Zoologist and author Desmond Morris dies aged 98 Morris, who was also a surrealist painter and broadcaster, was best known for his 1967 book The Naked Ape.

Zoologist and author Desmond Morris dies aged 98
www.bbc.com/news/article...

Navigating Practical, Political, and Ethical Challenges of Long‐Term Human Biology Field Research: The Shuar Health and Life History Project Major advances in understanding human biology and health have been made possible by long-term field research projects with Indigenous peoples, whose ecological settings and lifeways are distinct from...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Andrea Migliano presenting information about next year’s EHBEA conference in Zurich

Andrea introducing the organising committee, including herself, Adrian Jaeggi, Jorg Gross and Charles Efferson

Next year in Zurich 😊 🏔️🇨🇭 #ehbea2027 will be held 29 March to 2 April. Website and Bluesky account are already set up (love the logo ❤️) @ehbea2027.bsky.social

www.ehbea2027.com

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

Photo of a person standing on stage in front of conference audience.

Thank you to @rebeccasear.bsky.social for being an excellent President of @ehbea.bsky.social and for leading the EHBEA committee! The incoming President is @alexalvergne.bsky.social, who will also do an excellent job in this role.

#ehbea2026

But N=30... If they'd sampled a different 30 people, the findings would be different too?

#neuroscience

Higher education predicts global cultural similarity to WEIRD countries - Nature Communications Psychology studies are becoming more global, yet often rely on highly educated participants. The authors find, across 95 countries, that higher education predicts cultural similarity to WEIRD societies, such as the United States.

Psychology studies are becoming more global but often rely on highly educated participants. A study in Nature Communications suggests that cross-cultural samples of students or university-educated individuals over-represent cultural values that are typical of WEIRD countries, such as the US. 🧪

Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia - Nature Analysis of 15,836 ancient West Eurasian genomes reveals hundreds of instances of directional selection, showing that sustained changes in allele frequency were widespread, rather than being...

Analyses of ancient DNA sequences from >15,800 West Eurasian individuals finds surprising evidence of natural selection acting on hundreds of different genetic loci over last 10 millennia, according to paper by @aliakbari.bsky.social et al, published online today at @nature.com.
💀🧬🧪

Speaker standing in front of a screen with PowerPoint slide.

Great talk by @babeheim.bsky.social at @ehbea2026.bsky.social on the cultural evolution of strategies in the game Go, including the convergence of AI on established strategies.

#ehbea2026

Speaker in front of PowerPoint slide.

Excellent talk on machine-human interactions, cooperation and learning by @iyadrahwan.bsky.social, presented at @ehbea2026.bsky.social.

#ehbea2026 #culturalevolution

Photo of speaker standing in front of screen with PowerPoint slide.

Great talk by @zannaclay.bsky.social on optimal maternal sensitivity in wild bonobos, presented at @ehbea2026.bsky.social in Leiden, Netherlands.

#ehbea2026

Impact of Female Mating Status on Male Courtship Behaviour in a Sexually Cannibalistic New Zealand Fishing Spider Scoring of male courtship behaviour in Dolomedes minor revealed no effect of female mating status on courtship duration or sequence structure, but males delayed the initiation of courtship when encou...

🧪 ETHOLOGY: Do males invest less when females are mated? 🕷️💔
Clémot et al. tested this in sexually cannibalistic NZ fishing spiders. Males didn’t reduce courtship effort—but delayed it with mated females. Hesitation may reflect choosiness under high mating costs.
#OpenAccess doi.org/10.1111/eth....

"Recently, 3 studies reported genetic evidence for matrilocality & genetic matriline connections across broad geographical and temporal scales. We draw on these 3 studies to explore past social organisation forms in light of new evidence & reconsider preconceptions that continue to endure over time"

We're looking for an Associate Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology (mainly teaching Evo Med and Stats at UCL Anthro) as maternity cover! Please share - closing date 30th April

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

New preprint out! 📢

We analysed 1.38M papers across 612 journals in ecology & evolution. We show the field is dominated by vertebrates: they’re studied more often, in higher‑impact journals, and get more citations + media attention than invertebrates, with little change in decades😵

Demographic causes and social consequences of adult sex ratio variation @natcomms.nature.com

Burn Selection: How Fire Injury Shaped Human Evolution Intentional fire use exposed humans and their ancestors to high-temperature burn injury, a risk rare in other species, bringing major survival benefits and technologies but also repeated exposure to ...

Some evidence that humans have adaptations (immune & wound-healing responses) to better survive burn injuries than other primates
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Something to add to our paragraph on 'Fire-shaped humans'
academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

🧪🌍🔥🏺 #ecoevo #evolution #Anthropology

New paper out in Evolutionary Human Sciences (unformatted early access):

Testing Evolutionary Theories of Human Cooperation via Meta-Analysis of Microfinance Repayment

with Dougie Foster, Shakti Lamba & @erikpostma.bsky.social

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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...

People think of women as one thing, men as many People seem to represent men and women in a conceptually balanced manner: for example, seeing women as warm (not agentic) and men as agentic (not warm). Emerging evidence, however, suggests people mig...

People represent men and women as balanced, mirror images of each other... right? e.g., women as communal but men as agentic

We argue that people actually often see women as one thing but men as MANY

New open-access piece out in TiCS, with @rachelesh.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

IMPACT OF PARENTHOOD ON UNIVERSITY EMPLOYMENT. Line graph shows how the probability of holding a research position changes from four years before to seven years after having children.

Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s

Read the full story: go.nature.com/4v4rxmQ

Genetics, Evolution and Environment The UCL Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment (GEE) is world-leading in the study of Evolutionary Biology, Human Genetics, Healthy Ageing and Biodiversity research.

UCL's Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment invites Early Career Researchers for fellowship applications. Deadline: April 30, 2026. Details: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/life-sciences/gee #postdoc

Photos of flowers: yellow narcissi, coral azaelea, yellow and white primula and pale blue muscari.

Spring colours in my Scottish garden for this week's #sixonsaturday. #gardening 🌱

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...

1/ NEW in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology — our first review of a decade+ of research on understanding & predicting cultural change, with Michael Varnum.
This one is personal. A thread on what we found, what surprised us, and how two kids reading Asimov ended up here. 🧵

Between-group cooperation in bottlenose dolphins and bonobos. (Left) Male Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay engage in three levels of alliance formation—both within (first and second level) and between (third level) group cooperation (top).

What can we learn from bonobos and bottlenose dolphins about the evolution of between-group cooperation? 🏺🧪
royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Outlines emerging evolutionary and mechanistic frameworks for understanding the origins, maintenance and function of between-group cooperation.

Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us

The evolution of human infants’ helplessness: unique, relational, and long-lasting developmental implications Abstract. Although human infants’ helplessness is largely overlooked in developmental science, it has attracted considerable attention in comparative anthr

Another, new paper on the relevance of human infants' early helplessness for social development, this time by Hammond et al:

The evolution of human infants’ helplessness: unique, relational, and long-lasting developmental implications doi.org/10.1093/cdpe...

Forty-five years of progress after a key paper about the evolution of cooperation A 1981 publication showed how cooperators can prevail over defectors, laying the foundation for how the evolution of cooperation between unrelated individuals is studied.

Cooperative behaviours that can be costly to the individual but beneficial to others were discussed in a key 1981 publication

go.nature.com/4c0jVdj

The edge is already there: Experimental insights into the origins of stone tool technology The origins of stone tool technology remain a subject of ongoing debate. To investigate the early stages of this technological evolution, we conducted…

my former postdoc has a new paper out! It was fun to watch this experiment come together and so grateful to all who helped her with it

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