Really enjoyed the Mathematical Models in Ecology and Evolution (MMEE) meeting in Cork! If anyone missed my talk "Early-season helping yields increasing returns to scale at the onset of eusociality" (Tom Wenseleers, Viviana Di Pietro & Ricardo Caliari Oliviera), the PPT is here: lnkd.in/eGXBJRuq

An internal version of Astra, OpenAIs next major model, solved ten major open math problems, for a total cost of $2,000 at Sol API rates. Truly impressive! openai.com/index/ten-ad...

Really enjoyed the Mathematical Models in Ecology and Evolution (MMEE) meeting in Cork! If anyone missed my talk "Early-season helping yields increasing returns to scale at the onset of eusociality" (Tom Wenseleers, Viviana Di Pietro & Ricardo Caliari Oliviera), the PPT is here: lnkd.in/eGXBJRuq

Just got my son a new toy - a Sunfounder robot dog kit! With voice & face recognition, inbuilt text to speech & LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek) so it can talk back to you & it even has Openclaw to be able to perform entirely new behaviours! Very impressive for just 150 euros!

With minimal instruction & in just 13 mins, Codex wrote me a Python script to procedurally generate the STL of a piece of honeybee worker comb & I then had it 3D printed for just 8 euros by the great people at Fablab! Not allowed at KU Leuven, as it's agentic AI. But works great!

Link to a presentation I gave earlier this year at the Biology Research Day about "Working Smarter with AI: Coding, Analysis and Scientific Writing" on how to productively use LLMs as part of your research workflow : www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ta9k3...

Robert Trivers Obituary. jjffh.com/tribute/deta...

Robert Trivers Obituary | John J. Fox Funeral Home Inc | Larchmont, NY

View Robert Trivers's complete obituary, share memories, and explore 12 tribute posts from the community.

jjffh.com

There are two new obituaries of Robert Trivers, though the mainstream media, to its shame, still hasn't published one. Steve Pinker has an excellent and long obituary in Quillette, and there's a shorter one in the Times of London. whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/03/25/t...

Some new obituaries of Robert Trivers. whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/04/07/t...

Cool - first time I had a LLM produce correct code to calculate a Romanesco broccoli natural fractal mesh & display it in realtime in 3D in R using rgl... ChatGPT 5.4 Extended Thinking R code here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zrmqo...

Cool - first time I had a LLM produce correct code to calculate a Romanesco broccoli natural fractal mesh & display it in realtime in 3D in R using rgl... ChatGPT 5.4 Extended Thinking R code here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zrmqo...

First time that a vision model, GPT 5.4 Pro (Vision), now gets the best score on the Mensa Norway IQ Test - IQ 145, 33 / 35 questions correct, just by visually looking at the IQ test! Or IQ 130 (15/16 correct) in the offline test. Amazing how far we have come!

Now that the Epstein files are apparently also bringing up the old Nowak inclusive fitness controversy - here a fun challenge: show me how to derive our recent eusociality model www.researchgate.net/publication/... using inclusive fitness methodology! A crate of Belgian beer awaits those who can!

(PDF) Early-season helping yields increasing returns to scale at the onset of eusociality

PDF | The evolution of eusociality, characterized by cooperative brood care, reproductive division of labor, and overlapping generations, represents a... | Find, read and cite all the research you nee...

researchgate.net

A super handy database to help support academic society journals and other ethical publishing. academic.oup.com/jeb/article/...

Time to publish responsibly: DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology

Abstract. The current economics of scientific publishing reveal a profound imbalance: academia pays prices far exceeding the actual costs of publication. R

academic.oup.com

Where is AI showing up in the productivity data? - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @FT

Where is AI showing up in the productivity data?

Signs of its effects are already starting to peek through

giftarticle.ft.com

From the Epstein Files, the stated goals of Nowak's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics: "curing the world of cancer, infectious disease, selfishness, and inclusive fitness theory." www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

OpenAI just released Prism, prism.openai.com, an Overleaf replacement to collaboratively edit Latex documents. Any ChatGPT subscriber can use it & freely invite as many collaborators as you like. Below it typeset a ChatGPT generated paper for me. With inbuilt Zotero integration!

Merry Christmas to you all! As a nerdy Christmas card I had Google Gemini Canvas code a Christmas-themed Galton board, to entertain my stats students (it is 1000 lines of JavaScript code)! :-) gemini.google.com/share/15f33a...

Merry Christmas to you all! As a nerdy Christmas card I had Google Gemini Canvas code a Christmas-themed Galton board, to entertain my stats students (it is 1000 lines of JavaScript code)! :-) gemini.google.com/share/15f33a...

A young PI here in Mainz has a fabulous PhD position that will be filled soon! By you? Keywords: Social insects, ageing, gene expression. www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb10-evoluti...

The @iussi-nwes.bsky.social that we organised this week in Leuven (18-19 December, www.iussi-nweurope.org/meetings) was a success! @rmash.bsky.social and @patrick-kennedy.bsky.social delivered fantastic keynote talks and there was a great set of contributed talks and posters.

🚨 Tenure-track professorship at Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany, with a focus on evolutionary ecology of social hymenoptera 🐝🐜 Initially for 6 years: www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/pr...

Talk I gave about our recent Evolution Letters paper, in which we quantified the benefits of helping at the origin of eusociality using a combination of experiment & theory, at the @iussi-nwes.bsky.social winter meeting in Leuven this week! Powerpoint here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4w3hw...

Evolution Letters@evolletters.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Early-season helping in Polistes wasps shows increasing returns - more helpers lead to convex gains in sexual productivity, resolving a key paradox in the origins of eusociality. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic... @ricaliari.bsky.social @twenseleers.bsky.social

POSTDOC ALERT🚨 Two exciting social evolution postdoc positions live today! We're looking for two excellent field biologists. Join us to explore the evolution of sociality in wasps across Africa. Apply by 11th January. Collaboration with @dustinrubenstein.com @bristolbiosci.bsky.social

@patrick-kennedy.bsky.social talks about so many fun social evolution dramas at @iussi-nwes.bsky.social winter meeting #wasplove

@rmash.bsky.social from @ucl.ac.uk opening @iussi-nwes.bsky.social winter meeting in Leuven! #CareAsACapacitor

Elegant experiment-theory mix, showing increasing returns from helping in a cooperative wasp

Evolution Letters@evolletters.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Early-season helping in Polistes wasps shows increasing returns - more helpers lead to convex gains in sexual productivity, resolving a key paradox in the origins of eusociality. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic... @ricaliari.bsky.social @twenseleers.bsky.social

Early-season helping in Polistes wasps shows increasing returns - more helpers lead to convex gains in sexual productivity, resolving a key paradox in the origins of eusociality. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic... @ricaliari.bsky.social @twenseleers.bsky.social

Super handy! Upload your photo in Chatgpt and write "Use /Photoshop to remove XXX from background" and you get a .png back in original resolution. Works really well!

Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 8mo ago

(Reuters) - Adobe is integrating Photoshop, Adobe Express and Acrobat apps into ChatGPT, it said on Wednesday, allowing users to edit images, design graphics and manage PDFs within the OpenAI-owned chatbot. @reuters.com $ADBE www.reuters.com/technology/a...

Happy to see yet another article from our lab come out: "Deformed wing virus affects foraging success and foraging specialization of honeybee workers"! Check it out! Congrats to my coauthors @HelenaMFerreir2 Kristof Benaets Lina De Smet & Dirk de Graaf www.nature.com/articles/s41...