I'm working on some figures for a book to illustrate the foundation of quantitative genetics (as confirmed by GWAS a century later). Mendel showed discrete inheritance in peas (left figure, 1860s). Fisher showed that many such Mendelian effects yield continuous traits (right figure, 1918).

Sad to hear that Emma Johnston (@unimelb.bsky.social vice-chancellor) has unexpectedly passed away. I don't have much experience with her, but this quote shared from Kristen Pammer (our Head of School) describes a sustainable "leading from the edges" leadership we need more of at our universities.

Have you got a PhD in Statistics (or related field) and experience in Statistical Consulting? A continuing position at the Australian National University is now open 🇦🇺🦘🐨. Would love to get an #rstats person if possible ☺️ Apply by 18 Jan 👉 jobs.anu.edu.au/jobs/course-... #statssky #statsky

Very excited to share the first empirical paper from LEVANTE: we describe the LEVANTE core tasks, a set of nine open source tasks for measuring learning and development in kids ages 5-12 years. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the invention of smartphones and the advent of social media, which both appeared around the same year, 2008. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I'm still seeing conflicting reports so I expect the story and numbers on this to change again, but we're all in shock here whatever happened.

Michael C. Rockefeller got shipwrecked in 1963, washed up on an island, and was promptly eaten by cannibals.

A fascinating & damning exposé on Oliver Sacks, author of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”. It turns out, by his own admission in his private journals, that much of his work was akin to “fairy tales” — based on “lies”, “falsifications”, & “fabrications”. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Come to Auckland in July 2026 for the joint meeting of the Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference and the Asia Pacific Conference on Vision!! STUDENTS: there will be 40 travel support awards of $500 to help you attend, so don't let the distance stop you from attending.

A study on 1.7 million people in Hong Kong shows superior hybrid immunity to Covid in people who got vaccinated before infection vs. people who got infected first. "Our findings are a direct rebuttal to arguments for natural immunity," the authors write. doi.org/10.1016/j.va...

📣 Very happy to announce a new BBS target article with Nick Chater in which we propose a new theory of cultural evolution, highlighting the importance of bottom-up social interaction in explaining the emergence of cultural complexity 🧵 1/8 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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” 🧵

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/...

At least working in the office late looks pretty 🌄

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

Melbourne people! We're very lucky to have the one and only Alison Gopnik giving a talk here on November 11th at 6pm. Details below, open to the public, should be fabulous 😊 Space is limited so do be sure register! alisongopnik.bsky.social psychunimelb.bsky.social

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/

Yay Australia, come here it's great—we have beaches, kangaroos, and democracy! 🦘 (I don't want to know what the increase is in people I am competing against for faculty positions in Australia now 😬)

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

In the ~3 months it takes to ship our things from Auckland to Melbourne (a 4 hour flight), of course, the earliest possible delivery date is the day after we fly out of town for 1.5 weeks 🤦

Thrilled to see this paper out! It's the culmination of a project begun in the depths of the pandemic with Sabrina Karjack and @zoengo.bsky.social . We continue our exploration of how children generalize when their episodic memory is not yet mature. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Macron remarks are notable- some quotes: "We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies."

Jane Goodall was my first childhood hero, as I loved animals as a kid and was inspired by her story. I still remember the National Geographic specials about her. RIP.

1. Bluesky doesn’t downrank links 2. You can choose your own algorithm from among thousands 3. The whole app is open source This keeps it a free and open platform by design, leading to better click-throughs and traffic to your site. We 💙 the open web.

"basic cognitive processes underlying explanatory reasoning give rise to a systematic inherence bias among practicing scientists—a tendency to explain phenomena in terms of their inherent properties rather than external factors" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Hilarious and beautiful (free) film on Youtube. Pokes fun at extreme birdwatching (listing) but is actually more deeply about the joys of birding and being connected to nature ❤ www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-w...

