Simon J. Greenhill
@simongreenhill.bsky.social
I study how languages and cultures evolve. Primarily with phylogenies and other assorted computational methods. Based at @Biology_UoA. Never met a language phylogeny or a cultural phylogeny I didn't like. #phylolinguistics
I am so triggered by RJK Jr's comment about ICU's being empty during #COVID. I re-read what I wrote after one of the surges. How do others forget. The trauma was--and is--real.
I'm An ICU Doctor. I’m Haunted By What I’ve Seen During The Recent COVID-19 Surge.
“I can’t stop thinking about the 40-something man who told me, ‘I can’t die like this. I just got engaged and have a 6-month-old baby.’ I encouraged him to be positive, but that didn’t stop him from d...
huffpost.com
MSc and PhD students are the workforce in the engine room of our public research system. They are very, very cheap labor by policy design. This talk about a 'cost blowout' is utter rubbish. We frown on company owners that charge people to get a job. We should be doing the same here. #NZPOL
Cost blowout puts fees for foreign PhD students under review
A blow-out in the cost of treating foreign PhD students like locals has prompted a rethink of the long-standing policy and a cap on spending next year.
rnz.co.nz
Reminder: two weeks are left to apply for the PhD and postdoc positions in my lab. See more info here www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo...
Summer Institute in Statistical Genomics will be held in Auckland in late Nov/early Dec: events.humanitix.com/southern-ssi...
Summer Institute in Statistical Genomics
Bruce Weir Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics (SISG) - AUCKLAND 23 November to 4 December 2026
events.humanitix.com
one road, not even long enough to run a marathon on, for the low low price of 42 times the entire 2027 budget for scientific research in new zealand #nzpol
Biggest-ever PPP: $3.6b Northland expressway deal signed
The 26km expressway will include twin tunnels through the Dome Valley.
nzherald.co.nz
the current NZ govt is so anti-science that they've changed eligibility for the Prime Minister's Science Prizes to rule out awards to people doing basic science eg from 2026 the MacDiarmid is for work with "potential to generate econ, health, social, or env benefits for New Zealand" #nzpol
Klawitter & @alexeidrummond.bsky.social introduce novel and efficient methods for estimating the credible level of individual tree topologies using tractable tree distributions, specifically conditional clade distribution (CCD). 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag141 #societyjournal #compbio
Bayesian credible sets for phylogenetic tree topologies with applications to coverage analysis and cross-model comparison
Abstract. Credible intervals and credible sets, such as highest posterior density intervals, form an integral statistical tool in Bayesian phylogenetics, b
doi.org
Get excited :) PhyloSpec is coming! A shared standard + modelling language for phylogenetic models. Write a model once, run it across engines like BEAST X, BEAST 2.8 & RevBayes. Easy and reproducible. Built by @tochsner.bsky.social & collaborators (ETH Zürich, Auckland, LMU). phylospec.com
PhyloSpec
A standardized way to describe phylogenetic model components, common assumptions, and best practices in the field of phylogenetics.
phylospec.com
New article!: The Origins and Evolution of Writing www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... 🧵1/
The Origins and Evolution of Writing
For centuries, scholars have debated the etiology and evolution of writing. The most persistent concerns relate to the relationship between writing and social organization, linguistic structure, and c...
annualreviews.org
The arguments against language reclamation haven't changed much in the nearly 20 years I've been working in this field: "It costs too much." "People are choosing to abandon their languages, so let them." "They have no practical use." "It's just sentimental nostalgia." Fuck All That, a thread:
Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die
When cultural preservation comes at the expense of speakers’ decisions, sometimes it's O.K. to let a language die.
newyorker.com
Somewhere a university academic is being told to "do more with less" by someone whose job title didn't exist two reorgs ago.
My brilliant colleagues at @e-l-p.bsky.social put so much knowledge, time, and care into responding to something no one should ever have to respond to. If you were deeply disgusted and troubled by @newyorker.com’s decision to publish this smug anti-Indigenous garbage, please read this.
A Response to “Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die” | Endangered Languages Project
endangeredlanguages.com
Endangered Languages Project@e-l-p.bsky.social · last wk.If you’ve seen this article, you may be sitting with anger, pain, or just exhaustion at dealing with another helping of colonial nonsense. We feel a responsibility to speak back when these colonizing narratives show up, yet again, in such a prominent venue. endangeredlanguages.com/story/respon...
Baldwin effect? Methylation patterns predict cultural behavior in dolphins
Stephanie L King@stephanielking.bsky.social · 2w agoAnother new paper out this week: A culturally transmitted foraging technique in Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins can be predicted by DNA-methylation levels royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...
Cultural Evolution of Perfumes since 1900 https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19520 Perfumes are cultural artifacts and works of sensory art, composed from a finite, recombinable palette of notes that together evoke a distinctive scent impression. Here, we assemble the largest perfume corpus compiled ...📈🤖
It's called The Humanities and it's being systematically dismantled due to HE cuts. 😡
Financial Times@financialtimes.com · 2w agoUniversities should arm students with AI ‘eval’ powers ft.trib.al/KP8p07e | opinion
I have a new paper out in Science today with colleagues Damian Blasi, Marcus Hamilton, and Russell Gray. www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....
The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene
Characterizing the factors that have shaped linguistic diversity is fundamental for understanding human history, culture, and cognition. In this study, we combined statistical and social computational...
science.org
A reminder that UC _faculty_ and Faculty Associations — not the universities themselves nor their administrators — are waging this battle in court, demonstrating great bravery and moral clarity.
White House admits it used keywords to kill billions worth of California research grants
Federal agencies that terminated more than a thousand research grants at the University of California last year admitted that they used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COV...
apnews.com
Probably a good time to point out that after cuts to services like our bio-security under the last National Govt, M.bovis was able to breach our borders and infect our farms. It was the next Labour govt that managed to eradicate it and set up a 10 year plan to monitor its situation long term.
how about instead of banning social media for kids we make the social media companies clean up their damn mess?
RFK Jr. asked the National Institute of Health to dedicate $5 billion (!) to finding a link between vaccines and autism. "That would have dedicated more than a tenth of the NIH’s annual budget to investigating a hypothesis already refuted by scientists worldwide."
Inside RFK Jr.’s push to dismantle decades of U.S. vaccine policy
Insider accounts reveal the scale of the health secretary's ambitions to curb childhood immunizations and unearth a link between vaccines and autism.
reuters.com
Scientists--if your funding was cut over the last year (for research on climate, global health, DEI, LGBTQ or womens health, etc) but you managed to keep the research going, I want to talk to you for an upcoming article! Plz contact me: gewin at me dot com. Re-posts appreciated!
‘Thousands of university job cuts in humanities and social sciences are creating widespread cold spots for languages, classics and theology degrees, the British Academy has warned’ www.theguardian.com/education/20...
Humanities among degrees being ‘extinguished’ by hard-up universities
Exclusive: Experts fear rise in education ‘cold spots’ and social immobility as 4,000 academic posts lost in one year
theguardian.com
Happy to finally see this paper published! Thank you to the @dfg.de and all the institutions who supported me and this research! 🎉 @erc.europa.eu @humanorigins.bsky.social Open access, download freely at the link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Harvati Lab@harvatilab.bsky.social · last mo.📢 New #openaccess paper out! Exploring the evolutionary drivers of encephalization and facial reduction in the genus Homo. 🧠💀 Check it out here: rdcu.be/fsgmj Congrats to Mark and Katerina @katharv.bsky.social for this work! ✨️ #humanevolution @humanorigins.bsky.social
