Snow has come to Lower Austria! #art #painting Our first snow of the season. This is a watercolor I did of our local castle, Burg Kreuzenstein. Very simple palette: ultramarine and indanthrene blue with burnt sienna. The key trick was spraying the still-wet paint to get that sweeping snow look...

Scary data from the long-term study of wild chimpanzees at Ngogo: lethal attacks on neighboring groups (almost exclusively by males) increased female fertility and offspring survival in their own group. “Demonic males” indeed…

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences@pnas.org · 9mo ago

After the Ngogo chimpanzee group killed 21 members of neighboring groups and expanded their territory by 22%, female birth rates more than doubled and infant survival increased sharply—showing clear fitness benefits from intergroup killing. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/TKmf50XuPjY

1 New paper from my former PhD student Raffaela Lesch's lab used a citizen science database to show that urban racoons, who are rapidly becoming less afraid of humans, also have shorter snouts than wild-type rural racoons. Link: rdcu.be/eRcpT

2. Nice writeups in the BBC: bbc.com/news/article... and Scientific American: www.scientificamerican.com/article/racc...

Cuter and closer: Raccoons may be on their way to becoming America's next pet

The rubbish raiders are showing reductions in snout length, a sign of early domestication, researchers say.

bbc.com

2 This is consistent with our "neural crest/domestication syndrome" hypothesis that the shorter snouts of domesticated animals is developmentally linked to the ultimate selective force underlying domestication: increased tameness: academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

The “Domestication Syndrome” in Mammals: A Unified Explanation Based on Neural Crest Cell Behavior and Genetics

Abstract. Charles Darwin, while trying to devise a general theory of heredity from the observations of animal and plant breeders, discovered that domestica

academic.oup.com

3 The causal linkage is due to the joint origins of many tissues implicated in domestication syndrome - in this case the adrenal glands and HPA axis (reduced for tameness), and the bones and muscles of the face (reduced as a side effect) - from the embryonic neural crest.

New paper from my former PhD student Raffaela Lesch's lab used a citizen science database to show that urban racoons, who arerapidly becoming less afraid of humans, also have shorter snouts than wild-type rural racoons. Link: rdcu.be/eRcpT

@raffaela-lesch.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Not only do urban raccoons have shorter snouts than rural ones, but the snout length also is dependent on climate! Colder climate have overall longer snouts than warm climates. So: maybe in a few thousand years we don’t just have dog beds and cat trees, but also raccoon trees/beds in our homes!

Interested in the evolution of human language? Check out our new paper in @science.org where we synthesize latest findings and outline a multifaceted, bio-cultural approach for studying how language evolved. Super proud of this work, and hoping it leads to exciting new research! tinyurl.com/ykacvanp

What enables human language? A biocultural framework

Explaining the origins of language is a key challenge in understanding ourselves as a species. We present an empirical framework that draws on synergies across fields to facilitate robust studies of l...

science.org

Cedric Boeckx@cedricboeckx.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Excellent @science.org review by an outstanding group, including @inbalarnon.bsky.social @profsimonfisher.bsky.social @limorraviv.bsky.social @simonkirby.bsky.social @lirancarmel.bsky.social @kazuookanoya.bsky.social @luciewolters.bsky.social What enables human language? A biocultural framework 🧪

Tired of posting about my much-derided brain painting for the Phil Trans cover... here's a watercolor painting I did last year of my father in law. Paint on paper: No ChatGPT was used, just an old black-and-white photo:

My art is not "AI slop" I am very proud of the artwork on the cover of our recent Phil Trans issue on consciousness. It was the product of 10+ hours of hard artistic work on my part, drawing, painting, and interacting with ChatGPT to try to get something in the style of an old Victorian engraving.

The goal was a scientifically accurate but aesthetically appealing cover, capturing the fundamentally conservative nature of the vertebrate brain over millions of years of evolution. The brains by themselves weren't enough, so I decided little figures of the animals to clarify this message.

I am very proud of the artwork on the cover of our recent Phil Trans issue on consciousness. It is based on watercolor paintings and ink drawings on paper I did myself, based on published diagrams by recognized experts on comparative brain anatomy (detailed in the caption which it seems no one read)

My art is not "AI slop" I'd been thinking about joining Bluesky for a while, but it's ironic that I finally joined NOT to combat right-wing propaganda or AI-generated nonsense, but to defend myself and my own artwork which has been widely labelled, and derided, as "AI slop" on this platform...