Evolution acceptance, literacy, and knowledge acquisition among online manosphere communities: an exploratory survey study - Developmental Biology Advances Background Evolutionary scientists have recently expressed concern at the political weaponization of their research findings by online communities of laypeople. This is the case for genetics research ...

🔪"To put it shortly, [manospherians'] evolutionary scientific literacy was far above average. As such, there is only so much that better science education and communication can accomplish."

The pursuit of beautiful theories is an obstacle to discovery <p style="text-align: justify;"><em>Our reverence for beauty encodes a fantasy that reality is ordered and familiar, fully accessible to reason and observation. Philosopher <strong>Jane Forsey</strong...

🔪"a frank confrontation with those aspects of the world which we might prefer to ignore or deny is a way to free the aesthetic from its residual liberatory connotations and naiveté, and to focus on how the world actually reveals itself to us, rather than how we might wish it would be"

Relatedly, people forget (or never knew) that Dawkins did not develop the idea of a meme as a theory of cultural evolution. It was rather a (flawed) pedagogical device to help explain the idea that design will emerge whenever you have selection, inheritance and a source of variation

A mortal sin of argumentation It is fruitless to argue against something that your interlocutor does not believe

This post is what happens when too many people call me a fascist for thinking AI is useful. Link below!

open.substack.com/pub/unpublis...

(PDF) The gene’s-eye view of culture: vehicles, not replicators PDF | On Nov 24, 2023, Nicolas Baumard and others published The gene’s-eye view of culture: vehicles, not replicators | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

🫛🧠 This makes my pea-brain puzzled as to why Dawkins
didn't ditch memetics by the 3rd (2006) or 4th (2016) edition of The Selfish Gene... Could its apparent utility in dissing religion partly explain? (Gad Saad is a good blatant example of its motivated appeal in derogating rivals.)

Revenge and Forgiveness with Mike McCullough YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast)

🔪"thinking about it in a more tragic way may be a better lens through which to to see these issues"

The Field That Studies Groupthink Is Captured by It S2 Episode 45: with Smriti Mehta

"How social psychology can fall into the trap of groupthink"

"femme fatale narratives do not merely warn men about dangerous women; they index a broader adaptive problem—how to regulate desire in the face of cues that, while evolutionarily salient, can be strategically misleading"

www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/15...

Witnessing a Loved One’s Wrongdoing: What Would You Do?
@spspnews.bsky.social blog on our recent paper: spsp.org/news/charact...
#socialpsyc #PsychSciSky

"Analyses reveal a stable, asymmetric, tripartite structure: a unified conservative coalition alongside a fractured liberal wing composed of distinct 'Ideological' and 'Demographic' coalitions."

A few critical takes on Karl Marx's sociological legacy A group of Slovene sociology students at the Faculty of Social Sciences recently asked me to record a brief podcast with them for a series they’re doing on sociological classics like Max Weber and Emi...

"Even most Marxists today admit in the end that what they really want (and think is feasible) are Scandinavian-style free-market welfare states (or social democracy)."

In our new paper (with Keelah Williams and her amazing undergrads), we examine cross-societal evidence for sex difference in preferences for emotional support in friends. We find that women place more importance on this trait than men do kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...

Philosophical Microhistory: Its Nature, Scope, Value, and Challenges This article elaborates and defends philosophical microhistory—the intensive study of small episodes such as quotes, marginal anecdotes, editorial decisions, or forgotten glosses—as an undertheorised....

🔪"The hermeneutics of suspicion is not scepticism; it criticises a given form of consciousness to achieve a fuller one"

Wittgenstein and Relativism Cambridge Core - Twentieth-Century Philosophy - Wittgenstein and Relativism

"Central to almost all of the cases where Wittgenstein favors a nonjudgmental attitude is an encounter with a religious system that one does not share."

Contra Benn Jordan, data center (and all) sub-audible infrasound issues are fake One of the most popular videos made about data centers ever is a complete moment-by-moment disaster

Well Benn Jordan called me a shill and blocked me without defending a single study he completely mischaracterized in his video. I have a full summary of the interaction in a new section of the post here. blog.andymasley.com/i/194372054/...

