New working paper 🚨🚨🚨 What was the origin of modern economic growth? Joel Mokyr had a Nobel winning answer - growth took off when science and technology began to reinforce each other But can we test this quantitatively? This paper does so – read more ⬇️ 🧵

Extremely proud to have contributed to this amazing three-part Special Issue on Vanuatu languages, out now in Te Reo! Especial thanks to the wonderful editors for pulling off this major achievement. You can read my contribution here: nzlingsoc.org/journal_arti...

"The cooperative eye hypothesis proposes that human eyeballs are uniquely conspicuous and evolved under selective pressures to behave cooperatively....but lacks robust empirical support: human eye pigmentation does not uniquely stand out among primates, is not uniform at species level..."

A few words on survey weights, why I'm embarrassed to have forgotten to take them into account in the past, and how I got lucky because I personally didn't get burned. Not a mistake I intend to repeat in the future blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-0...

Now out in @cpsjournal.bsky.social. In our new article, @denis-cohen.bsky.social @thmskrr.bsky.social and I show that where local rent prices increase more, residents with lower incomes become more likely to support the radical right AfD. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New paper alert! 🧪 www.doi.org/10.1057/s415...

@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/...

woah this is genuinely, utterly WILD Ant queens of one species produce males of another species, so she can then mate with them and produce hybrid workers! This is so gloriously weird I can't quite compute it 🤯🧪🐜 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Climate models since the 1970s nailed it—most predicted global warming almost exactly as it happened.

My colleague Quentin Atkinson wrote this piece - How Not To Run a University. It is an insanely good read about how managerialism is destroying universities. Make time for it. Talk about it. Share it. quentinatkinson.substack.com/s/how-not-to...

Happy to share our new paper introducing the Animal Culture Database in Scientific Data: We’re putting together a resource consolidating primary research on cultural behaviors in wild animal populations and how they’re affected by human activity (1/5) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Nasa has revealed a dramatic rise in the intensity of..events such as droughts & floods over the past 5 years. The study shows that..extreme events are becoming more frequent, longer-lasting & more severe" www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

I could not be more proud of my lab, and my fantastic colleagues for the study they just published in @nature.com revealing a massive expansion of our species' niche before dispersing out of Africa. Have a read, because it's an amazing paper 🤩

Fascinating - not least on why different datasets produce very different results.

“Historically, no one lived past age 35” "I’ve heard *so* many versions of this claim, including recently from a menopause doctor (implying menopause is not “natural” because noone lived long enough to go through it). Every time someone states this “fact,” a demographer loses a piece of their soul"

Our recently published paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review on #reasoning styles and #belief in God is now featured by @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social! Thanks, Jonathan Caballero, for the interesting article. 📄 Read the paper here: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

I was really excited when I saw this study being presented at @icarehb.bsky.social last January and I'm really glad to see the paper out! Amazing record of cultural transmission strategies & cultural traits over 3 million years 🤩 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Very thought provoking But it's difficult to see how “science cannot be mandated” tackles the incentives for 'fast science', quantity over quality, etc that the best of Open Science aims to overturn

🚨🚨 NEW PRE-PRINT 🚨🚨 Prominent theories in political psychology argue that threat causes increases in conservatism. Early experimental work supported this idea, but many of these studies were (severely) underpowered, and examined only a few threats and ideological DVs. 1/n osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧪 New research for the science feed from #anthropology!

Extremely happy to see some of my PhD work out in Current Anthropology! "The Dual Foundations of Political Ideology Are Ubiquitous across Human Social Life" www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

Thing I just learned in #rstats: unz() lets you connect to a .zip and load files from inside it without actually unzipping it (great for a file I'm working with that's 30 MB zipped and 1+ GB unzipped, with multiple CSVs in it)

Two Fully-Funded PhD positions at Auckland Uni! Come help us understand the past and future of global cultural and linguistic diversity. #linguistics #evolution #academia #phd www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

A few words of appreciation for Marc Neil-Jones, founder of the Vanuatu Daily Post. I owe my journalism career to him. village-explainer.kabisan.com/index.php/20...

Religion data for reuse! Those stories about U.S. religion you're currently seeing in the news? They're from the Pew 2023-2024 Religious Landscape Study. While anyone can explore the data with their online tools, Pew has also shared the underlying dataset: doi.org/10.58094/3kw...

Thrilled to see this out! In our new Psych Review paper, we argue that prosocial religious beliefs develop as people strategically push narratives that motivate others to cooperate. We show how this "mutual policing" dynamic explains (among other things) the origins, decline, & varieties of belief.

