New special issue on "Cultural evolution of the arts" led by @sobchuk.bsky.social and @masonyoungblood.bsky.social confirms my intuition that this field has taken off in the past two decades, with a particularly strong representation from music!
doi.org/10.1017/ehs....
New preprint with Rafael Leite, Sandro Reia and Paulo Campos
Cumulative Cultural Evolution in Structured Populations
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
In which we take an old model of cumulative cultural evolution of mine and see what happens if you add social networks
📢 Rare academic 💎 alert 📢
We’re hiring a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer (Level B/C) in Psychology & Cognitive Neuroscience @ Swinburne (Melbourne).
Teach a brand‑new degree + access MRI, MEG, EEG & TMS/tDCS.
⏰ Apply by 17 May 2026, 11 pm
🔗 swinjobs.nga.net.au/cp/index.cfm...
Reach out for more info.
Man when you lay it all out like this it sounds crazy, but it's somehow basically true www.reddit.com/r/cognitives...
Why do the Japanese like their buns askew (2026)
Y'all, I just watched Dirty Dancing for the first time. I think that Swayze fella is going to be a star.
This is a critique, true; but more importantly it just outlines the underlying assumptions that most advocates actually hold: the pursuit of truth is secondary to everyone taking my cry-baby ideas seriously.
Great tit perched on a branch, with beak slightly open. Photo credit: Alizée Vernouillet
📢Fully-funded #PhD opportunity with us:
🐦 Quantifying (social) learning and social behaviour in an urbanised world 🐦
Position at @ceec-research.bsky.social
📆29th May deadline
More info: tinyurl.com/yz28s96x
Apply: tinyurl.com/2wpkb64y
#cognition #socialbehaviour #fieldwork #birds
🙏Please Share
Somehow the opposite of academic genius is comedy genius duos. There's a sticky memorability in different ways...
What do you mean that revise-and-resubmit that I've been avoiding for 8 months only took a day and half to complete?
Surely not. My brain would let me be anxious for that long for such a trivial task. Right?
Diagram of a human head from the side and front, showing examples of the ornaments found and indicating how they may have been worn in piercings in the ears and lower lip.
Was body perforation a prehistoric coming-of-age ritual?
Evidence for a rich tradition of body ornamentation in adult burials from Neolithic Southwest Asia suggests piercing was performed as an indication of maturity and social status.
🔗 from 2024 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...
🏺 #Archaeology
Yeah, I don't claim to understand how trimesters work... but they do.
There's still some other class marking to come in... just not the behemoth dissertations...
Dissertation marking complete! The summer is mine!
British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants. Deadline: 3 June 2026 Independent Scholars Deadline: 27 May 2026
The British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants is now open for applications, supported by DSIT, @leverhulme.ac.uk and @wellcometrust.bsky.social. Apply now: https://bit.ly/4t0MDRl
Following for response
Woo-Hoo! First comprehensive assessment of the evidence for Pleistocene mobile containers! A biocultural perspective viewing container use and manufacture as a process of niche construction! Jennifer C. French, Somaye Khaksar, me & @marckissel.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
May I interest you in £10k for humanities or social science research? Our small grants scheme is open. Apply by 3rd June.
We allocate through partial randomisation - awarding randomly between all applications that meet our quality threshold
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...
The more you look, the more there is to see
A long piece this week on the various kinds of AI foolishness I have seen lately. Tl;dr: in your professional life, do not use technologies in which you have no expertise and with which you have not engaged critically?! It’s not that complicated?!
open.substack.com/pub/naomiald...
On my timeline you wrote this 17 minutes ago. It's snowing now.
This country. I blame the rails for convincing people "leaves on the track" are a train delaying catastrophe...
I don't know why but I laughed
A lot of it still hits, especially to my partner who had never seen it. Strong recommend
100%
About to watch The Prestige for the first time since I saw it in cinemas 20 years ago. My partner has never seen it.
Will it hold up?! I'm hopeful.
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.” ― Edgar Mitchell
A stopped clock isn't right twice a day. It's 'accurate' for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second once a day, and not due to insight.
From the latest AUTX newsletter, a 20 something is reforming peer-review with AI.
I mean, where to start? Assuming they've diagnosed the problem *for the right reason*, this is just...?
