Here is the link to a short blog that @kztwyman.bsky.social and I wrote about our article (with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social and Marc Feldman) entitled "Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience": www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20...
Director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution, Brunel University London @brunelcce.bsky.social. President of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association @ehbea.bsky.social https://www.rebeccasear.org/
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Here is the link to a short blog that @kztwyman.bsky.social and I wrote about our article (with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social and Marc Feldman) entitled "Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience": www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20...
🚨 GRANT APPLICATION 🚨 Do not forget to apply for the workshop/event grant from EHBEA in case you are organising a scientific event 😉 DEADLINE: September 11th, 2025
Coincidentally, was talking about eugenics again yesterday at the #BSPS2025 conference. Dermot Grenham and Alice Reid organised a very interesting session on similarities in public concern about low fertility in the 1920s and 2020s
This is my point (and Duncan’s) that this special issue is co-edited by @rebeccasear.bsky.social @drsarahmyers.bsky.social and me and an @ehbea.bsky.social initiative to support rigour in science We’re all evolutionary *to our core* and care deeply about using this knowledge to challenge hate
This is a great thing to do - I did it, loved it and it underpinned a Phil Trans B special issue 💜 If you want any advice DM me Also my (with @drsarahmyers.bsky.social and @ehemmott.bsky.social successful application is on the EHBEA website to help guide you…. Just saying there’s still time 🕰️
WE ARE HIRING! 2 Lecturers in Quantitative Social Science. Want a friendly interdisciplinary department in one of the world's most vibrant cities? This just might be for you. Apply by: 10 Oct www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
My dept at the University of Auckland (NZ) will be hiring in social psych at the junior level this cycle. Official ad to follow It's a big research-active dept with fun colleagues, plus you can commute to uni on a boat, paired with a pleasant walk thru Albert Park (this pic from heading home today)
Race Isn’t Biological — So Why Do So Many Still Think It Is? @kevinlala.bsky.social and @kztwyman.bsky.social blog about their recent paper in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20...
My pitas: 150ml warm milk 100ml warm water 3 tsp instant yeast 2 tsp sugar Let the yeast activate then add 350g flour 1.5 tsp kosher salt Knead for 8-9 min, let double in size in a warm oven (~45 min), divide into six balls, rest for 10 min, and then cook quickly on a very hot griddle Perfection
For those interested in my latest book, Trusting Science, here is a 30% discount code:
"It is crucial to make psychology inclusive of all the world's people but vitally important to do this in ways that are respectful, ethical & empirically accurate. I weigh the promises & pitfalls of research in small-scale societies & discuss how we can improve our research practices moving forward"
This is such an interesting paper, about the impact of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment, "which significantly reformed and in many places abolished more than 2 centuries of local parish- and magistrate-administered social security, health & welfare support", including by forcing the poor into workhouses
The impact of the first austerity policy in the 1800s: "From 1740s to 1810s in England, a strong improvement in mortality is evident, followed by 5 decades of stagnation. Only in the 1870s did life expectancy rise again; it continued to rise until 2010s, when a new austerity policy was unleashed"
New preprint! "Parental beliefs and practices around child weight in London, England: insights from qualitative photo-elicitation interviews" We explored how parents view child weight + weight-related behaviours, and discuss implications for public health practice. doi.org/10.31235/osf...
taking a social/relational perspective on resilience in recovery - super proud of this work and so grateful to our participants 🫶
On Prolific, "we estimate that about 34% of online study participants use LLMs to answer open-ended questions atleast some of the time..." Seems like a very timely paper for behavioural scientists using online samples: osf.io/preprints/so... ; We really need more papers on this issue
Study shows how the human pelvis was reshaped for upright walking | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...
Centre for Ecology & Evolution autumn symposium & mixer www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/e...
Here is "AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto". I've been working on this feverishly because the issue seems to me so urgent - and I'm worried extreme positions on both sides are becoming locked in, when the best way forward is in the centre. Please read it! philpapers.org/rec/BIRACA-4
The conversations Siobhan has initiated have been great so far 😊 hopefully funding will really help us move the evolutionary behavioural sciences forward in a productive direction
“There have been a lot of opinion pieces about why Bluesky is not useful because the people there tend to be relatively left-leaning. I haven't seen any of those same people say that Twitter is bad because it's relatively right-leaning. Twitter is not a representative sample of the public either”
📢 Interested in excess mortality methods, and want a challenge? I'm organising the "One Epidemic, Many Estimates" (1EME) project! Register *now* as a many analyst team (submissions due 15 March 2026), and then join us at LSE for a workshop on 21-22 May 2026! (1/n) www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-His...
