GRFP fellow Courtney Elmore celebrates the news with sushi
Congratulations to my MA student Courtney Elmore on her NSF GRFP!! A thread about Courtney's research, accomplishments, and where she's headed 🧵
#NSFfunded #veteransinSTEM #earlycareerresearcher #anthropology
So excited by paper on Bonobo Gal Pals with Kirsty Graham is now out in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology!
🧪 #primatology
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
🚨🚨🚨 International Society for Moral Psychology (ISMP) 🚨🚨🚨
ISMP was formed to create an interdisciplinary and international home for moral psychology, aimed at fostering deeper engagement across traditions, methodologies, and cultural contexts.
internationalsocietymoralpsychology.com/join-ismp/
The National Science Foundation has proposed eliminating the directorate that includes most of the federal funding for fieldwork and research in human origins. It's a sudden acceleration of a decades-long trend. I comment on what this means.
www.johnhawks.net/p/us-federal...
Woman with sunglasses smiling in front of the US Capitol.
At the Capitol again today trying to make inroads on the disastrous plans to kill social science at the NSF. Your turn. Call your reps. Tell them Congress must act to preserve funding for SBE. Seriously. Today.
Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. In FY 2027, NSF will close-out this directorate. Continuing grants that align with Administration priorities, such as in behavioral and cognitive science, and all impacted employees will be transferred to other parts of the agency. The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics will operate independently of the directorates and continue to be supported through the R&RA appropriation.
Once again it is time to contract your representatives: The FY27 budget request for NSF (see nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...) would get rid of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.
What I appreciate about the debunking of Mendelian traits is it is often just as much about advances in genetics as it is better measurement of and attention to phenotypic variation. You can't understand how genetics contribute to phenotypes without also understanding phenotypes themselves
WSU Anthropology Ph.D. students Madison Honig and Tigist Temesgen presented their resesarch projects at the Northwest Evolution, Ecology, and Human Behavior Symposium earlier this year. Great work representing the department!
For almost a decade, this highly popular short course McGill University has become recognized venue for learning about qualitatitve research methods
You can apply too!
www.mcgill.ca/summerinstit...
A Hadza collaborator of mine suddenly lost his wife earlier this week. They had two young children. I am seeking to raise a small amount of money to help Endeko cover funeral expenses and short-term childcare costs. Any small donations would be appreciated
www.gofundme.com/f/support-en...
Congratulations to Sumanta Roy, a Ph.D. student in cultural anthropology, who will join the Smithsonian’s Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History in D.C. His project will explore connections between material culture, labor, and social life in India.
Undergraduate Anthropology students Tariq Rose, Sally Wierenga, Clara Welch, Gentry, and Bailee Hanson with their SURCA presentation awards.
WSU Anthropology students Tariq Rose, Sally Wierenga, and Clara Welch with SURCA poster titled, "Reconstructing Identity: An Osteological Study of a Limited Provenience Anatomical Cranial Collection."
WSU Anthropology student Emiltze Cervantes-Contreras with SURCA poster titled, "Latino Immigrant Agricultural Worker Culture and Its Effects on Workplace Hazards."
WSU Anthropology students had a strong showing at SURCA (Showcase for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities)! We’re excited to celebrate several students who received awards: Johnathon Whitacre, Gentry, Bailee Hanson, Tariq Rose, Piper Welch, and Sally Wierenga. Learn more: surca.wsu.edu
Abstract: Social norms are unwritten rules that guide human behavior and social interaction. They play a central role in promoting cooperation and maintaining cultural diversity. Yet because norms pressure people to do what others do, they may also sustain practices that are inefficient or harmful. In this talk, I present insights from a mathematical model and a field study that together examine whether and how such norms can persist. The model challenges the idea that arbitrary or harmful norms can be maintained solely through social pressure. It shows that norms with continuously varying behavioral options cannot be maintained at ecologically or psychologically suboptimal equilibria, suggesting that norms adapt more readily than previously assumed. I then present evidence from a field study among the Derung, small-scale horticulturalists in Yunnan, China. Derung farmers continued to follow a traditional cooperative farming harvest division norm after market integration. They did so even though they recognized its lower ecological payoff and expected no social disapproval for deviating from it. Rather than payoff calculations, Derung farmers adhered to the norm out of a desire to follow tradition and common practice. However, five years later the norm had changed, consistent with the model’s prediction that norms with continuously varying options eventually adapt to ecological conditions.
