New special issue on "Cultural evolution of the arts" led by @sobchuk.bsky.social and @masonyoungblood.bsky.social confirms my intuition that this field has taken off in the past two decades, with a particularly strong representation from music! doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

New preprint with Rafael Leite, Sandro Reia and Paulo Campos Cumulative Cultural Evolution in Structured Populations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... In which we take an old model of cumulative cultural evolution of mine and see what happens if you add social networks

📢 Rare academic 💎 alert 📢 We’re hiring a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer (Level B/C) in Psychology & Cognitive Neuroscience @ Swinburne (Melbourne). Teach a brand‑new degree + access MRI, MEG, EEG & TMS/tDCS. ⏰ Apply by 17 May 2026, 11 pm 🔗 swinjobs.nga.net.au/cp/index.cfm... Reach out for more info.

Man when you lay it all out like this it sounds crazy, but it's somehow basically true www.reddit.com/r/cognitives...

Why do the Japanese like their buns askew (2026)

Y'all, I just watched Dirty Dancing for the first time. I think that Swayze fella is going to be a star.

This is a critique, true; but more importantly it just outlines the underlying assumptions that most advocates actually hold: the pursuit of truth is secondary to everyone taking my cry-baby ideas seriously.

📢Fully-funded #PhD opportunity with us: 🐦 Quantifying (social) learning and social behaviour in an urbanised world 🐦 Position at @ceec-research.bsky.social 📆29th May deadline More info: tinyurl.com/yz28s96x Apply: tinyurl.com/2wpkb64y #cognition #socialbehaviour #fieldwork #birds 🙏Please Share

What do you mean that revise-and-resubmit that I've been avoiding for 8 months only took a day and half to complete? Surely not. My brain would let me be anxious for that long for such a trivial task. Right?

Was body perforation a prehistoric coming-of-age ritual? Evidence for a rich tradition of body ornamentation in adult burials from Neolithic Southwest Asia suggests piercing was performed as an indication of maturity and social status. 🔗 from 2024 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

Dissertation marking complete! The summer is mine!

The British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants is now open for applications, supported by DSIT, @leverhulme.ac.uk and @wellcometrust.bsky.social. Apply now: https://bit.ly/4t0MDRl

Woo-Hoo! First comprehensive assessment of the evidence for Pleistocene mobile containers! A biocultural perspective viewing container use and manufacture as a process of niche construction! Jennifer C. French, Somaye Khaksar, me & @marckissel.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

May I interest you in £10k for humanities or social science research? Our small grants scheme is open. Apply by 3rd June. We allocate through partial randomisation - awarding randomly between all applications that meet our quality threshold www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...

The more you look, the more there is to see

A long piece this week on the various kinds of AI foolishness I have seen lately. Tl;dr: in your professional life, do not use technologies in which you have no expertise and with which you have not engaged critically?! It’s not that complicated?! open.substack.com/pub/naomiald...

I don't know why but I laughed

About to watch The Prestige for the first time since I saw it in cinemas 20 years ago. My partner has never seen it. Will it hold up?! I'm hopeful.

From the latest AUTX newsletter, a 20 something is reforming peer-review with AI. I mean, where to start? Assuming they've diagnosed the problem *for the right reason*, this is just...?

I'm marking dissertations... and my Kingdom for a spelling mistake. I know it's not a perfect diagnostic tool, but give me something to show you did this all by yourself, plleeaasseee...

The preliminary programme for @ces2026.bsky.social is now out. What a fabulous line up! airess.fgses-um6p.ma/CES2026?__cf...

OMG, do you want to see the cutest thing ever (in data?). I tracked children for 12 months and asked their beliefs in various agents. On the left is the entire sample. On the right a single 2y/o who snuck in at T1! Adorable. (and, actually, really fascinating!)

I will ALWAYS post this, because if it helps even one person, it has been worth it: Key Travel is a parasite on the underfoot of Higher Education, and should be avoided at all costs.