Our article "Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience" (with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social, @kztwyman.bsky.social & Marc Feldman) is now published online. We describe five factors that contribute to the spread of racism and suggest strategies for countering them. doi.org/10.1017/ehs....
Last but not least! today we share the talk of Christine Caldwell as plenary speaker at @ehbea2025.bsky.social Here she talks about the cognitive challenges for cumulative cultural evolution and how these abilities were selected 🧠 Don’t miss it! 👇 youtu.be/UvVNfyiYOGc?...
"parental financial support significantly affects desired number of children & the gap between desired & actual fertility intentions. The effect follows a pattern of ‘initially negative, then positive’, with diminishing marginal returns across different level of fertility willingness"
So excited that the #PAA2026 call includes a dedicated session on: **Heterodox, Feminist, and Critical Perspectives on Demography** Get your submissions ready for session 917 and please share widely!!
"although men and women suffer reprisal at the same rate, women are more likely to face harassment and bullying in the workplace because of their whistleblowing disclosures" www.hrlc.org.au/reports/wome...
🤣
...it's not good for research integrity that editors/publishers largely ignore concerns raised by one individual, but will respond to exactly the same concern after publicity on social media. All evidence-based concerns should be taken seriously.
Further note: there were 2 other cases where the paper was retracted (one Springer, one Sage), but there the editors were contacted by multiple other individuals because the papers attracted social media attention. It's a good thing for research integrity that those papers were retracted but..
Notes - despite less variability in outcomes, there was certainly no consistency in how journals/publishers handled concerns - weirdly, Emerald did publish an Editorial Note which has now disappeared - Elsevier is now conducting an investigation into the issue so their tally may change
Interesting on how publishers respond when concerns are raised 👇 My own experience: Springer, 3 journals, No action Elsevier, 3, No action CUP, 1, No action Brill, 1, No action Emerald, 1, No action Frontiers, 1, No action Qeios, No action Cell Press, 1, Editorial note Royal Society, 1, Retraction
“A Norwegian register-based analysis shows negative associations between mental disorders and birth rates, but, according to Øystein Kravdal, Martin Flatø & Fartein A. Torvik, the increasing prevalence of these disorders has likely not contributed much to the country’s fertility decline since 2009”
“the results showed that the public is being influenced by “negative rhetoric” about university education and its costs, even if most parents remained positive about their children going into higher education”
Could be treated as a complement to this paper finding that most LLMs tested (9 out of 10) had a tendency to over-generalize clinical trial results in summaries. (Claude was a repeated exception, for whatever reason). royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
Living, screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, and would happily watch any film involving his writing in any way (Google says Taika Waititi is directing an upcoming film based on Klara and the Sun. Maybe not the kind of thing you’re looking for, but I also liked JoJo Rabbit)
@appliedanthro.bsky.social is running an oral history week for #anthropologists. This looks VERY cool. If I were teaching this semester, I'd ask my students to sign up to interview someone interesting in the field. Check it: appliedanthro.org/oral-history...
Have you had a good (in)fertility experience at work? Or not? If you're UK-based, please take this survey so that we can better understand the current landscape. Please share.
Starting the week strong 💪 we share now the plenary talk of @heidicolleran.bsky.social, which was part of @ehbea2025.bsky.social Here, she talks about the misconceptions and the biases behind the idea of “natural fertility”👶 Pass by, have a look, and stay tuned! youtu.be/8Ch1t7zpW10?...
Seems like the prompt asked it to evaluate the quality of papers, which surely ought to have brought up retractions and expressions of concern.
Insisting on expertise over ideology is not “politicizing” science. The ideologues installing scientific and governmental policy that is contradicted by evidence and data are. By emphasizing ideology over expertise, THEY have made arguing for expertise and evidence-based decision making partisan.
'Cancer Research UK told The Observer that several pieces of research had been affected by...immigration costs, which have risen by 126% since 2019 and are up to 17 times higher than the average of comparable countries including France, Australia, the US and South Korea.' Not only cancer research.
“The study authors asked GPT 4o-mini to evaluate the quality of 217 papers. The tool didn’t mention in any of the reports that the papers being analyzed had been retracted or had validity issues. In 190 cases, GPT described the papers as world leading, internationally excellent, or close to that”
This is an important essay. Surprisingly the comments push back, with only scant evidence to support arguments for the use of race as a biological construct. Medicine Still Treats Race as Biology. As a Physician, I Choose Evidence Instead. www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/seco...
