Very interesting

Heritable variation in the lifetime fitness of female baboons; it's an amazing feat to document LRS in a long-lived animal like baboons, and even more amazing to estimate genetic heritability.

Does anyone on here use a kneeling chair for work? Looking for leads to help my chronic lower back pain….

Our late Neandertal paper is officially out! 💀❤️🧬 www.nature.com/articles/s41... It was years in the making, a tremendous feat spearheaded by our PhD student Alba Bossoms Mesa and co-led by @janetk.bsky.social and @benmpeter.bsky.social

Oh to be so Enlightened that you “forget” you got ten grand for a letter that you let other people doctor to help a paedophile get off lightly and continue abusing 100s of children for years. Truly the transition from status to contract is the liberation of the mind.

Happy #PrideMonth! To celebrate, I'm starting a thread of readings on queerness in animals/evolution, and keep adding throughout the month. I'll include a mix of writing for popular audiences as well as some scientific articles and book recommendations! 🧪 🏳️‍🌈 (1/n) Nature has ALWAYS been queer! 🌈

I have read and enjoyed The Paradox of the Organism by @arvidagren.bsky.social and Manus Patten. I had a lot of thoughts about it, and about selfish genes. Here they are, in a long blog post. homunculusmusic.wordpress.com/2026/05/30/i...

My leader this week: an anti-capitalist screed in New Scientist! www.newscientist.com/article/mg27...

A representative snapshot of my desk as I race to finish the first draft of my forthcoming book THE FACTS OF LIFE

An audience member asked me about leftist pronatalism.

Trans people have been around your whole life. You’ve been sharing bathrooms with them your whole life. They’ve been in your communities your whole life. They’ve even been playing sport your whole life. And you didn’t care *at all* till a few years ago when every right wing org decided you should

With @remyfurrer.bsky.social, a new piece in Nature Human Behavior. The standard description of a polygenic score as a "genetic predisposition" essentializes a statistical construct. It's not language policing: PGS are a new kind of entity; now is the time to think carefully about what they are.

Good from @nilsgilman.bsky.social about how "long-term demographic projections are ideological fictions that tell us more about their authors' hangups than they do about the future" nilsgilman.substack.com/p/the-future...

Same, except 3 decades.

Extremely interesting and if correct very important contextualisation

If you at the Cultural Evolution Society meeting this week - come check out Dunstan Matungwa presenting on Tanzania’s extraordinary contributions to anthropology and the priorities of Tanzanian scholars for the future of cross-national collaboration. 🇹🇿 🌍 🌎 🌏

Mental illness is pregnancy’s No 1 complication. It’s time to support those who suffer from it | Edna Lekgabe | The Guardian

My annual Mother's Day post. Because some people had great mothers but lost them, some had or have mothers who never mothered them or stopped mothering them for some reason, treated them as adversaries or as worthless, and Mother's Day can be a punitive day for all those for whom this is true.

Meet the academics refusing to use generative AI Researchers say they have their reasons for avoiding AI tools — and they’re sick of arguing about it. www.nature.com/articles/d41... h/t @maartenp.bsky.social

New Open Access book edited by Cristina Moya @hyperadapthyrax.bsky.social and Wolfgang Wagner on identity and culture. Many great chapter by great folks. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

The release date is approaching for my new book, Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution (www.upress.umn.edu/978151791998...). On cultural evolution as emblematic of instabilities that pass between the sciences and the humanities or nature and culture. Here's a discount code:

Full cringe here but also proud of the work that we have done with my colleagues, John Bunce and Caissa Revilla-Minaya now at @amnh.org #childgrowth #anthropology #bioanth #antropologia #growhtmodel #FAU

Forget Dad Books. MORE MOM BOOKS. Here are 4 excellent, insightful books about mothers and mothering in early America and beyond. Likely available second hand, too, for modeling reuse and recycle.

Do I give deeply researched analytical women's history classics to my elders for Mother's Day? Of course I do. Every one of these books tells you something fundamental about early America that explains why you should be shocked but not surprised about where we are. Mom Books should be a thing.