This little bird survived a volcanic eruption! Buried by volcanic ash from Vesuvius in AD 79, this Roman fresco of a little bird pecking at fruit re-emerged looking as delightful as it did some 2,000 years ago! Villa Poppaea, Oplontis, Italy 📷 by me 2023 #Archaeology

I'm excited to share that I've just started a new Research Fellow position at the University of Auckland! I'll be working alongside Quentin Atkinson on a project about the connection between religiosity and socially conservative attitudes, so stay tuned for some cool new work!

Our new Registered Report testing whether secular individuals would be willing to join religious groups when threatened with cooperative insecurity. While this effect was weak in a behavioral test, a self-reported willingness to join was much stronger than anticipated. bit.ly/secularizati...

I am delighted to share our latest piece of research: ‘A global cross-cultural analysis of string figures reveals evidence of deep transmission and innovation’. This was long in the works and is by far the largest project I’ve led to date. A thread: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

It’s a dark day for research in Aotearoa New Zealand and the ramifications for the country are huge. Minister Judith Collins has just announced our blue-skies funder will no longer fund humanities & social science research and that 50% of what is funded must have economic benefit.

Our JSS article is out! And now I get to focus on {marginaleffects} 1.0.0. Stay tuned. www.jstatsoft.org/article/view...

Since I am suddenly inundated with statistics-oriented followers, I should post again that I am still conducting free weekly open office-hours for anyone in the world with Econometrics questions, Wed 10-12AM Eastern or by appointment. Details and sign up at donskerclass.github.io/OfficeHours....

Cool paper on “humanity’s perennial tendency to denigrate kids”. Here’s screenshot of abstract:

New paper: in what we think is one of the largest meta-analyses of animal behaviour, we find no evidence for inequity aversion in nonhumans (in accept/reject paradigms) royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... Led by Oded Ritov & with @engelmann.bsky.social & Christoph Völter

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) against women is a major public health and inequality concern. It's not clear what causes it or how to reduce it. Gaby Deschamps' JMP considers that IPV is positively correlated with motherhood, and asks if we can understand why. www.gabrieladeschamps.com/research

"language transmission may have a local-level sex bias in certain regions of the world, and the effects of ethnographic traits, such as descent and postmarital residence, are inconsistent at a global level" 👀👀👀 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Have you ever wondered about individual-, group-, and multi-level selection arguments? Packed with strong opinions, vehicles and replicators, the Price equation, and causal graphs, I hope you find some answers in my new paper. Please share widely! ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

"Ethnographers can... use participant observation to provide evidence of causality" "they can leverage the strengths of ethnographic research... to illuminate causal processes, building upon prior research and complementing rather than replacing other forms of inquiry"

May be a bit niche, but I’ve made a starter pack for Vanuatu! Includes people in Vanuatu, who do work related to Vanuatu, and who are interested in Vanuatu and the region There's only a handful of us at the moment but please let me know if you or anyone else should be added! go.bsky.app/u8riwS

I'm very happy to see my article "Genes, Culture and Scientific Racism", coauthored with Marc Feldman, published in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (see rb.gy/x0e4lw). We explain why people wrongly believe race is a biological classification.

Fully-funded PhD position available on the cultural evolution of tea! With me, Sabine Parrish, and David Burslem at the University of Aberdeen (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿), come combine anthropology and biology to think about why people drink tea and how that may change in the future. www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

when he typed in “Pakistan IQ,” rather than getting a typical list of links, Hermansson was presented with Google’s AI Overviews tool, which gave him 80. For “Sierra Leone IQ,” it was 45.07 & 75.2 for “Kenya IQ” these results were directly taken from debunked race sciences published by Richard Lynn

Press release on our paper in Nature Comms tracking the spread of peaches across Indigenous North America! Through this study we aimed to center Indigenous communities and ecologies in narratives of colonialism as a socioecological process #archaeology #history #ecology www.psu.edu/news/researc...

Here's a stunner for #FossilFriday, just look at that beetle's preserved wing case! It belongs to a group called frog-legged leaf beetles (so-named for their extra-juicy rear legs), paleontologists called its pattern "the most perfectly preserved pigment-based colouration known in fossil beetles" 🧪

“Fifty years after the discovery of Lucy, it’s time to ‘decolonise paleoanthropology’ says leading Ethiopian fossil expert – podcast" theconversation.com/fifty-years-...

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