A natural experiment involving relocating between cities in the US suggests moving to a more walkable city increases physical activity: “moving from a less to a more walkable city (25th to 75th percentile) increased walking by 1100 daily steps, on average. These changes hold across gender, age, BMI”
“What can I do? I can try to help us build a scientific enterprise that won’t be as easy to attack. To do that, we need to do a better job recognizing that the public is investing in this and we owe them a debt of gratitude, rather than simply lecturing to them about all the great things we found”
Pretty clear evidence here on how far British politics have tilted right. Powell’s rivers of blood speech in the 1960s was condemned by Tory party leaders. Now the same rhetoric is being spouted by mainstream politicians without consequence bsky.app/profile/orig...
“Politics may be tilting right and the voices of those opposed to migration may be louder, but the long-term trends in British society on tolerance of people across ethnic and faith lines are powerfully and strongly in a pro-tolerance, pro-liberal direction” www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...
Finally got around to posting the video for our #AltAc #Career panel, facilitated by the wonderful @kristinemaassen.bsky.social for #Rutgers #Anthropology. Spent half a day trying to figure out closed captioning; turns out Youtube does it (ok-ish). Check it out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocvv...
“We explain that secular transition happens in three steps: first, public ritual participation declines; second, the importance of religion to individuals declines; and third, people shed religious affiliation” www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This is interesting on Dutch politics podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/p...
Tenure protections really are strong, huh
Oh wow, another entry for the "academia is definitely not run by Marxists" file
A healthy approach
* according to bio, this reply is from a Professor at an R1 university in the US (taking the trouble to reply to one of my 2022 tweets)
Drops in on Twitter to see how things are going over there. Oh, so that’s how academics are interacting with each other in the world’s town square*. Never look back, folks.
"The enduring presence within the history of the neoliberal movement of these linkages points to a more fundamental theoretical convergence between neoliberal ideology and the far right"
"The Bell Curve marked less a departure from established neoliberal ideas than the cresting of a trend begun by Rougier, Van den Haag, Lynn, and others, each of whom worked to forge a network of personal and intellectual linkages between the neoliberal movement and far-right eugenicist networks"
"our 4-level guide for gradual engagement: a) foundation; b) growth, adopting low-cost, easily implementable practices; c) community, contributing to open-science communities through actionable steps; d) leadership, taking on leadership roles or forming local communities to foster cultural change"
OSF is reviewing its generalist preprint server partly because of “Volume and quality challenges: The generalist server has seen increasing numbers of suspicious or low-quality submissions…trends such as generative AI and paper mills have introduced new risks to research integrity”
I had great fun preparing and giving this talk at EHBEA last April. So lovely of them to create a video version for sharing. :)
🧠 Want to integrate cultural evolution into your course using award winning materials created by the field's experts, and get paid $2000 to do it? 💵 🚨 The Cultural Evolution Society is seeking applications for the ACE Teaching Innovation Awards. 🔖 Apply here: vuw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
This is quite the all-star lineup of demographers with expertise in fertility. Period fertility (or mortality) rates are not destiny. If we are really that concerned about future population growth, perhaps we should just make it easier for people to have families? It's in our power
Feeling alarmed over dire long-term population projections that suggest humanity will disappear? Don't be! Demographers generally aren't worried, and you shouldn't be either. @amandajean.bsky.social explains why in this great @ccfamilies.bsky.social brief. sites.utexas.edu/contemporary...
"we examine the rationales underpinning journalists’ choices to publish problematic content, which include...the fear of being viewed as left leaning and losing their audience" academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...
Headline findings from the report: “Graduates are far more positive about their experience at university than people think, & feel far less burdened by the debt than many assume” www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-insti...
“What name do we give to a policy environment that suppresses the arrival of new life?” www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
"The correlation between parental and children’s wealth has strengthened over the last 20 years, particularly at the top of the wealth distribution." cepr.org/voxeu/column...
This talk is well worth your time, with many take-always for the evolutionary behavioural sciences as well as behaviour genetics. Such as: the impossibility of separating nature from nurture, the impossibility of separating science from ethics, and how scientific humility might help in both cases.
“findings suggest that health in early adulthood is an important determinant, whether direct or indirect, of family life-course trajectories. This paper endorses the inclusion of health as an explanatory variable in studies of fertility in high-income contexts” www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
We are excited to share our next plenary speaker from @ehbea2025.bsky.social ! @prof-r-hill.bsky.social shows the STRANGE biases that exist in animal behaviour research via a nice and thorough overview of primate studies Don’t miss it! 👀 youtu.be/wtS-xouCHqg?...
From a review of our Human Evolutionary Demography book in the Quarterly Review of Biology. Book available here www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...
