Let Arrow’s enthusiasm be an inspiration/folie à deux for us all.

Q: How’s the end of the semester going?

A: 🎾

@weratedogs.com

Claim 1 if you want to owe money in April. Claim 0 if you want to give the government a free loan all year. Claim yourself if…you know yourself.

bsky.app/profile/rmce...

This potentially could facilitate the system Jaron Lanier has talked about, using micropayments, where individuals would be paid small amounts whenever their data is used commercially.

If you want to collaborate on Qmd, Rmd, or md files for reproducible manuscripts, try out the alpha version of Quarto Review! It does track changes, comments, syncs with git, shows differences between versions! github.com/Lakens/Quart...

Tell me the bugs and feature requests!

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Why Some Birds Seem to Be Developing a Cigarette Habit

Evidence for the parasite chemoprophylaxis hypothesis of tobacco...nest building. @edhagen.net

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/s...

This is what I assume of horticulturalists, generally

ab absurdo forager-horticulturalist, forager-fisher, fisher-farmer

I take your point, and it's important. I wasn't clear. *Given* these are *all* captive populations, what I'm interested in is what (other than random chance, eg personality or hierarchies) could explain within-species variation in aggression between captive groups.

Definitely. But these are all captive populations.

Primatologists have long documented that group dynamics can substantially shift in response to different alphas with varying personalities (e.g., Prita & Singh, 1980; Itani et al. 1963).

Might this be evidence of inter-individual variation in personality/ social strategies on group norms?

Figure from manuscript illustrating distributions of rates of aggression for each group by each species. It shows there's much overlap, but the most and least aggressive groups seems distinct. Caption from MS: Fig. 6. Posterior sample distributions for the group intercepts for aggression. (A) shows distribution for total aggression, and (B) shows distribution for contact aggression only. Black lines reflect a 95% CI.

What I find particularly striking is the within-species between-group variation in rates of observed aggression...

#BioAnth 🧪

doi.org/10.1126/scia...

I’m happy to announce that our paper "The Meanings and Dividends of Man the Hunter" has now been published in Evolution and Human Behavior.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Postdoctoral research position at Princeton on psychological processes related to time (such as impatience and present bias) and their causes and political consequences.
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/11/p...

Priceless interview for all anthropologists and fieldworkers. Thank you, @ilarimakela.bsky.social & RB Lee!!

Lee’s discussions on establishing new field sites closely parallel my experiences in the Omo in Ethiopia with the @omovalleyresearchproject.org

🚨🚨🚨A Very Special Note from JVL🚨🚨🚨 I’ve got a secret. And it’s not a podcast. 😉

My book "How to Eat an Elephant" hits shelves Sept. 8 but it's available for pre-order starting today.

At its core, this book is about communications, persuasion, voters, and how to save America from the toxic forces Trump has unleashed on our politics.
www.thebulwark.com/p/a-very-spe...

Paused the pod to preorder. Stoked.

Looking forward to Jamie Tehrani's guest lecture in my cultural analytics course, open to everybody. If you are in Trento and want to know more about cultural evolution, that is a great opportunity! eventi.unitn.it/en/origins-s...

KPop demon hunters snack ad

MJ doesn’t penetrate the algorithms. Algorithms shape prestige and biases. Sadly. Update? 😢

I suppose every biologist would write quite different essays on TSG. My take, for what it's worth, is that in TSG and followups, Dawkins aimed to introduce the public to the developments in evolutionary biology sparked by Hamilton, Williams, Maynard Smith and Price, Trivers, and other folks working that tradition, which has settled on “evolved strategy” as a core concept. This body of work, which today is generally referred to as behavioral ecology and evolutionary game theory, has the same goal as Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, and especially, The Descent of Man (i.e., sexual selection), but now using the understanding of heritable variation from the Modern Synthesis.

The Selfish Gene (TSG) was published 50 yrs ago. I was recently asked about Dawkins' concep of the selfish gene in light of my review many years ago of Burt & Trivers' book on selfish genetic elements: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here is my response (lightly edited): 🧪 #BioAnth 1/14

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

all the way down

all archbishops/monkeys/apes are primates, not all primates/apes are archbishops. all monkeys are not archbishops, afaik, but who knows what the future holds.

"Primate" movie poster.

It's not a monkey.

Volubilis Excursion – May 17 A full-day trip to the Roman ruins of Volubilis. The group will depart Rabat at 8:00 a.m. and return around 6:00 p.m. This guided visit provides an opportunity to experience one of Morocco’s most impressive archaeological sites. Chellah Excursion – May 17 A half-day visit to Rabat’s Chellah archaeological site. Participants will meet in the city at 10:00 a.m. and finish around noon. This outing offers an accessible way to explore the medieval necropolis and surrounding gardens. Participants may choose either the Volubilis day trip or the Chellah visit. Please plan your travel accordingly

Chellah, Rabat.

Volubilis: Roman Ruins in Morocco

The social excursions for @hbes2026.bsky.social will be held on the 17th of May, after the conference. (There was a mistake in the date in the email sent out to HBES members.)

Talk to your friends to coordinate on which one you may want to join.

@humbehevosoc.bsky.social #HBES2026

True. But also it’s a smaller network. And my follows/followers here are probably majority all from this crew. Yours must be/evidently are more diverse. Which is cool!

Bluesky Map Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

Better on mobile?