This week's Cooperation Colloquium:
Minhua Yan @minhuayan.bsky.social @iast.fr
The persistence and adaptation of social norms: Theory and field evidence
Date: March 27
Time: 15:00 UTC+1 (Vienna) / 10 am ET (NYC)
Sign up: list.ku.dk/postorius/li...
Climate change in the WHO Pandemic Agreement negotiations: a qualitative study. Graph shows the evolution of different topics over different articles.
NEW PREPRINT! 🦠⚖️🌡️ The Pandemic Agreement is the first global health treaty to name climate change, and behind the scenes, the UNFCCC was a source of both inspiration and conflict. Cristina Arnés-Sanz and team tracked climate issues through three years of negotiations: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Our new paper is now out showing how time perception in animals is linked to their ecology. Using data from 237 species we show temporal perception is faster in species that fly and pursuit predators www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐
New paper with @dstibbardhawkes.bsky.social exploring responses to unequal distributions in Hadza hunter-gatherers. Equal distributions were more like to come from people *taking* from peers with more rather than giving to peers with less.
BREAKING: The controversial hepatitis B vaccine trial in Guinea-Bissau has been *cancelled,* I can now report. A senior official with Africa CDC confirmed the cancellation and said GB officials are working to make sure any research is conducted ethically:
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
predominantly ‘Jewish’ human psy chol ogy with a new psy chol ogy that was ‘properly German.’ ”51 Lorenz joined the Nazi party in June of 1938. By 1940, he was appointed to the Kant Professorship of Psy chol ogy at the Albertus University of Königsberg in East Prus sia, which came along with the directorship of an Institute of Comparative Psy chol ogy. Adapting his domestication theme to the Nazi context, Lorenz wrote two articles in 1940 making explicit connections between Nazi racial hygiene and his own studies of animal be hav ior; the second of these was published in the official Nazi journal for biology teachers.52 Lorenz quickly became part of the Nazi war machine. In Oc- tober 1941, just eight months after assuming his Königsberg position, he was drafted into the German Army, first as a military psychologist in Poznan, a city in western Poland taken over by the Nazis after their inva- sion of Poland in 1939. In Poznan, as a member of the Nazi Office of Race Policy, Lorenz administered mental tests aimed at sorting “mixed Poles and Germans into German- like people that could be rehabilitated and Poles who could not,” and who were subsequently sent to concentration camps.53 When such psychological testing was discontinued, he worked as a physician and psychiatrist at the reserve hospital in Poznan.54 Along with these practical activities, Lorenz continued to support Nazi ideology through intellectual labors. In 1943, he published another article extol- ling the virtues of race purity, and warning of the disruptive effects of do- mestication on animals’ instincts.
I am reading "Killer Instinct: The popular science of human nature in 20th century America" by Nadine Weidman, and I am learning a lot. I was aware that Konrad Lorenz (father of field of ethology, winner of 1973 Nobel prize) was a Nazi, but didn't know he was so enthusiastic about it.
“If you dressed up a Homo habilis individual in clothes and you saw her walking in the distance, would you do a double take? … This study shows us that the answer is YES!” https://scim.ag/4aSsPJT
The 0.5.0 version of my {brms} + {tidyverse} translation of McElreath's "Statistical Rethinking" (2nd ed) is up!
solomon.quarto.pub/sr2/
1/3
#rstats
1. My new preprint has its own bluesky account. Why? The problems facing social media & scientific publishing are similar: both are dominated by powerful oligopolies. The @atproto.com tech underlying bluesky that aims to solve the social media prob might also help solve the scientific pub prob 🧪 🧵
Favorite article on how evolution and culture (sociocultural, not CET) aren't at odds with each other. Go!
Almost everything by Barry Hewlett, I always thought his Evolutionary Cultural Anthropology framework was underappreciated. Here's an overview w/ application to disease outbreak www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
I am impeaching Secretary Kristi Noem, who is an incompetent leader and a disgrace to our democracy.
She wreaked havoc in the Chicagoland area and has brought her reign of terror to Minneapolis. One of her rogue ICE agents shot and killed an innocent woman today. It must come to an end.
White-sided dolphins seem to help killer whales "scout" and catch Chinook salmon near Vancouver Island, then eat the leftovers
screenshot of my post
Big new blogpost!
My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more.
--> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...
@anthrofuentes.bsky.social and I are working on a letter regarding the archiving of #NSF #DDRIGs in the #SBE Directorate and impacts on our fields. What did you/your students discover as a result of a DDRIG award? What other impacts resulted from the award? Post here or DM. Please repost for viz.
