky.social and Chieh-Hsi Wu: “Combined lexical and phonotactic data resolves uncertainties in the evolutionary diversification of the Japonic language family” doi.org/10.1093/jole... Summary below🧵1/8

Could I politely suggest, that with how Arts & Humanities research funding has been pulled from all of these, that political interference has already occurred.

Out now in Biology Letters, my latest paper tackles an apparently simple question: how many characters are needed to reconstruct a phylogeny? TL;DR: in most cases between 100 and 500, more than a substantial portion of morphological datasets, but the story is more complex... doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Because I think better in pictures, here is a visualisation of languages according to documentation and endangerment status (I'm calling it glottocloud). glottolog.org/langdoc/status

Guillaume Jacques and I have collaborated to survey spindle whorls and the origins of weaving in East Asia ... lots of new stuff in this preprint ... a novel method for processing spindle whorl archaeological data, comparison with farming, and new linguistic information ... osf.io/preprints/so...

Great article on why we should be careful using AI Participants in research by @cathleenogrady.bsky.social www.science.org/content/arti...

Hey, has anyone compared performance on the Stroop task cross-linguistically?

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

14 years ago Paul Callaghan gave this talk. It leaned in to the idea of making Aotearoa New Zealand a place where talented people wanted to live. Our government is hell bent on doing the opposite. @nzscientists.bsky.social #NZPOL

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted “no one has died” as a result of U.S. foreign aid cuts. In Myanmar, the grieving father of a 2-year-old boy who died after their food rations were cut calls such claims a lie.

Wow, a junk spam email written in Comic Sans from a .biz email address. It's like the 90s again!

When you study a language that has, say, 500 inscriptions surviving and someone out of the blue SENDS YOU FIVE MORE...! I don't think I've ever cancelled my plans faster than when Dan sent me these. So pleased everyone can read this wonderful publication.

“war on science” = Universities are slowly dying world-wide but I’m angry because a one time a woman told me to shut up

Maori scholar, Makereti Papakura writing at her desk c.1910. The room is decorated with a mix of Maori & European mementoes whilst the rafters are painted with traditional kowhaiwhai patterns. Makereti will be awarded a posthumous degree in Oxford tomorrow, almost a century after she died in 1930.

Jane Goodall, the trailblazing naturalist whose intimate observations of chimpanzees in the African wild produced powerful insights that transformed basic conceptions of humankind, has died. She was 91. Read more about her legacy www.latimes.com/obituaries/s...

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

We've got hundreds of signatures in five hours... but if we can cross 1000 by morning when I send this to NSF that'd be great. The stories from past, current, and future applicants in the comments section are hearbreaking. Keep up the pressure, and please please sign!!!

Social functions of language may drive faster change and faster diversification in some features. Thanks to growing diversity in variationst sociolinguistics, I gathered studies of 63 languages from 28 families. Here I sketch some potential patterns compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

is it strange for a journal to republish old articles from their archives?

Paywall: www.afr.com/policy/healt... Reddit version: www.reddit.com/r/Anu/commen... #AcademicSky #HigherEd #UKHE