Gregory Kohn
@kohngregory.bsky.social
Professor specializing in bird social behavior. Interested in developmental systems thought, ontogenetic niches, organismal agency, and ייִדיש. PI: Animal Social Interaction lab kohnlab.wordpress.com
Donald Griffin, discoverer of bat echolocation, was born OTD 1915. I imagine “small mammals enough like ourselves to feel that I could understand what their lives would be like, and yet different enough to make it a sort of adventure and exploration to see what they were doing.” 🐋🌱🧪 #HistSTM
Somebody needs to tell the new parking lot attendants that attempting to get into a vehicle is unlawful (they literally tried to jump right in my car right after this video).
I really hope someone checks my math and memory of public university starting salaries. The idea that inflation adjusted numbers reflect starting assistant professors making 20% less now than they did 25 years ago is….. whew.
Drug Monkey@drugmonkey.bsky.social · last wk.The academic culture of compensation drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/07/28/t...
Forest gate in Adirondacks near Lake Placid, June 2026.
Neural correlates of seed-eating in songbirds royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... Our new paper showing that songbirds that dehusk seeds with the beak and tongue have an enlarged trigeminal nucleus in the brainstem, particularly the part where the tongue is represented.
bonding with my yiddish-speaking ancestors over our shared love of vegetarian baked beans
Happy to share this 'capstone' project from my time as a postdoc @umich.edu, where we show that hierarchically nested bursts of body-shape evolution may underlie much of perching-bird diversification over ~50 million years. Free access link here: rdcu.be/fuxB1
Rates of passerine body plan evolution in time and space
Nature Ecology & Evolution - A reconstruction of the evolutionary history of passerine body plans over the past ~50 Myr shows rare bursts of phenotypic innovation near the origin of major...
rdcu.be
Ever wondered what the bizarre dances of male birds of paradise look like to females? Check out our new preprint! @izziehb.bsky.social @fusanilab.bsky.social “The geometry of visual signaling in a bird-of-paradise” ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
The WISDOM OF CROWDS emerges in flocks of thousands of migrating songbirds! Excited to share our work published by @aaas.org in Science Advances! doi.org/10.1126/scia...
The wisdom of crowds emerges in flocks of thousands of migrating songbirds
Larger flocks of migrating songbirds orient more accurately toward their population’s migratory direction than smaller flocks.
doi.org
For #FossilFriday, abundant Eocene (~50 mya) shorebird tracks from the Green River Formation, WY; seen last week in the Tellus Museum of Science, Cartersville GA. 🧪🪨⚒️🐾🐦
I just learned Peter Schuster passed away. A great colleague from @sfiscience.bsky.social , one of the smartest people I ever met. He made fundamental contributions to the maths of evolution and origins of life. A great inspiration for all. @josepsardanyes.bsky.social www.santafe.edu/people/profi...
very nice read! I've been thinking about innovation vs. copying a lot lately - motivated by my finding that increasing learning rates in zebra finches led to learning novel syllable variants. And listening to the catbirds in my yard makes me wish I could get them into the lab eh:
Song development by grey catbirds
What are the relative roles of imitation, improvisation and invention in the development of large song repertoires in species of the songbird family M…
sciencedirect.com
Bird song has been central to the nature-versus-nurture debate. In my latest piece, I argue that new ideas from developmental science, combined with classic studies on the social shaping of song, point toward a way beyond the innate-versus-learned dichotomy. gregorykohn.substack.com/p/templates-...
Templates in Tension: the dialectic of flexibility and structure in birdsong
Flexibility
gregorykohn.substack.com
My favorite photo this summer. Chestnut-sided Warbler (Setophaga pensylvanica) at Norton Book in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.
A thorough documenting of the statistical shenanigans in the embryo selection company Herasight’s claims about genetic IQ prediction. The paper was published in a new Intelligence journal against the reviewers’ protest that the proprietary prediction model was not disclosed and so was unverifiable
Herasight: Latent Promises, Observed Failures
Many make the mistake of rejecting Herasight on ethical grounds, but doing so gives them too much credit.
open.substack.com
We are delighted to invite you to the interdisciplinary workshop of @animalinvention.bsky.social on Agency between Biology and Philosophy. It will take place at UCL and online on 22-23 September. All info and registration details can be found here: www.animalinventiveness.com/post/interna...
If we lose the capacity to know anything then they can sell us anything.
Alex Wild@alexwild.bsky.social · last mo.I get angry when people talk about "declining trust in science" as though there weren't a coordinated effort by billionaire criminals to smear science as a way to decrease regulations, spread propaganda, and enrich themselves. Scientists are being scapegoated and we should not play along.
Am I right that this paper just shows that 1) chicks have a basic preference for round shapes, 2) this preference disappears when a stress-evoking sound is being played in the background? 1/4
Really interesting article (in Polish) on the science of birdsong! www.tygodnikpowszechny.pl/o-czym-spiew...
O czym śpiewają ptaki? Mówią więcej, niż sądziliśmy
Sztuczna inteligencja na dobre zadomowiła się już w wielu dziedzinach nauki. Dzięki jej zastosowaniu mamy szansę poznać reguły rządzące ptasimi pieśniami – a nawet ich znaczenia.
tygodnikpowszechny.pl
Chestnut-sided warbler (Setophaga pensylvanica) at Norton Brook NY. This individual was exceptionally confiding and he followed me around the site.
Twitter is going kind of crazy about crime and genetics right now (What's new?). My next post is a deep dive into a paper behind a widespread claim that brutal execution in Medieval Europe selected for reduced aggression, allowing civilization to develop. The title says it all, really.
Capital punishment is not a breeding program
No, medieval execution didn't "genetically pacify" Europe
sequencesandconsequences.substack.com
I’m pretty sure this is the first time bird conservation sparks a national revolution, and I’m looking forward to the ruling Lëvizja Bashkë-Birdlife Albania coalition. I birdied in Vjosë–Nartë around 08ish, and you’d have to be crazy to build a trashy resort there.
Mother Jones@motherjones.com · last mo.The “Flamingo Revolution,” as local activists have dubbed it, was set off by the luxury resort projects that Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, plan to build on nature reserves in Albania.
What makes a new kind of mind possible? In this @royalsocietypublishing.org paper, the authors explain why cognitive transitions are not just moments when animals became smarter, but evolutionary shifts that opened new spaces of cognition. @eplantec.bsky.social pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
American yellow warbler (Setophaga aestiva) at Norton Brook NY.
Really interesting book that covers Lefebvre’s studies on avian innovation and behavioral flexibility. How this relates to “general intelligence” is an open conceptual question for me, but the studies here really speak to the potential of behavioral drive in avian evolution.
tl;dr: There never was a paradox of the organism. It was just a mistake about genes. But genetic conflicts do occur and are fascinating. This is also an invitation: if you like the selfish-gene idea, I'd love to hear why. What biological reality does the metaphor capture?
Philip Ball@philipcball.bsky.social · 2mo agoI have read and enjoyed The Paradox of the Organism by @arvidagren.bsky.social and Manus Patten. I had a lot of thoughts about it, and about selfish genes. Here they are, in a long blog post. homunculusmusic.wordpress.com/2026/05/30/i...