#1243 Jeff McMahan: Antinatalism, Extinctionism, Gene Editing, and Overpopulation YouTube video by The Dissenter

New episode (1243), my fifth interview with Dr. Jeff McMahan. We talk about reproductive #ethics, including #antinatalism, extinctionism, gene editing, and overpopulation. #Philosophy

YouTube: youtu.be/pk36NrckYoc
Podcast: bit.ly/488OmvJ

Increasing Evolutionary Inequalities - Theory and Society Theory and Society - Scholars using evolutionary theory in the social sciences (mostly outside of sociology) were the first to draw attention to inequalities in outcomes between children from...

"The fact that these inequalities were first pinpointed and documented by scholars using evolutionary theory is a strong argument for why all sociologists should incorporate evolutionary theory into their theoretical toolkits."

Men and women show different relative cognitive strengths across their lifespans Moving beyond average test scores reveals distinct cognitive patterns: men consistently show a personal strength in math, while women show one in reading. A large new study finds these trends remain s...

"Shifting to this perspective could have profound implications for understanding modern phenomena, such as the persistent underrepresentation of women in STEM fields."

"Many evolutionary psychologists have pushed back against mainstream cultural evolutionary theories for what they perceive to be a lack of appreciation for the sophistication of human cognition."

Eager for publication of this issue. Singh's approach, afaict, is deflationary-but-not-eliminationist towards dual-inheritance theory, so the commentaries should be pretty interestingly diverse.

The Hard Truths Behavioral Science Must Face in Conflict Settings - by Britt Titus - Behavioral Scientist Approximately 2 billion people live in conflict-affected areas. Yet most of the theories, experiments, and interventions developed in behavioral science are based on stable contexts. Approximately 2 b...

"When behavior looks 'irrational,' we need to get *more* curious about people and context."

Frontiers | Evaluating the credibility of claims and recommendations in educational psychology: a grand challenge (2) conversely, the proportion that employ observational methods has increased from 43% in 1994 to 66% in 2025; and (3) the proportion of observational artic...

😸"Our first obligation to society must be to protect society from our field."

Will college get fixed? - Marginal REVOLUTION That is the topic of my latest Free Press column.  Here is one excerpt: So schools will respond to cost pressures by letting quality deteriorate. More instruction will be of the inferior online variety. There are very good online experiences, but schools are too bureaucratic and not run well enough to deliver them. Fewer professors […]

Will college get fixed? - Marginal REVOLUTION

Nietzsche and the limits of genealogical critique Nietzsche presents genealogical critique as a tool for promoting human flourishing, which might suggest that he regarded it as unconditionally beneficial. However, I argue that Nietzsche suggests t...

☠️🔪 "if Nietzsche’s philosophy is to be taken seriously, theorists need to resist the temptation to regard genealogical critique as an unproblematic vehicle of emancipation or empowerment"

👻"Nearly every adversarial collaboration on a social justice-related topic has produced findings requiring the walking back of social justice narratives"
unsafescience.substack.com/p/adversaria...

Contra Benn Jordan, data center (and all) sub-audible infrasound issues are fake One of the most popular videos made about data centers ever is a complete moment-by-moment disaster

Folks, infrasound issues are fake. This was truly an insane experience to write and I hope you enjoy blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-ben...

😿🐊"the outcome of evolutionarily ancient evaluative and emotional systems that guide our behaviour adaptively"

psyche.co/ideas/the-hi...

Fun reading:

Latest issue of *Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition* features a target article on CONCEPT CREEP with commentaries including Payton Jones (whose research has skewered misinfo around "trigger warnings") and Michael Inzlicht.

Not “Coddling” but “Rewiring”: Explaining Psychic Harm - Society Sensitivity to harm has become a crisis, and the reasons for this remain unexplained. Across organizations, individuals express psychic damage from trauma to microaggressions. Some call this rise in h...

🔪"Social science technologies have created illiberal epistemic landscapes, particularly in spaces where the recently educated hold authority in interpreting interaction... supports and extends Foucault’s theory on technologies of the self and [...] power"

🔪"What we need is not two evolutionary processes -- one genetic, one cultural -- but a unified framework showing how evolved motivational systems generate the complex social regularities we call culture."
www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/n7wka...