“Women have always worked and they have always had kids. It’s just that now we live in this patriarchal setting…let’s change this whole culture.” @paulajasheppard.bsky.social telling it straight in @newscientist.com 🤩 www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

I've just read the section on sex differences on intelligence in this textbook. 32 mentions of Richard Lynn! Curiously, none of which are about his political activities. The chapter summary leaves students with the impression his research demonstrated men are more intelligent than women

Call for research participants! Are you non-binary, aged 18+ and living in the UK? Would you be willing to spend 30 minutes on a survey on your experiences of family? qualtrics.ucl.ac.uk/jfe/form/SV_... Please share! I am a researcher on this project - A short thread to follow. 1/14

New masters programme in Evolutionary Anthropology - University of Leipzig & Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, teaching in English www.uni-leipzig.de/en/studying/... #EHBEA

Fantastic example of intellectual humility from @drsarahmyers at #ehbea2026, re-evaluating a previously published paper of her own using more robust methods. Advice to the audience: “be more reflective”

New paper alert. My new article just published in Quaternary Science Reviews, "Revolution, modernity, and the dispersal of Homo sapiens beyond Africa". www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🤮 that this had to be written but HELL Yeah that it has been 🥳

Excellent new special Issue on the challenges raised by the ancient DNA of kinship Special Issue: Kinship Trouble: Traversing Interdisciplinary Boundaries between Archaeology, Archaeogenetics and Socio-cultural Anthropology www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Really pleased this collaboration with @carlyschuster.bsky.social is finally published! We lean on queer feminist theory to discuss kinship as a dynamic set of relations and map their flow around funerary rites - we see burials as cannily assembled, not simple mirrors of the living world

I'm hiring! 2 x postdocs in Cognitive Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, to work on the cultural history of Australia and Papua. More details in link below, and please do repost or share elsewhere! www.isle.uzh.ch/en/jobs/post...

This was a fun exercise. For the non-philosophers, here's a thread briefly describing the ridiculous views that we philosophers are pretty sure we could find seven experts to agree to. If you read one of them and think "What?!? I must be misunderstanding" you probably aren't.

Anyway gender was the first division of labor, women were the first oppressed class, and gender is the hierarchy that must be abolished in order for us to eliminate all others. 😇

Omg @dunsworth.bsky.social doing the lord’s work here 🙏

The deadline for submitting abstracts for the British Society for Population Studies conference is coming up - 17 April. There are a range of planned sessions, from classic demography topics to newer themes, including a new session on how demography is used and misused for political purposes

Featuring me and @rebeccasear.bsky.social @philipncohen.com and Karen Kramer Thanks @sujatagupta.bsky.social www.sciencenews.org/article/pron...

These are ritual artefacts, belonging especially to women's rituals in relation to reproduction and social reproduction, notably blood symbolism--menarcheal, childbirth. Not goddesses, not queens. Women with blood potency www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic...

This, from demographer Francesco Billari, is very good: “The real choice for political leaders is not whether to accept demographic change. It is whether to continue to fight it symbolically or to start governing it strategically” www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026...

Putting almost 2Y old to sleep, cuddling and she’s almost gone. Start to sing a lullaby tenderly. Sweet child, I think. Two bars in, she slams my mouth repeatedly and roars through her pacifier a muffled but threatening BUS! ‘Wheel on the bus’ for the next 20 mins.

Heritability is a statistical description of sources of trait variation in a specific set of people under a specific set of environmental conditions. It doesn’t show how malleable the trait is, doesn't index an underlying feature of human biology, & can’t say anything about you as an individual.

Adorable wooden horses on wheels were pulled around by little ones in the past, too. A timeless reminder that play has been part of the human experience for millennia. From Egypt, Roman period, 30 BC-150 AD. 📷 Julia Thorne/Manchester Museum 🏺

Timeline cleanse! A marvellous baby feeding bottle in the shape of a mouse. 🐀🐭 Campanian, 4th century BC. From the collection of the Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe (currently closed) 📷 me 🏺 #archaeology

Question for the Bsky hive mind: what’s the most batshit pop Evolutionary Psychology study you’ve ever come across? Particularly interested in examples in the area of female parental investment, but I’ll take others too …

Extremely cool - assisted births in Whales! 🐋🐳

More on the historical slippage between lefty environmentalism and grievous population control

New BJPS Short Read! Why Does Causal Reasoning Work? Naftali Weinberger, Porter Williams & James Woodward on the role of worldly infrastructure www.thebsps.org/short-reads/... #philsci #philsky

One of the very best Irish novels. For my money it’s the best depiction of rural Irish domestic life and the stifling and tragic power of repressed masculinity.