Very happy this has finally been published! Thread by co-author @theissbendixen.bsky.social about our study on cephalopod brain evolution

Theiss Bendixen@theissbendixen.bsky.social · last mo.

New research! 📚 We built the largest database to date of cephalopod species - octopuses, squids and cuttlefish - and their brains, habitats and behaviors 🐙🧠📈 What did we find?👇 Press release: www.lse.ac.uk/news/ecologi... Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨 CES Elections 2026–2029 🚨 We’ve got SIX Executive Committee positions open — including President-Elect, Treasurer, Secretary, Executive Ordinary Members (x2), and Student Rep! 🗓 Nominations close: May 31 🗳 Voting: June 15–24 📢 Results announced this summer forms.gle/9yX2SLcf82Vk...

Cultural Evolution Society Elections 2026: Nomination Form

Please use this form to submit your nomination(s) for the Executive Committee's open positions. On this page we will ask you for general details. The next pages allow you to choose the position(s) ...

forms.gle

I'm collecting together my prior Bluesky threads addressing popular misconceptions about genetics. A thread of threads, beginning with this brief guide to heritability: 🧬🧵🧪

Simon Fisher@profsimonfisher.bsky.social · last yr.

Heritability = one of the most commonly confused concepts in public (mis)understanding of genetics. Let’s break it down. Imagine studying a cohort of people in a specific set of environmental circumstances. You assess everyone for an observable trait & find it varies from one person to another. 🧪1/5

Heritability is a statistical description of sources of trait variation in a specific set of people under a specific set of environmental conditions. It doesn’t show how malleable the trait is, doesn't index an underlying feature of human biology, & can’t say anything about you as an individual.

M. Nolan Gray 🥑@mnolangray.bsky.social · 4mo ago

What's something that experts/practitioners in your field universally agree upon, but that remains a "hot take" among the general public?

I guess with race science discourse still percolating, I should re-up my starter pack for people who work on the topic

very excited to read all the interesting arguments for and against atrocities, and about the different, more and less sophisticated ways of thinking about atrocities, in the prestigious publications and platforms read and watched by a society indulging in atrocities without a moment's reflection

Our new review of beluga sociality and culture just dropped at Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology! Some of our key conclusions summarized 🧵 doi.org/10.1007/s002... @marine-valeria.bsky.social @dmennill.bsky.social @raincoast.org

If you work on corvid ecology, behaviour, cognition, or conservation, this might be useful for you 👇 I’ve just published CORVIDATA in Scientific Data 🐦 doi.org/10.1038/s415... (1/4)

If you look at the lit on the just world delusion, or cognitive biases (those that survived the replication crisis) there’s ample evidence that every human deludes themselves to varying degrees to cope with this fucked up reality. There’s no escape short of Buddhist enlightenment. Only coping.

What role(s) can non-human animal culture play in conservation? Much has been written on this topic in recent years, but Dawn Barlow, Taylor Hersh, & I offer some new perspectives: "Integrating space, time, and culture in animal conservation practice" @behavecol.bsky.social tinyurl.com/bdfe9k3j

Integrating space, time, and culture in animal conservation practice

Recent theoretical integration of the spatiotemporal and cultural elements of animal behavior has led to increasing calls to incorporate animal culture int

academic.oup.com

Little reminder that you can still register for the next talk in our online ROTO Lecture Series! Just click the link and join the talk and discussion on Monday 🤗 rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture... #PhilSci #HPBio

ROTO Research Group@roto-rub.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Next week, we welcome @rebeccasear.bsky.social in our Lecture Series. Rebecca will talk about 21st century eugenics, scientific racism and the role of academia in promoting political ideology. Just register here to participate 👉 rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture... #PhilSci #HPBio

Nice thread to balance things out! There are good researchers doing the hard work to treat evolutionary hypotheses of human psychology with the seriousness and rigor they deserve. Testing assumptions and, if necessary, shedding zombie theories is how a field progresses and improves

Lynda Boothroyd@drboothroyd.bsky.social · 9mo ago

So, lots of people picking up Kevin's post to declare all Evolutionary Psychology/ists misogynistic pervs. And I get why but look: I trained in Evo Psych. I trained in Behavioural Ecology too which maybe helps but I came into academia an enthusiastic researcher of sexual selection. 1/

I am happy to present to you our review „The diversity and evolution of vocal communication in nonavian reptiles“, published @annualreviews.bsky.social Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. Huge thanks to @gabrieljcohen.bsky.social and my other co-authors! Must say, I am a bit proud of Figure 1. ….

