New theme issue of #PhilTransB: The evolution of collective intelligence. Read #OA: buff.ly/f0gWUxH

Flyer: 20th May: Piers Kelly (in-person/hybrid) "The origins and evolution of writing: a very brief synthesis

"The origins and evolution of writing: A very brief synthesis" at Cambridge 16:30, 20th May.

Zoom in, if you're in a compatible time zone!

Can chimpanzees prepare for mutually exclusive possibilities individually or collectively?

Check out our new paper in Phil Trans @royalsociety.org, led by @drelizabethwarren.bsky.social, and funded by @templetonworld.bsky.social!

And stay tuned for the next paper, clarifying the mechanism!

What function did ~100k-year-old engravings from Blombos Cave & Diepkloof serve? Decoration, identity marking, proto-writing? osf.io/preprints/ps... uses transmission chains + cognitive experiments to find out & help answering one of the hardest questions in cognitive archaeology. long thread! 1/

The Cultural Evolution Society is delighted to announce that Mason Youngblood (he/they) @masonyoungblood.bsky.social, Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook University, is the recipient of the 2026 CES New Investigator Award.

Congratulations Mason on this well-deserved award!!

Clever vermin? Collective intelligence in rats and roaches Abstract. Collective intelligence (CI) is the capacity of groups to outperform individuals in tasks such as decision-making, coordination and problem-solvi

Things I thought I’d never say - here’s a new manuscript of cockroach and rat collective intelligence. We argue group-level intelligence can emerge from very different mechanisms—from simple local rules to socially mediated cooperation and learning:

royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Photo of James presenting the first slide of his talk

@brunelcce.bsky.social was well-represented at #ehbea2026. @replicatedtypo.bsky.social presented on ‘The cultural evolution of problem-solving’ and @abbeyepage.bsky.social on ‘When the village predicts the next baby: post-natal social support and fertility intentions in the UK’ (sadly no pic)

Final version of this paper is now published. Find out what the microfinance literature can tell us about the evolution of human cooperation

Volume 381 Issue 1948 | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B | The Royal Society Influential themed journal issues across the life sciences.

‘The evolution of collective intelligence’, compiled and edited by @omadagain.bsky.social, @anthrosarah.bsky.social, Monique Borgerhof Mulder, @edseabright.bsky.social, @jsegoviamartin.bsky.social, Andrew Whiten and @replicatedtypo.bsky.social

royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

Title slide: Modeling and testing the evolution and development of sensitive periods in changing environments

Fabulous, wide-ranging plenary from @ehbea.bsky.social’s 2026 New Investigator winner Nicole Walasek at #ehbea2026. Her work on the evolution and development of sensitive periods highlighted the benefits of multi-species work and the importance of formal modelling of verbal theories 👏👏

Throwback to a year ago: my large, cross-cultural review of how humans have coexisted with, used, and abused mushrooms.

A potpourri of fungal traditions.

someone recently called poetree "an essential DH infrastructure", and it was the best award we could ever asked for.

but! it's a standardized collection of poetry corpora in 11 languages and counting, with regular processing and annotation, API, R and Python access points, fully open, has a map..

Here's EHBEA's wonderful Secretary, who makes EHBEA run smoothly 👇 talking about how happy the part of her role which involves giving out money to early career researchers makes her 😊

I'm hiring! 📢 Fully funded 4-year PhD position in Language Evolution using Communication Games at @mpi-nl.bsky.social. Come work with me on how different social pressures shape the evolution of new communication systems in the lab! Deadline for application is May 18th! share.google/fGTKbFS4v4Gb...

New blog post: The Phylogenetics of Artifacts — inferring the evolution of cultural objects, artificial life forms, and language models.

From cat genetics to ancient myths to LLMs. 🧬 1/n

Hyperfixation of the week: there is apparently a field called “forensic hairdressing” where people try to reconstruct ancient hair techniques. Below is one from Ancient Rome ca. 120 AD. The leading figure is a hairstylist-turned-archaeologist named Janet Stephens who also does video tutorials. Cool!

The roles of cultural transmission and causal reasoning in the cultural evolution of technology Abstract. Humans are uniquely capable of producing highly efficient tools, but the extent to which this capacity depends on individual reasoning abilities

📣 Out now in @pnasnexus.org our *NEW PAPER* revamping a long-standing debate: to what extent does causal reasoning aid the cultural evolution of technology?

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ad...

We're pleased to announce the call for the 2026 Richerson Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research, for a recent PhD dissertation that significantly contributes to the field of CE.

