In the long-running Nativism-Empiricism debate, have the impressive successes of AI based on blank slate-ish connectionist architectures dealt a knock-out blow for Empiricism? Is it game over for Nativism? @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social gently pushes back 🧪 philpapers.org/archive/KARA...

Everything you wanted to know about adult sex ratios (ASR) but were afraid to ask 🧪 #bioanth: www.nature.com/articles/s42...

If Schrödinger's classic 'What Is Life?' is important to you, grab this book (free for 1 more day?). It's short, and although it throws shade on the genetic program concept ('m still a fan), it provides lots of interesting context and a fair assessment of the impact of What is Life? 🧪

Me, decoding CMC-encoded dates in a 1996 DHS survey #rstats 🧪 WTF, no household child was born in 1916 and no mother was born in 2063 Footnote on p. 195 of an old DHS report: "The beginning of the year 2053 in the Nepali calendar roughly corresponds to 15th April 1996 in the Western calendar..."

I'm starting to explore {simDAG}, a nifty #rstats package that has a nice API for specifying DAGs and then simulating data from them: robindenz1.github.io/simDAG/

DIY soda maker. You need to buy 3 things: 1. A 5 lb CO2 tank. Mine cost $100 from a local beer-brewing supply store, which will swap empties for filled units for $20. 5 lb -> 100-150 liters -> $0.13-$0.20/liter vs. $1/liter for store-bought vs. $0.50/liter for sodastream.

Great thread on the discovery that a rare mutation in FOXP2 disrupts language, with an appearance by Steve Pinker. Subsequent research showed that FOXP2, a transcription factor, is highly conserved, yet acquired 2 amino acid substitutions in the human lineage. 🧪 #BioAnth

"Now I talk to the popular kids and they treat me like a normal person because their frontal lobes are finally catching up to my frontal lobes...." - teen daughter

TIL that the "Krebs" of Krebs and Davies was the son of "Krebs" of the Krebs cycle:

#HBES2026 abstract submissions are live! More exciting details to come soon. Arrive early for @ces2026.bsky.social @humbehevosoc.bsky.social

It's happening! And HBES will directly follow and overlap with CES, including a joint plenary to unite these two stellar scientific communities...don't we all love economies of scale. Do you happen to know anything about that cool logo?

📝 Writing Wednesday! Ph.D. Candidate Michael Gaffney first-authored an article on on how children communicate their needs through crying. This research was recently published in Human Nature, and his photo taken in Utila, Honduras made the cover image! Article: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A fun 15 minute talk by evolutionary anthropologist David Samson putting human sleep in context with that of other great apes, primates, and other species 🧪 #BioAnth www.youtube.com/watch?v=joHF...

Some thoughts on how preferences for #leaders change with our environments: Leaders for the World We Think We Live In | Psychology Today www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ecol... #LeadSciSky #EvPsych #CultEvol #socialpsyc #BehSci 🧪 @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social @psychologytoday.com

My review of Sex is a Spectrum, by Agustín Fuentes 🧪 #BioAnth blog.edhagen.net/posts/2025-0...

This week, Drugs, Delusions, and Depression with @edhagen.net A wild ride! youtu.be/fWawIyNAjTc www.podbean.com/eas/pb-7srpz... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

TIL that sequences from XX males and XY females were instrumental in tracking down SRY, the sex-determining region on the Y-chromosome. From the key paper, Sinclair et al. (1990) 🧪 nature.com/articles/346...

www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9... 🧪

I hoped a fully-featured #rstats ggplot-based heatmap package would show up one day. {ggalign} might be it. It's basically {patchwork} on steroids 🧪 yunuuuu.github.io/ggalign/

I love how easy it is to setup parallel processing on your local machine when using the #rstats {targets} package: books.ropensci.org/targets/crew...

My plot of @thefireorg.bsky.social data. Early on, campus deplatforming was more from the right, then more from the left, & now equalizing at a high level. Attacks on scholars were rare until 10 years ago, then increased by both sides, w/ a recent steep drop of attacks from the left 🧪 #AcademicSky

TIL two interesting things about horizontal gene transfer (HGT), typically conceptualized as bacterial sex 🧪: 1. It's often driven by mobile (selfish) genetic elements, and therefore might be more akin to infection than sex: cell.com/trends/genet...

If you're kicking the tires on the just-released version of the #rstats package {purrr}, which features built-in parallel processing... www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/07... ...be sure to read this github issue, which explains how to pass in your helper functions: github.com/tidyverse/pu...

An important corrective to the famous case of Phineas Gage, as well as details about Eadweard Muybridge, also a brain injury survivor, who made the famous movie of a galloping horse in 1878, a few years after murdering his wife's lover 🧪 #AcademicSky aeon.co/essays/how-t...

“Our anthropology colleagues, esp. behavioral ecology colleagues, have been studying a lot of these topics like parenting that we’ve been neglecting & they’ve been rightfully annoyed at us EP’s for being so obsessed with sex and dating…” 🧪 @dconroybeam.bsky.social podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

Jesus was a shaman, and so were John the Baptist, Paul, and other early biblical figures. Or were they? Check out www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730339... 👇 by @manvir.bsky.social #AcademicSky

1. The evolution of [proto] music. My arguments against the social bonding hypothesis and in favor of the signaling hypothesis 🧪 The Explicandum: The evolution in the human lineage of vocalizations that are: * Loud * Synchronized * Variable 🧵

A new podcast, @epthepod.bsky.social: Actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists. In the first two episodes, the hosts, @davidpinsof.bsky.social and @dpietra.bsky.social, interview each other 🧪 www.youtube.com/@Evolutionar...