The Diversity and Evolution of Vocal Communication in Nonavian Reptiles

Historically, research on nonavian reptile communication has emphasized visual, tactile, and chemical modalities. Recently, growing evidence highlights the significance of acoustic signals in intra- a...

annualreviews.org

We must change this mindset that the essential and most critical work in a field is always the first one. That distorted view has caused a lot of problems in psychological science already. The first work is just that—the start. Every field should be evaluated based on the complete body of evidence.

If you want to know the latest on the government's 'compact' (i.e. extortion) offer to universities, you can use this tracker. Feel free to suggest edits as well. #academia docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

University 'Compact' Tracker

docs.google.com

The superpower of books like Sapiens is that they require expertise in like 12 academic fields to debunk. So you get these super detailed takedowns of small sections that look to laypeople like nitpicking.

Violence, scientific DRAMA, and misunderstanding! Who first asked if woodpeckers get headaches, or if rams are immune to brain damage? New Paper! I trace the history of human thought on brain injury in head-hitting animals, and it's a wild ride. 🧪 🏺 A thread - 1/🧵 doi.org/10.1002/ar.7...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH

The academic study of Religion also remains misunderstood as @vox-magica.bsky.social notes—whether because of its common misinterpretation as theological or the sense that it’s arcane +

A lot of the justifications point to the number of Religious Studies majors—but is this really how a dept’s value should be judged? In many RS departments in which I’ve taught, our courses have enormous enrollments & student interest +

Really happy to share this article I'm grateful to have been a part of: 'Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience' coauthored with @kevinlala.bsky.social, @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social and Marcus Feldman. Check out a preprint here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #ScientificRacism #Antiracism

part of the issue may be that when people say ‘the humanities’, or my personal favorite, ‘the humanities and social sciences’ they could be referring to any of 53982 things that have very little to do with each other

Julia M. Rohrer@dingdingpeng.the100.ci · last yr.

Among all the weird takes that seem to be popular online, the one that always gets me is that studying STEM somehow morally corrupts people and the solution is to make people additionally go through a humanities and/or social science curriculum at the university level.

I admit that I do not fully grasp what the knowledge of an ongoing genocide demands of me, but I think if I were not bothered by that question—if I batted it away, like a gnat—it could only be because something essential and irreplaceable had absented itself from my soul.

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...

Mapping nonhuman cultures with the Animal Culture Database - Scientific Data

Scientific Data - Mapping nonhuman cultures with the Animal Culture Database

nature.com

New theme issue in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B @royalsocietypublishing.org: Animal culture: conservation in a changing world Edited by @pbrakes.bsky.social, @lucymaplin.bsky.social, @emma-carroll.bsky.social, Alison L Greggor, Andrew Whiten and @ellengarland.bsky.social doi.org/10.1098/rstb...

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1925

doi.org

“Protecting the living cultural landscapes of animal stone-tool-use sites involves preserving the environments where these behaviors occur and recognizing the intrinsic value of animal cultures” 🏺🧪🐒

Ammie Kalan@ammiekalan.bsky.social · last yr.

Happy to have a new piece in @science.org with my friend Lydia where we draw attention to the significance of animal material culture for understanding human technical evolution and why we should digitally preserve and protect primate tools and tool use sites. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Inside me there are two wolves. One of them has a 15 genome edits the other 20 genome edits. Neither of them is a dire wolf.

I cannot imagine an ecologist saying "I'm going to start a genomics project, I don't know anything about DNA but how hard can it be?" You'd ask someone who knew. You'd learn. You should do the same for social science research! Obviously!

We would love feedback on a new NCBI-BLAST service we are launching today: sky-blast.com Under the hood it's the same BLAST executable and databases provided by NCBI, with a replica of the NIH's interface - providing an alternative to the US gov service that's less congested, faster & more reliable

New paper on the demographic drivers of cultural evolution in Great Tit song published today - epic work led by @nilomr.bsky.social with help from @andreaestandia.bsky.social Ella Cole & Sara Keen. Why did we do this, and what did we find? 🧵 follows: 1/n www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The demographic drivers of cultural evolution in bird song

Social learning can give rise to shared behavioral patterns that persist as culture within animal communities,1,2 such as bird and whale songs and cet…

sciencedirect.com