Recipients receive a $300 award, a 3-yr CES membership and CES conference registration.

forms.gle/p4MqcskCs2Yz...

The drop and the metric system: how an unruly unit survived revolutions This paper presents the peculiar story of the drop, a non-standard unit which outlived the standardizing forces of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as an instructive lens for understan...

This was a fun paper on the history of science.

Despite all the pressures to standardize measurement, that good old informal unit of measure – the "drop" – persists in both medicine and chemistry. 💧

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I made a tiny tool for quickly sharing small datasets (< ~1000 rows) without uploading any data to a server.

🔗 ziptbl.com

It compresses the data into the link itself, so there’s no account, hosting, or storage layer involved.

Here's Florence Nightingale's famous 📊 data:
ziptbl.com#d=eNpdlE-LGz...

Did you know that the spinning top is one of the most common forms of traditional play worldwide?

Our research found tops to be nearly universal across human cultures.

Wherever you come from, your ancestors probably spun tops.

New preprint: Top of the World

osf.io/preprints/so...

Thread:

Baumard and André (B&A) responded to the (many) comments that their original piece (www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...).

Their response is linked in Alberto's post. I just got a pdf copy and will read it now; this will be a thread with my first thoughts...

Poster for the call. All relevant information is in thread

1/6

Excited to share the call for posters & registration for the 2nd XSCAPE Workshop: "Varieties of Externalism" !

📅 Friday, April 10th, 2026 — Gallery Room, Bramber House, University of Sussex

Registration is free but places are limited. 🧵

Gradience as a cognitive principle for evaluating numerical notations | PNAS More than 100 historically, archaeologically and ethnographically attested numerical notations have been used over the past 5,000 y; however, becau...

OK, it finally happened! My new article, "Gradience as a cognitive principle for evaluating numerical notations", is now out today in @pnas.org. By focusing on numerals' use for communication instead of arithmetic, we have a new tool to assess their efficiency.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Apply at this link: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

ABSTRACT The extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) is a school of thought that maintains that genetic determination and natural selection are over-emphasized in the study of evolution at the expense of non-genetic inheritance and processes of evolution beyond selection. Its proponents call for the de-emphasis of genetics and the adoption of a broader model of inheritance that includes cultural and epigenetic transgenerational effects and strong adaptive phenotypic plasticity. Presenting itself as a radical alternative to what it claims is a rigid and ossified theoretical orthodoxy, the EES has lately gained considerable traction among scholars of human evolution, and a distinct sub-branch of the EES unique to the biological anthropological study of human evolution has emerged (the EES in human evolution). To date, however, no direct comparison between the EES in human evolution and other contemporary evolutionary approaches has been attempted to evaluate whether the EES in human evolution affords researchers an edge in articulating good questions and structuring research programs to answer them. After reviewing the landscape of evolutionary theory, we evaluate whether the EES in human evolution is capable of delivering the processually pluralistic vision of evolution it has long promised and whether it brings something that the decades-long ongoing synthesis (OS) of evolutionary theory since the modern synthesis does not. We then conduct a head-to-head comparison to evaluate the relative explanatory efficacy of the EES and our preferred OS theoretical framework on several issues of human morphological evolution. We demonstrate that evolutionary perspectives as drawn from the OS have a much more clarifying effect on the investigation of human evolution than their EES-based competitor. Far from being a radical extension of evolutionary thought, the EES in human evolution offers little more than another idiom in which to tell adaptationist stories and triumphalist narr…

A much-needed critique of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) as applied to human evolution, by @evoroseman.bsky.social and Ben Auerbach (2026).

Evolving a Field: Can Evolutionary Theory Provide What the Study of Human Evolution Requires? 🧪 #BioAnth
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Existential security and the cultural evolution of secularisation in Mauritius Despite the central role of religion in human history and its continued global growth, an increasing number of individuals identify as secular or athe…

1/ New paper from @brunelpsy.bsky.social CCE in Evolution & Human Behavior looks at secularisation in Mauritius 🇲🇺

Nachita Rosun, @matthewmgervais.bsky.social and @aiyanakoka.bsky.social have been testing big theories outside the usual Western settings 🌏

🔗 👇

Fair enough!

As a side point: the term "tinkering" is not even new in the context of cultural evolution -- Francois Jacob had a paper on this in 1977 called "Evolution and tinkering" and @svalver.bsky.social + colleagues directly refer to tinkering in their papers on tech evolution

I haven't had chance to read this yet, but wouldn't your points be a *good* reason to write a commentary?