Great visualization of NSF cuts to science funding (which doesn't even include cancelled grants) 🧪 nytimes.com/interactive/... h/t to @jhelvy.bsky.social

Dunbar's hugely influential social bonding hypothesis for the evolution of human language, music, & dance is based on the putative increase in primate grooming time with group size. These are the supporting data, including a confound with substrate pointed out by others 🧪 #BioAnth 1/3

1. Early in development, the presence of a Y chromosome triggers development of the testes, which then secrete testosterone, which then shunts fetal development to a male phenotype. But I was curious: beyond gonads & hormones, do XX and XY contribute to sex differences? 🧪 🧵

Want to up your game on vaccination to inform family members, neighbors, friends, or students (or yourself)? This in-depth review covers a lot of ground, including the history of vaccination, vaccine technologies, and public health benefits 🧪 #AcademicSky www.frontiersin.org/journals/pub...

The evolution of upper-body strength: is strength correlated with mating success? Since humans have pair-bonding, is the pattern similar in men & women? Find out in Caroline Smith & Ed Hagen's HBES blog post: www.hbes.com/sexual-dimor... Or read the original E&HB article: doi.org/10.1016/j.ev...

Strong public support in the US for medical research, the independence of private universities, & Dept of Ed in this poll released today. The public is split on whether DEI efforts help "level the playing field" (51%) or "create unfair discrimination (47%) 🧪 www.langerresearch.com/wp-content/u...

Feet and heel bones of the great apes (left to right: orangutans, chimpanzees, western and eastern gorillas, and humans) 🧪 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Our team recently took a deep dive into the history of Man the Hunter. Preprint: osf.io/preprints/os... I learned some very surprising things about interactions between popular writers and practicing anthropologists. 🧵 below

This stood out in Harvard's new lawsuit against the administration. I looked it up and it's a recent unanimous SCOTUS decision for the NRA (per the first amendment, the gov't can't use financial threats to punish or suppress gun advocacy) 🧪 www.harvard.edu/research-fun...

I was curious about the state of evidence for discrimination in correspondence studies (eg, job apps w/ fake cv's that only change the name from male to female). Here is a 2023 meta-analysis of recent studies (left: neg discrim; right: pos descrim) 🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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If you have a #quarto #rstats pandoc workflow, and need to create a track-changes version of your revised paper for resubmission, try pandiff, which can do that for you for docx, pdf, and html 🧪 github.com/davidar/pand... You'll first need to install Node and npm: nodejs.org/en/download

I don't have access to the article but based on the plot: Less than 1 point on a 7-point scale separates the two political extremes All means are above the mid-point of the scale, & all but one are above 5 Better conclusion: trust in scientists is pretty high across the political spectrum 🧪

Great article on current state of ADHD research, much of it consistent w/ the evo mismatch hyp & also w/ work by @realadamhunt.bsky.social One thing I didn't know: kids who consistently take stimulant medication for ADHD are about 1 inch shorter than those who don't🧪 www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/m...

1. I know nothing about heritability of traits, but I thought I'd take a shot at understanding this famous paper. It describes a method of estimating heritability from genetic sequences that overcomes limitations of twin studies: 🧵🧪 #BioAnth www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper on the obstetrical dilemma from @xliaoyi.bsky.social et al. using UK Biobank data: "Our observed genetic correlation between birth canal width & infant & adult head width provides support for the coevolution of the human brain & pelvis." 🧪 #BioAnth www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

TIL that measles can infect and persist in the brain, and then (rarely) FIVE TO TEN YEARS LATER, kills you. There are no effective treatments. Vaccination against measles obviously prevents this 🧪 journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

@anthrofuentes.bsky.social responds to our article, which is summarized in this thread: bsky.app/profile/edha...

When I was in grad school in the 90's the rule of thumb from twin studies was that the heritability of everything was ~50%. It turns out that twin studies are highly confounded, & after unconfounding w/ new genome-based methods (Family-GWAS), the median heritability of behavioral phenotypes is ~5% 🧪

1. Does research by @caraocobock.bsky.social & others, widely reported in SciAm & elsewhere, finally dispel hunter-gatherer myths that have persisted since the 60's? In a preprint led by @vivek123.bsky.social The Meanings & Dividends of Man the Hunter: osf.io/preprints/os... we respond 🧵🧪

1. What's at risk by disrupting NIH? With only a bit of hyperbole: a mechanistic understanding of life itself, & therefore better treatments for cancer, dementias, autoimmune disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, birth defects, aging & more 🧪 Notes on a revolution interrupted 🧵

NIH: Too woke? Or not woke enough? 84/10,000 titles (0.84%) of NIH funded research published in the last year had one or more of these words/phrases (couldn't use "diversity" because it was too common in non-woke titles) 2414 titles (24%) had cancer, patient, health, and/or cell 🧪