Yeah I remember reading that and thinking: he knew exactly how that will come across

It's time for my favorite manuscript submission ritual! Scrolling through every single ManuscriptCentral login I've ever used in my career in a futile, fifteen-minute attempt to gain entry before I inevitably give up & reset my password to a new one which will also be lost to the sands of time.

Key discriminating result: discriminability increased only in Communication (d' β=0.33, ER=29, credibility=0.97). Not in Decoration or Identity. Communicative pressure forces signs apart to minimize referential ambiguity - the other functions might even suppress this. 12/

Derek once again equivocating on anti-amyloid antibodies as an Alzheimer's therapy:

"I do not see why these antibodies should be on the market."

"Do something else! For God's sake, do something else."

www.science.org/content/blog...

I second the ultimately-make-it-a-lottery call.

To get the basic screening right is not trivial, however - there are many problems in most current screenings methods (e.g. unintentional, yet "inbuilt" bias against interdisciplinary work)

1803

Peak retired academic moment.
1. One of those emails: Are you the R Watt who wrote xxxxxx?
2. Nope, but it sounds vaguely interesting. Wonder what they found.
3. Google - read it and discover that I did write it.

Unfalsifiable by Design: A Year of Trying and Failing to Reproduce a Human Microbiome and Autism Study The myth of open data, reproducibility, responsibility, and accountability in science, and your role in it

How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism:

merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...

The monkeys succeeded

...will use this in class this year (CTY)

For all that I hated the pcap course in the UK (full of edu psych nonsense) this was one of the useful bits of info that they taught us. They used somewhat different words though.

Here is even more such ai slop:
bsky.app/profile/your...

Yes: Chatgpt use, or similar. (It's strange why people upload ai videos of a behaviour that is naturally so incredibly good)

Cool paper that we've all been eagerly anticipating since news of these events began filtering out!

It doesn't quite make it into the
MS but the process of fission and subsequent "civil war" in Ngogo is remarkably similar to what we documented in our 2018 paper on the permanent fission in Gombe....

Glad we have a comprehensive article on the intra-community split in the Ngogo chimpanzees. It was shocking to see chimps that once had close, intimate friendships become violent, lethal enemies within just a couple of years!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Dam him up!

Researcher degrees of freedom should be more widely appreciated in the biological sciences too. Social sciences & psychology are way ahead of us in that regard.

diminutive cultural evolution (DCE)

🪙 🙃

Thank you. Feedback very welcome!

What emerges is a set of nested wars: the old one over whether apes have culture, the current one over details and evidential standards, and beneath both a conflict between camps, their assumptions, and their scientific cultures. Our paper’s aim is to help move beyond that, toward integration.

The paper then dissects the camps’ mutual critiques. E.g.: From the wild side: captive work may lack socio-ecological validity. From the captive side: field studies often lack strong controls/ reliability. Both sides raise real concerns, but both also overgeneralize.

Relevant differences in apes likely result from multifactorial influences. Trauma, deprivation, enrichment, ecology, development, social setting, and human contact may all matter. Yet, their complex effects on ape cultures are still not well enough understood.

Both “wild” and “captive” are *ranges*, not pure states. Captive apes can be deprived, enriched, or human-enculturated. Wild apes can be habituated, traumatized, and otherwise shaped by anthropogenic conditions.

Its answer is: not so fast. The contrast factor wild/captive is real, but it is far too crude. The paper argues that it should be studied and characterised in all its facets - not simply presumed to mark a deep and clean divide.

A central reason the split persists is that the field is often framed as divided between “wild” and “captive” ape research. The paper asks whether that familiar contrast really explains as much as as neatly as people often assume.

The original fight was over whether apes have culture at all. That fight is now behind us: apes *have* culture. But the conflict did not disappear. It shifted toward methods, standards, mechanisms, and what the evidence actually shows...

Brokering peace in the ape (culture) wars | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core Brokering peace in the ape (culture) wars - Volume 8

New paper for primatology, comparative cognition & cultural evolution: @ammiekalan.bsky.social & Tennie “Brokering peace in the ape (culture) wars”.

"Ape culture wars” is the term for the long-running dispute over how ape culture should be understood / studied.
Open access:
doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

🚨I couldn’t be happier to share that today I’m officially starting my own research group at the Human Origins Cluster of Excellence in Tübingen (@humanorigins.bsky.social)!🚨We’ll explore drivers of genetic, phenotypic and cultural evolution by integrating evidence from many fields in creative ways 🧬

Okay for the rest of my life I have a new preferred go-to example of what a DFA is