“A recurring message is: the potential for politically driven abuse & the importance of many social variables in affecting human demography are no excuses for not seeking advances in knowledge of when evolutionary principles are, or are not, important for understanding the demography of our species”
“human infants receive dramatically more infant-directed communication than nonhuman great ape infants…suggests the earliest hominins relied more on surrounding communication to become communicatively competent, while infant-directed vocal communication became more prominent with human language”
there's up-to-date info on how to leave substack at leavesubstack.com along with a roundup of many reasons you should probably leave substack
“Building alternative institutions outside of government that reduce reliance on the authoritarian regime, lessen its power and relevance over day-to-day life, and preserve sites of independent thought can be vital both in preserving science and in defending democracy”
“Anderton said that in a future world of “meritocracy”, the UK could “regain” former colonies” www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
'Arguments about populations being replaced, denunciations of asylum seekers as “invaders”, the insistence that migrants are unassimilable, accusations of mass criminality and depravity, are all wearily familiar.'
In VT to pick up the kiddo and enjoying this read by @jenheemstra.bsky.social. Love that it’s prompting me to think positively about introverted leadership. Thinking about how to adjust elements (eg retreats) for accessibility. Great read.
Oh no, let’s not bring back phone calls 😱
Has there been a “quiet return to lower-key and more old-school methods of communication”? Survey of researchers (by an academic publisher) suggests “Newsletters, email, mailing lists and in-person conferences and events are seeing renewed interest” as social media use drops off
“This special issue provides insights into social inequality in living standards in pre-industrial & early industrial communities in Europe, Asia & Africa. The focus is on how families & households of different social classes accommodated the additional pressure of increasing costs of living”
London is the greatest city in the world to live, work and study. I wrote for @bylinetimes.bsky.social on why the city millions of us know and love is far from the bleak picture some are trying to paint:
My excellent colleague, Dr Sophie Hodgetts is running a public webinar about teaching about sex and gender in psychology. 'Sharing reflections and practical strategies for delivering education that is accurate, evidence-based, and just.' It's free to join and you can register below:
🧵 1/ 📢 New CCE pre-print on open-ended technological evolution by @replicatedtypo.bsky.social and @matcharbonneau.bsky.social 👇 @brunelpsy.bsky.social #ehbea #culturalevolution
We are happy to announce our brand new YoutTube channel 🥳 We start with the plenary talk of Petr Tureček as the New Investigator Award winner in @ehbea2025.bsky.social 🎤🤓 “Error, inspiration, and the dynamics of variance in cultural transmission” 👀 youtu.be/wafXoULA3B0?...
Our experience was very positive. Extremely helpful and responsive team and excellent processes.
"It was a very enriching experience, especially because we didn't have much experience as editors, but were able to work as a team. Helen Eaton (the journal’s Commissioning Editor) provided crucial support. The experience was incredibly valuable in helping me understand the entire editorial process"
If you're interested in editing a theme issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, here are a couple of blogs with editors talking about their experiences - in a very positive way 😊 royalsociety.org/blog/2025/08...
'At the heart of human communication: new views on the complex relationship between pragmatics and Theory of Mind' "What's the engine behind human communication? Understanding other people’s language or intention and emotion? This theme issue examines the relationship between these two abilities"
Calling Medical Anthropologists - job at UCL Anthropology (cover for colleague who recently got ERC grant). Teaching to start in January 2026. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
An outstanding metaphor
Defective data: statistics, disability, and eugenic sterilisation in interwar Britain "Eugenics - academic and practical - has always been a numbers game" www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
“Using modelling techniques from evolutionary game theory, we show how oppressive schemes employing race are especially well-suited for underpinning stable and highly unequal systems of dividing labour and reward…these models provide an explanation for the co-occurrence of race and capitalism”
“With the ending of USAID support in February 2025, ICF has secured interim funding for continuing selected, but not all, Demographic and Health Survey Program services. Several donors and host countries are funding the completion of selected surveys” www.dhsprogram.com/Who-we-are/N...
The beginning of the conversation discusses what evolutionary psychology, and other evolutionary approaches to human behaviour, are about (I don’t think Cristina would describe herself as an evolutionary psychologist)
I'm pleased to share this new article by @svenkasser.bsky.social, Laura Fortunato @anthrolog.bsky.social, Marc Feldman and myself. The article extends gene-culture coevolution to recognize evolutionary effects of culture arising through drift and migration. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
More reason to read Sarah Hrdy, rather than population panic narratives, typically written by people with little understanding of our species: “What I take from Hrdy’s expansive view of human possibility is a strange sort of confidence in futures we’ve never seen or imagined”
"We argue that population membership by itself does not determine risks or response to intervention; rather, it is the confluence of genetic, environmental, sociocultural and policy factors that are causal and should be identified" link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Prenatal exposure to genocide accelerates epigenetic aging in third- and fourth-generation clocks among young adults in Rwanda www.nature.com/articles/s43...