At @ishe-society.bsky.social, we are looking for someone to review @mgurven.bsky.social new book, "Seven decades" for Human Ethology. It looks terribly interesting! DM/email for details (and to get a hard copy 😊) @princetonupress.bsky.social press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Hello 👋 We're the official #UniMelb account! Follow us for news, updates and information about UniMelb. For now, enjoy the blue skies over our Parkville campus 💙

New work with @samcheyette.bsky.social & Susan Carey testing the memory architecture used when learning/producing center-embedded sequences. Adults don't use Push-Down Stacks as is often assumed, instead they rely on a Queue-like memory architecture onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Oxford Biology is growing 📢 We’re appointing 3 Associate Professors in: 🌱 Plant Sciences 🦉 Animal Behaviour 🔬 Molecular Cell Biology 3 fields. 3 opportunities. One new home for Oxford Biology. Learn more 👉 bit.ly/41S2Tc7 Apply now 👉 bit.ly/488CNW3

💙New paper!💙 How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society? With @danielredhead.bsky.social we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

We are delighted to announce that the CES2026 conference website is now live! We invite you to submit your presentation proposals using the link on the webpage, deadline November 16th: airess.fgses-um6p.ma/ces2026

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised! 3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution 2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions. Please share and apply! www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...

Australia is home to approx 24,000 species of native plants 🌿 This #BiodiversityMonth, we’re celebrating the beauty and diversity of native flora — from orchids to mistletoes. Our guide books are your companions for exploring them: www.publish.csiro.au/PlantsAndFun...

UCDavis Psych is hiring an Assistant Professor in Human Cognition or Cognitive Neuroscience 🧠✨ Come join a vibrant, collaborative dept and live in a fun college town near Sacramento, San Francisco, Napa, and Lake Tahoe. Applications due Oct.21. Please share widely! recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07300

The psych job market may not be dead... but it is gravely injured 😬 So far it's looking like the Trump administration's attacks on higher ed/research are going to have more than 2x the impact on the job market as the covid-19 pandemic. #psychjobs #neurojobs #academicjobs

Ever wondered why you keep going to that restaurant with stale fries? Is it because you went often in the past (perseveration) or because you remember past good experiences better (positivity bias)? Our study out in PNAS investigates the normative basis for these biases www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

Great new paper: Patterns of genetic admixture reveal similar rates of borrowing across diverse scenarios of language contact #linguistics #language www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New study on #BlueSky for #SciComm. “Bluesky posts demonstrate substantially higher levels of interaction (likes, reposts, replies, and quotes) and greater textual originality than previously reported for X, suggesting both stronger interactive and more interpretive engagement.” 🦋🦫🌱🐋🧪 #philsci

Michael Kubovy, my undergraduate thesis advisor, recently passed. I was moved to write some reflections on his life and career. open.substack.com/pub/alexholc...

Hard to beat the time I was in DC and we spotted a senator mid-interview by the Capitol. My mother-in-law at full volume asks “IS THAT ANYBODY?!” so loud it stopped the interview. At least they laughed 😂

I can't quite believe it – I got a new NSF grant! 😲🤯 I'm incredibly grateful to the program officers & reviewers for their dedication and efforts to keep science going 🌟👏🏼 So, I'll be hiring! Looking for a postdoc to study competition in memory-guided attention. See flyer for details! 🎉

Light pollution is causing birds around the world to sing for longer each day, prolonging their vocalizations on average by 50 minutes, according to a new study in Science. Learn more: https://scim.ag/3Uz7vzP

Hive mind: I'm writing a book chapter called Utter Bastards – intended to showcase the ways in which animals (yes, incl. us) can be 'nasty'. I've got lots of the obvious candidates e.g. siblicide, infanticide, sexual coercion etc. anything *unusual* you think should be in there?

Great time to announce that I am starting an ARC DECRA fellowship here (‪@psychunimelb.bsky.social) in a couple weeks!! 😊

Come be my colleague! The Department of Psychology at Princeton and @princetonneuro.bsky.social‬ are jointly searching for an Assistant Prof in Cog Neuro. puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...