I'm not throwing shade here, but - in my personal opinion - we should not be so widely discussing and critiquing propaganda as if it is a kind of opinion worth critiquing. Even if Hanania and Cowen *believe* what they say, they're propagandists. Challenge their project, not specific claims.

I've had grants rejected on the topic of beliefs because, according to experts, 'people don't change their minds'.

Putting aside the Haidt and dystopia of it all, I know the exact square meter this photographer is standing in.

The nice guys is a perfect movie and I'm certain it would not be loved by the youngs. A remake would be a terrible idea, not least because there's no more story to tell.

Fun fact: If they offer you book vouchers you can respond with "Money please" and they'll come back to you with an offer.

CUP asking me to review a book proposal and saying "We can only afford to pay you £xxx because we're a not-for-profit" is... well. It is something

I'm no theologist, but surely this has profound implications for *gestures at the last 2000 years of Christendom*. I mean, I support it. I'm just saying that there must have been at least one war in which the one who waged it was able to attribute prayers as a causal factor in victory...

Look at these colors! Are you an elder millennial man with an interest in cliche hobbies but not bothered by cringe? Would you like to learn about pickling? AMA.

Being a philosopher must be tiring... but I think it ought be said, that psychologists could do with a dash of this kind of humility:

Wikipedia now has higher standards than all universities

I've been dipping my toe back into Prolific as a survey respondent this week. Wow, a lot of academic researchers are all-in on AI research. And I can tell they're trend-chasers, because their designs suck. Also, a lot of industry research are all-in too, and they training so many models. Gross.

This confirms all my prejudices, and I will not be critically evaluating its claims or evidence at this time.

Wow. Heard on the grapevine that the situation at Edinburgh uni is going to get much worse for staff in the next ~5 weeks. The administration there is craven. There's not even a real deficit. thetab.com/2026/01/31/t...

One of our IMPRS Faculty Members, @heesenr.bsky.social , is currently looking for applications. Please follow this link for more information: imprs-qbee.mpg.de/125923/docto...

Literally any creative endeavour.

Also worth noting how many of the signatories of the letter defending Cofnas call themselves evolutionary psychologists, including those with gatekeeping roles or large public platforms. Concerning to have the discipline represented by those who, at very best, misunderstand academic freedom

🧪 #FossilFriday Mummified baboon, Namibian cave, prob lost beyond the roosting chamber. Re: taphonomy of Homo #Naledi, this baboon was +70m in, via small tunnels, and despite humid cave it formed in arid ledge microclimate. as did a 2nd one, in <5 yrs. digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcont...

3 new studies on using psychedelics as treatments for mental disorders just came out; 2 in JAMA Psychiatry, 1 in Lancet Psychiatry. I reviewed one of these submissions. Here are the core results. 🧵

Wooahhh. This is super cool.

I made a tiny tool for quickly sharing small datasets (< ~1000 rows) without uploading any data to a server. 🔗 ziptbl.com It compresses the data into the link itself, so there’s no account, hosting, or storage layer involved. Here's Florence Nightingale's famous 📊 data: ziptbl.com#d=eNpdlE-LGz...

Brand new and expensive computer. Install RDR2, because I heard all the hype (from many, many years ago). It's fucked my sound. Completely. I've spent like 8 hours trying to fix it. I think I'm going to have to do a gdamn reformat. Apparently a known and on-going issue.

A new Department of Cognitive Science is being created at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Here is the call for a cluster hire (for around 10 faculty) in all areas of cognitive science, at both junior and senior levels: www.unibocconi.it/en/faculty-a... Deadline: May 4th, 2026

A man, up to his neck in grains of sand, craning to remain breathing. "IT'S. NOT. A. HEAP"

Submitted a peer review the other day, editor emails back with their final decision. It's pretty obvious the other reviewer just used an LLM to provide the review. I've been told by other editors this is remarkably common. I find that quite offensive.