Day 8, more napping

Littlest teddy bears

Six-day-old kitten blep

I sincerely believe that female cooperative breeding groups pushed human evolution towards a positive cooperative feedback loop that brought us complex culture, language etc. We’re finding more examples of female coalitions in other species now— valuable insights to be found here! ⬇️ 👍

With Western Civilization now deemed too woke, the manosphere has started converting to Islam. This is how the right breaks up. open.substack.com/pub/virginia...

Shrimp.

All tucked in.

Day 3 of my life ❤️

Turns out she’s only having 2. We had a little emergency trip to the vet last night to be sure. I’ll be keeping this account live up until their adoption. Watch this space for cute kitten pics!

I guess with race science discourse still percolating, I should re-up my starter pack for people who work on the topic

Interrupting my social media break to announce the birth of two kittens, likely 2 more coming soon. Mom is a champ, please clap

Today's US EO orders the Attorney General to identify + take expeditious action to stop enforcement of "all State & local laws... purporting to address “climate change” or involving “environmental, social, and governance” initiatives, “environmental justice,” carbon or “greenhouse gas” emissions."

A 1,600-year-old altar found in the Guatemalan jungle shows the ancient Maya and Mexico’s Teotihuacan once shared political power – a rare sign of alliance, not conquest, between two major Mesoamerican civilizations. apnews.com/article/guat...

Everyone: hopefully this all gets better and less chaotic soon Climate change: hi guys how are you

Trapped!!

Scientific racism doesn’t exist without the active involvement and complicity of scientists. Or, in this case, social scientists 👇 One practical step we in academia can take to guard against attacks from the far-right is to stop facilitating scientific racism

An image of 10th/9th millennium BC Göbekli Tepe from the earlier days of the excavations, around 2007, with the central pillars of Building D still mostly covered by sediments. This was a great opportunity to study the reliefs and pillar heads in detail.

“Richard J. Herrnstein, a co-author of the notorious “The Bell Curve,” wrote in a letter to a friend: “It continually amazes me that even biologists deny having eugenic sentiments, as if they were shameful.”” archive.ph/2025.04.04-1...

"He calls them reciprocal tariffs, but there's actually nothing reciprocal about them. You see...."

Behind the scenes, our wolverine Rainier has discovered a new passion for rolling around in fresh wood wool! This natural, shredded material doesn’t just smell great to a curious nose; it’s perfect for enrichment, encouraging all kinds of playful behaviors that keep Rainier’s wild instincts sharp.

Flowers are exploding, especially with our abundant rain. White-flowered trees have the broadest range of pollinators, including moths, bees, beetles, butterflies, and flies. Most have a lot of nectar, and range in scent from intensely sweet to burnt rubber. 🧵

Not leafing bed todayy

I'm sorry about the cuts to NIH and NSF. That sucks. But the humanities get such proportionately smaller funding, and now we lost basically all of it. Plus our programs will get cut by admins to make up for science grant losses. You can't be human without the humanities.

President Trump’s most recent levies are hitting some of the world’s poorest nations the hardest The 50% trade tariff on Lesotho, the highest levy on Trump’s list, could kill entire industries in the country, Thabo Qhesi, an independent economic analyst,tells Reuters www.nbcnews.com/business/eco...

Today I wrote about compositionality--a foundation of human language. Is it also in the calls of apes? Gift link: nyti.ms/4iO0zct

Yes, #tarrifs, and: Günther Thallinger of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies, is over on LinkedIn warning that if global heating is not halted near 1.5C, enough capital becomes uninsurable that entire sectors of the global economy will collapse.

We all get to play stupid games & win stupid prizes now. By decree.

Trump and Musk have ushered in the era of cataclysm capitalism. But I have a plan to counter it The speed with which US democracy is being dismantled is dizzying, but if we organise resistance now we can stop this www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

🚨Job alert! Two-year postdoc to join the Rep2SI project at @lsemethodology.bsky.social! We're looking for a modeller to join our team of ethnographers & experimentalists studying the role of reputation and reputational concern in perpetuating social inequality. Apply by 4 May: tinyurl.com/yjccd3vv

A review of the signatories of the now-infamous 2020 Harper’s Letter shows that only 24% who put their name on the letter defending ​“Open Debate” have come out in opposition to Trump’s war on campus free speech. By me and @ahjohnson.bsky.social inthesetimes.com/article/demo...

The myth of the entrepreneurial hero has seeped into archaeology,. It blinds us to collective accomplishments, like Mohenjo-daro's drainage system, a joint endeavour of many households. Our book challenges this myth. #Archaeology #Economics #Entrepreneurship www.routledge.com/Cities-and-C...

"The caring-touch hypothesis emphasizes the intrinsic links between touch, oxytocin-vasotocin, bonding patterns, and how animals cooperate. Touch supports the development of enduring bonds and a prosocial mindset, facilitating the emergence of forms of cooperation that result in delayed benefits."

After many years of studying gene and genome duplication, I’m excited to announce this discovery. In addition to sub- and neofunctionalization, a new class of duplicate gene evolution exists: devofunctionalization where one copy maintains ancestral function while the other evolves to whip it good.

Remember when Lukianoff's pal, Jonathan Haidt, claimed that 'both sides' have deniers of 'inconvenient truths'. On the left are apparently 'IQ deniers' & 'heritability deniers'. Another FIRE favorite, Lee Jussim, also had a weird outburst in support of 'race realism' a couple of years ago... 🙄

Someone invite me to a podcast to talk about the lab leak theory, the mountain of evidence pointing to a normal zoonotic spillover, and how anyone who thinks the lab leak theory is even plausible at this point is stupid, racist, engaging in wishful thinking, or all of the above.

Hundreds of millions of bees, almost 80% of bees in the US, have died over he past eight months. Researchers don't know why. Here is what this means:

the text that annoyed Trump is from the AABA Statement on Race & Racism... share it widely...BioAnth doing the work-- bioanth.org/about/aaba-s....

It also fundamentally misunderstands the difference between private health decisions and public health measures. Vaccines are different than abortion because you can’t spread abortions to others. This was established all the way back in 1905 with Jacobson v Massachusetts

This reads like blame-shifting responsibility for those who have put their children in danger by refusing to vaccinate them onto the public health measures that were taken in an emergency pandemic situation. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/o...

Anyone able to provide a paywall free copy of this please? www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/o...

The TX Natal Conference ended on 3/29/25. “Network State” leader Balaji S., an ally of Peter Thiel & Marc Andreessen, was slated to speak. Organizer Kevin Dolan once wrote that those w/ Apache ancestry are “lucky we let you live in Arizona” bc the Apaches “got royally butt-raped by whitey lol.” 1/

I'm looking for contact details for Kirsten Grothe, who did her MSc Zooarchaeology at York. She examined the animal bones from a site of a PhD student and we'd like to include her in a publication. Other avenues to contact her have failed. Does anyone know her and can pass this on???

The August 1958 edition has this snippet about a "brave" academic who has supposedly "proven" the intellectual superiority of whites over blacks, but is worried that she'll be cancelled for such "truth telling." That racist book was funded by a eugenicist organization called The Pioneer Fund.

This is cool. The Guardian recreated a searchable climate future risk tool (wildfire, extreme heat, drought, hurricane, and coastal flood) for the US that was developed by FEMA but deleted by the Trump administration’s ‘climate’ purge.

I wrote about how population stratification in genetic analyses led to a decade of false findings and almost certainly continues to bias emerging results. But we are starting to have statistical tools to sniff it out. A 🧵:

Demand for Tiny Plants Is Driving a Poaching Crisis in South Africa