1. Headmen, shamans, and mothers: natural and sexual selection for computational services. A new preprint with Zach Garfield and Aaron Lightner: grasshoppermouse.github.io/headman-shaman/ 🧵

📣Today Will is giving the CCE seminar on sensory ecology of deception and magic 🪄

So deception is fundamental to hunting and important in our evolution and key part of predator - prey interactions But this is widely ignored within the evolutionary cognitive sciences As argued here link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Our ✨amazing ✨ director Rebecca Sear has been recognised by the British Academy and elected fellow 🤩 🍾

Recommended read, cautioning about assuming history began in 1950 & “reading history sideways”: “Apart from a few decades in 1800s, the only time since 1550 that the average age of first marriage for women fell below 24 was during the 1950s/60s baby boom” campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog/2024/07/1…

Today at #CogSci2024 I'll present our poster introducing a pragmatic account for explaining the preference for using short words when colexifying multiple meanings. Come check it out at 1 PM in the Shipping & Exchange hall! Paper 🔗: escholarship.org/content/qt05m6… Poster: P1-EE-116

I wrote one of these on cultural evolution oecs.mit.edu/pub/u870vxpu/r…

Can I get AI to generate a heavy metal power ballad about Cultural Evolution to get you all amped up for Cultural Evolution Society's #CESConf2024 in a few weeks? Yes, yes I can suno.com/song/e9ecf314-…

Evolutionary Psychology

We have just finished making the shortened 'get to the point' report if you wanna read 2 pages instead of 20 osf.io/wx63e We are also starting the next stage of the project with Best Beginnings so watch this space over the next year ✨🤩

Hey y'all, here's my latest attempt at general audience writing - I didn't choose the title, so please pretend it is only titled "How do we transmit culture when it cannot be put into words". Hope it'd be an enjoyable read! aeon.co/essays/how-do-…

As it turns out, we're one of the few animals that actually do regularly do this: culturologies.co/files/mimicry.…

Why you should always think about your priors: theguardian.com/world/article/…

New paper led by Joe Hackman with CCE member Abbey Page on fat development in children from hunter-gatherer societies 🏹 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs…

Hi twitter friends! You may know that sometimes I collect donations to buy things ⬇️ for the Kremenets battalion 🇺🇦, which is protecting the eastern front of Ukraine & which includes my relatives & schoolmates. Now they need help again (1/3)

Major CES paper alert! 🚨 - the exciting first demonstration of cultural variation in nest building in birds: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Information Architectures: A Framework for Understanding Socio-Technical Systems New paper tackling a big topic that came out of a workshop I co-organized at Santa Fe Institute in May 2023 with a large interdisciplinary group. osf.io/preprints/soca…

Made it to Durham for #CES2024, looking forward to a week of hxc CE and SL chat! And after the conf dinner, Mason Youngblood and I will be DJing an event celebrating the diversity (and richness?) of club music for Cultural Evolution Society peeps

Preprint alert! After 4 years, I’m super excited to share work with Charley Wu (@thecharleywu.bsky.social) Sam Gershman Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI on the rise and fall of technological development in virtual communities in #OneHourOneLife #ohol 🧵👇 doi.org/10.31234/osf.i…

Job alert! 💣💣 Join my European Research Council (ERC) funded team as a postdoc, and study the mechanisms of human social learning! We're looking for innovative, computationally minded candidates. Please RT ki.varbi.com/en/what:job/jo…