David W Lawson
@davidwlawson.bsky.social
Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara Applied Evolutionary Anthropology Lab 🌍🌏🌎 Human Behavioral Ecology Global Health, Family, Gender Norms 🏳️🌈 aea-lab.com
As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...
Happy #PrideMonth! To celebrate, I'm starting a thread of readings on queerness in animals/evolution, and keep adding throughout the month. I'll include a mix of writing for popular audiences as well as some scientific articles and book recommendations! 🧪 🏳️🌈 (1/n) Nature has ALWAYS been queer! 🌈
New review out today in Evolutionary Anthropology on arranged marriage, coauthored with @dconroybeam.bsky.social and @davidwlawson.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1002/evan...
The Role and Consequences of Arranged Marriage in the Evolution of Human Mating
Mate selection has important fitness implications and thus has been a prominent focus across the evolutionary social sciences. However, despite ample evidence that human mate selection is uniquely sh....
doi.org
Super happy to see this paper out! I think we did a good job of making sense of a dense and often conflicted literature, and Elizabeth and Dan were wonderful writing partners! Elizabeth 💫 has probably read every paper on arranged marriage out there! Check it out!
Elizabeth Agey@anthroliz.bsky.social · 2mo agoNew review out today in Evolutionary Anthropology on arranged marriage, coauthored with @dconroybeam.bsky.social and @davidwlawson.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1002/evan...
The 1991 documentary on New York City drag queen ball culture and their houses "Paris is Burning" is available on Youtube www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ7r...
Paris Is Burning | FULL MOVIE | New York Drag Ball Classic LGBTQ Documentary
YouTube video by Shout! Studios
youtube.com
In their recent Perspective in our Field Stations in Experimental Biology Research series, Somanathan & co call for a network of field stations throughout India to better understand the biology of the organisms that inhabit the country's diverse ecosystems doi.org/10.1242/jeb....
The NIH is demanding that it's grantees cease collaborations with foreign scientists. Wait until NIH director Jay Bhattacharya hears about this! His stated top priority in the director role is to prevent government interference with or censorship of scientific researchers.
U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators
NIH, NASA grantees are confused and concerned amid agencies’ piecemeal communication
science.org
Films more likely to star an actor called Chris or a talking animal than a woman over 60, study finds
Films more likely to star an actor called Chris or a talking animal than a woman over 60, study finds
Emma Thompson among voices supporting anti-ageism campaign, which has uncovered striking findings in top-grossing UK films over past three years Box office hit films are four times more likely to star a talking animal than a woman over 60, according to a new survey by Age Without Limits. The anti-ageism campaign studied the 100 highest performing films released in the UK in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and found that while five starred an older woman, about 20 featured creatures who chat. Continue reading...
theguardian.com
$9-billion taxpayer transfer to a $5 trillion company for US spy agencies to go all in on AI. NYT doesn't include a single critical word from a privacy or civil liberties expert. Just a don't-worry-about-it assurance at the end. Also: Anthropic is not our friend. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/u...
White House Approves $9 Billion for Spy Agencies to Catch Up on A.I.
nytimes.com
Especially concerning when we know DOGE was using AI models to identify “DEI” projects to cut. A self-reinforcing cycle against women and URM researchers.
Sasha Gusev@sashagusevposts.bsky.social · 2mo agoI assigned random gender/ethnicity labels to scientific abstracts from the literature and then asked Claude to do a thematic analysis. Claude identified a clinical versus computational split for female/male authors and a DEI focus for Black/URM authors. All in completely random data.
I assigned random gender/ethnicity labels to scientific abstracts from the literature and then asked Claude to do a thematic analysis. Claude identified a clinical versus computational split for female/male authors and a DEI focus for Black/URM authors. All in completely random data.
Landmark systematic review of the British birth cohorts, providing further evidence of Generational Health Drift. Led by the fantastic Laura Gimeno with superstar team: @dmorenoagostino.bsky.social @martindanka.bsky.social @yiling1015.bsky.social Alice Goisis & @drjenndowd.bsky.social
UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies@clscohorts.bsky.social · 3mo agoMillennials and gen Z may spend more years in poor health than their earlier born counterparts, according to a new review of 51 studies comparing UK birth cohorts. Read more on the CLS website - bit.ly/4wKqclU
CEs Job Alert 🚨! 4-year teaching focused lecturership at Bristol in bio/evo anthropology with a quantitative focus. Bristol is a terrific city to live in, and many ECRS in the CES will hopefully fit the profile: www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...
