There is a fully-funded PhD position at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to pursue dissertation research among the Mayangna of Nicaragua, expanding a longitudinal study of subsistence strategies and behavioral ecology. Please share the posting!
www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...

How Economics Discovered Women by Shelly Lundberg - Hardcover Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.

My book (!) How Economics Discovered Women is now available for pre-order from the University of California Press. The book is a survey and critique of how the economics of gender has developed since the mid-1970s. www.ucpress.edu/books/how-ec...

Yay! Congratulations Shelly. Super excited to read this!

📢 News: Dr. @alexalvergne.bsky.social is assuming a new position as President of the @ehbea.bsky.social. She is Director of Research at the Evolutionary Anthropology Team at ISEM Montpellier

Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) NSF's mission is to advance the progress of science, a mission accomplished by funding proposals for research and education made by scientists, engineers, and educators from across the country.

Why is NSF SBE important? Over 25 years, it has funded research on the impact of terrorism on social systems, how social, cultural, & econ factors affect interactions w/the environment & how communities adapt to environmental change, human origins, & how people interact w/new technologies etc!

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.

The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

This project (with Stacy Rosenbaum and Nick Grebe) began in the dark days of Covid, and is finally ready to share. We've built a living database of primate paternity data (52 species, 3000 paternities) and completed first wave of analyses of paternity distribution. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request to Congress

I am shocked to see this language from the NSF.

“The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”

The preliminary programme for @ces2026.bsky.social is now out. What a fabulous line up!

airess.fgses-um6p.ma/CES2026?__cf...

Are boys really in crisis? What the science says in the age of the manosphere Some data suggest that boys and young men are struggling with school, health and masculinity. But does talk of a male crisis further sideline women and girls?

Thoughtful piece: “Rather than focusing on a crisis of boys or girls, many specialists say the priority should be supporting young people overall, sometimes in a gender-neutral way”

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The deadline applications to the CES New Investigator Award has been extended until April 2 - don't miss out getting your application in!

Microchimerism with Amy Boddy YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast)

This week, we talk to @amyboddy.bsky.social about the weird and wonderful world of microchimerism.
youtu.be/pFi5DGFpavA
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
epthepod.podbean.com/e/amy-boddy/

“A snake with no teeth”: Urbanization shifts perceptions of men who support women’s empowerment in Northwestern Tanzania Achieving gender equality requires the support of all genders, but efforts to engage men in women’s empowerment initiatives have been fraught with res…

"Urbanization appears to introduce new incentives for men to support women’s empowerment, including social prestige, access to novel employment, and increased adaptability to urban life" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thanks to all who have signed so far. We have 73 signatories across a variety of disciplines. Let's see if we can break 200 before we send it off next week. Please re-post and send on to your colleagues. Thank you!

Transmissions Episode 2 with Dr Sarah Matthew YouTube video by Cultural Evolution Society

Excited for the new Transmissions episode on ASU's Sarah Mathew on how human warfare evolved, and her fieldwork in Kenya.

Watch here:
youtu.be/eUqEcxf5uBQ?...

New Episodes monthly! Created by @ferylbadiani.bsky.social and @ahnisnaahsi.bsky.social

CC: @arizonastateuni.bsky.social

Competition for heritable wealth, not cultural group selection, drives the evolution of monogamy | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Versatility, value and limitations of using health and demographic surveillance system data for secondary analyses: guidance for researchers, using examples from existing analyses - Journal of Populat... Journal of Population Research - Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems (HDSS) are geographic open cohorts operating in countries with absent/incomplete vital registration. Data on demographic...

New paper, led by Estelle McLean, on the value of data from Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems. These data sources are particularly suitable for complex longitudinal analyses which require consideration of household and familial contexts, but their complexity may result in their under-use

Culture, Killing, and PTSD with Sarah Mathew YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast)

This week, we talk to Sara Mathew about the psychology of killing, PTSD, and the relationship between our evolved psychology and cultural evolution.
youtu.be/mgDerXD0djI
www.podbean.com/eas/pb-qypm9...
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

My first PhD paper is published! 🎉 We compared how wild bonobo and chimpanzee infants (0-5.5y) become independent from their mothers. Here is the open-access link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

🧵(1/5)

Work (also) with me!

Two years postdoc in the @weaponisedpasts.bsky.social project, based in Edinburgh. Will do transmission chain experiments to understand the spread of heritage-based hostility, online and elsewhere.

More info
⬇️⬇️⬇️

Hanna posing with tthe medal with ASAB president Melissa

Congratulations to Hanna Kokko for receiving this year’s ASAB medal! Hanna has done extraordinary work and we are so pleased to honour her at #ASABWinter2025

In this blog post, Guest Editor @rachkendal.bsky.social discusses their #PhilTransB issue, 'Transforming cultural evolution research and its application to global futures': royalsociety.org/blog/2025/12...

Each semester I go in my classroom and I try to figure out what we would use to block the doors, if it would be safe to crawl out the windows, where we could hide if there was a mass shooter in campus. It’s such an indictment of this country how we have normalized these preventable tragedies.

A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the invention of smartphones and the advent of social media, which both appeared around the same year, 2008.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A brief natural history of misinformation Abstract. The idea that organisms benefit by acquiring information through social connections is a cornerstone of our understanding of social evolution and

"misinformation is widespread in biological systems spanning levels of organization, and [...] is probably an inevitable property that inherits from fundamental constraints on biological communication systems, rather than a pathology"
royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article...

I miss London!

Gender difference in self-reported empathy: Effects of task instructions and exposure to gender essentialism primes Women often score higher on average than men on self-report measures of empathy. However, self-report estimates of empathic tendencies and other attributes could be susceptible to a range of biases. F...

🚨New article on gender differences (Rajasekhar et al 2025): 'self-reported empathy appears to be related to social desirability and broader social attitudes, which suggests that a range of cultural and social factors might contribute to gender differences in empathy'. 🧪

dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Thanks to Adeela Shafi, @drtwymanghoshal.bsky.social, Acheampong Charles Afriyie, Samuel Copland & Omar El Masri for their hard work in bringing together this excellent collection of articles.

Innovations in Decolonising the Curriculum: Multidisciplinary Perspectives.

– a new book about how to decolonize the curriculum, by Adeela ahmed Shafi et al.

www.emerald.com/books/edited...

Here is our chapter: