Belated career update: after 4 years of reasonably productive PhDing with @kevinlala.bsky.social, I have now started a postdoc at UC Davis with Brenna Henn, working on KhoeSan popgen, historical subsistence transitions, and - of course - potential gene-culture coevolutionary relationships.

I wrote a thing! Credit where credit is due - the impetus for this paper came from many conversations I had as a baby first year grad student at CES 2022 (@culturalevolsoc.bsky.social). I hope it might serve as a useful way of thinking about the many modes of interaction in dual inheritance theory.

Happy to share a PhD opportunity in my new lab at the University of Zurich! Application deadline: June 30. Do not hesitate to contact me for any questions!

Happy to announce that my temporary thesis-writing mania has sprung the long awaited sequel to my conference presentation "Of Rice and Men":

I’ve always thought EvoBio has this strange, bordering on unhealthy obsession with / cult of personality around Charles Darwin. Anyway, on an unrelated note, I tufted his tree of life drawing today because I didn’t know what else to make

Here's my favorite from this semester - a meme about why we grow old and die.

A lovely preprint, that really resonates with some of my own thoughts on how we use/have adapted the “coevolution” concept in the gene-culture interaction literature

NEW in preprint form: Don't ask "when is it coevolution?" — ask "how?" In which I pick apart the way I've understood the very definition of my field of study, and try to come up with something better.

🚨 PhD project: 4-year PhD project on human reproduction, mating strategies and gender roles. Funding is via BBSRC EastBio (i.e. funding not attached to specific project). Please get in touch with me (UK/international). Deadline for nominated applicant: 17 Jan 2025 www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

I should maybe (re-)introduce myself: Hi! My name is Sven, a PhD student at St Andrews w/ Kevin Lala, exploring empirically how being a cultural species shapes the genetic (and cultural!) evolution of human populations - by profoundly affecting not only selection, but migration, demography, etc.

One of my principal joys and frustrations as a disciplinary tweener is that I will spend one day regaling my office mates with unsolicited fun facts about the anthropology of cheese making, only to spend 10 hours the next day spiralling as I try and fail to merge two vcf files.