Details | Working at Bristol | University of Bristol
bristol.ac.uk
Our new commentary is out: "More than the sum of its sexes" — on embodied capital & age-structured labor in forager economies. Big thanks to Venkataraman et al. for their excellent "Man the Hunter" piece that clarifies much. Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
More than the sum of its sexes: functional constraints, embodied capital, and age-structured labor in human forager economies
sciencedirect.com
Congratulations to Elizabeth Agey, winner of the #HBES2026 Postdoctoral Investigator Award! 🎉 For her work on “Parental influence on mate choice shapes reproduction and socioeconomic resources in Nepal.” 👏
New Open Access book edited by Cristina Moya @hyperadapthyrax.bsky.social and Wolfgang Wagner on identity and culture. Many great chapter by great folks. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...
Culture, Identity, and Essentialism
This open access book approaches topics of culture, identity, and essentialism through an anthropological and psychological lens.
link.springer.com
I've changed my mind about the origins of essentialist intuitions quite a bit over the years, and it was great to have Wolfgang Wagner renew my attention to the puzzle. So many clever contributors have refined my beliefs about the phenomena and changed my mind about what we know.
Paul Smaldino@psmaldino.bsky.social · 3mo agoNew Open Access book edited by Cristina Moya @hyperadapthyrax.bsky.social and Wolfgang Wagner on identity and culture. Many great chapter by great folks. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...
It's an all-star cultural evolution / evolutionary psychology / human behavioural ecology panel, with Joe Henrich, Fiona Jordan, @edhagen.net and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder
Phenomenal plenary at CES 2026 by Nicole Creanza on the links between birdsong and human language
This is happening NOW in the Applied Cultural Evolution session. Come join us. Room B-K2-02 😊
David W Lawson@davidwlawson.bsky.social · 3mo agoIf you at the Cultural Evolution Society meeting this week - come check out Dunstan Matungwa presenting on Tanzania’s extraordinary contributions to anthropology and the priorities of Tanzanian scholars for the future of cross-national collaboration. 🇹🇿 🌍 🌎 🌏
If you at the Cultural Evolution Society meeting this week - come check out Dunstan Matungwa presenting on Tanzania’s extraordinary contributions to anthropology and the priorities of Tanzanian scholars for the future of cross-national collaboration. 🇹🇿 🌍 🌎 🌏
Sneak peek at the US cover for THE THINKING ANIMAL, coming Jan '27. Looking forward to sharing more - soon! @stmartinspress.bsky.social @zcosini.bsky.social
The call for the PhD programme in Sociology and Social Research at Trento is out, with deadline 14 May. Interested in a PhD in cultural evolution / social media / cultural analytics? Get in touch! www.unitn.it/en/phd/socio...
Sociology and Social Research
Con il PhD in Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale studi le politiche sociali, le disuguaglianze, la demografia e le migrazioni. Con laboratori, borse e mobilità
unitn.it
Couldn't wait to give this news! English edition of Technopanic will be out at end of this month. It will appear under a new publishing project led by @danielnettle.bsky.social , which I am very glad to be part of. More details soon. And thank you to @hugoreasoning.bsky.social for the endorsement!
Congrats to Hampton, and to all other winners of the IPUMS Research Awards competition for "outstanding research using IPUMS data to advance or deepen our understanding of social and demographic processes" 🎉🥳
IPUMS@ipums.bsky.social · 3mo agoIPUMS International Student Award is a tie! * @hggaddy.bsky.social for "High rates of polygyny do not lock large proportions of men out of the marriage market" (doi.org/10.1073/pnas...).
Despite my face in this thumbnail, I really enjoyed this conversation about a project I've been working on lately! Thanks for having me on again, @epthepod.bsky.social
Evolutionary Psychology (the podcast) @epthepod.bsky.social · 3mo agoThis week, we talk to @dconroybeam.bsky.social about sex and gender. youtu.be/MwB7cemCfgM podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... www.podbean.com/eas/pb-xiemw...
Are gender gaps in partner preferences larger in countries with stronger gender norms? In our new preprint (w/ @jinwenxie.bsky.social ), we addressed this question using an open access dataset (Walter et al, 2020; >14k participants, 45 countries). 🧵1/4 #ehbea #psychscisky 🧪 osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
There is a fully-funded PhD position at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to pursue dissertation research among the Mayangna of Nicaragua, expanding a longitudinal study of subsistence strategies and behavioral ecology. Please share the posting! www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...
My book (!) How Economics Discovered Women is now available for pre-order from the University of California Press. The book is a survey and critique of how the economics of gender has developed since the mid-1970s. www.ucpress.edu/books/how-ec...
How Economics Discovered Women by Shelly Lundberg - Hardcover
Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.
ucpress.edu
