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Alex Mesoudi

@alexmesoudi.com

2.1K followers 425 following 223 posts

Cultural evolution researcher at the University of Exeter (Penryn campus), UK. I study human social learning and culture using evolutionary theory. Past President of the Cultural Evolution Society @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social Website: alexmesoudi.com

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Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 23/07/2026

Feels like GenAI still has some ways to go

Screenshot of an AI interface that was asked for a Premier League footballer whose surname rhymes with rainbows. It gives the answer 'Liam Delap'.

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 24/06/2026

We find in a series of online experiments that most participants indiscriminately share costly information with others, rather than use the reputation-based partner choice system that we painstakingly set up for them.

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 22/06/2026

My department has funding for 2-year MByRes studentships (full tuition fees and research allowance) on ecosystem resilience, broadly defined. Apply to do a project with me modelling social-ecological networks. #culturalevolution #socialnetworks ecologyconservation.exeter.ac.uk/masteer-coho...

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 21/05/2026

Here's @ruthmace.bsky.social giving the inaugural Tinbergen lecture @uniexecec.bsky.social today, asking why there are so many celibate monks in Tibet

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 13/05/2026

and last up @michael.muthukrishna.com on applied applications of what Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson started 50 years ago

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 13/05/2026

and the equally amazing Sarah Mathew

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 13/05/2026

Now to Rob Boyd's academic grandchildren, first the amazing @hyperadapthyrax.bsky.social

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 13/05/2026

Joe Henrich gives his take on the history of the field

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 13/05/2026

Rob Boyd reflects on his and Pete Richerson's early work on cultural evolution

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 13/05/2026

It's an all-star cultural evolution / evolutionary psychology / human behavioural ecology panel, with Joe Henrich, Fiona Jordan, @edhagen.net and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 13/05/2026

Supercool work by @sobchuk.bsky.social mapping dynamic networks of books / literature

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 13/05/2026

Phenomenal plenary at CES 2026 by Nicole Creanza on the links between birdsong and human language

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 12/05/2026

Now it's @michelleakline.bsky.social 's fascinating plenary on cultural evolution and childrearing / childbirth

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 12/05/2026

Our host turns speaker: @matcharbonneau.bsky.social on how open-ended cumulative cultural evolution works

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 12/05/2026

Here's @maximederex.bsky.social on the role of causal reasoning in cumulative cultural evolution

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 12/05/2026

Sergey Gavrilets now on how tightness-looseness changes cooperative dynamics

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 12/05/2026

CES 2026 continues with @twaring.bsky.social talking about food clubs as an example of cultural group selection

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 11/05/2026

"migration as THE central driver of change"

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 11/05/2026

Final keynote of the day by Abdellatif Bencherifa @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 11/05/2026

More @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social conference talks! @babeheim.bsky.social on norm psychology, and in particular escalator standing norms in Japan

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 11/05/2026

Egor Lappo telling us about social learning in chess playing (not in cats sadly, despite the photo)

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 11/05/2026

Here is @alexschakowski.bsky.social on social learning strategies in Finnish fishing competitions

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 11/05/2026

Now Tom Morgan on how conformist behaviour emerges from anti-conformist beliefs

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 11/05/2026

In Rabat for the @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social conference. Great start with a fascinating keynote by @helenamiton.bsky.social on constraints on cultural evolution

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 17/04/2026

Final version of this paper is now published. Find out what the microfinance literature can tell us about the evolution of human cooperation

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 17/04/2026

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

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 10/04/2026

I took the German or Autistic diagnostic. Result: Both. The Wittgenstein Result. I don't know whether to be proud or concerned. german.millermanschool.com

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 11/11/2025

Congratulations to Andoni Sergiou for defending his PhD thesis today! And special thanks to @psmaldino.bsky.social and @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social for examining his thesis

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 30/06/2025

In an effort to make old papers more reproducible, I’ve put the code on GitHub for: Kempe, Lycett & Mesoudi (2014) From cultural traditions to cumulative culture: parameterising the differences between human and nonhuman culture. Journal of Theoretical Biology 359, 29-36 github.com/amesoudi/kem...

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 13/06/2025

We found high levels of information sharing. But most people shared indiscriminately, ignoring reputation information. This was found in the UK and China, and persisted even when we introduced exploitative non-sharing bots, and removed reputation altogether

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 07/06/2025

Fascinating conversation on the Renaissance. Interesting cultural dynamics where Florence survived by transmitting its prestige to other more dominant states. Also, England was a ‘weirdo island’ back then too, just like today.

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 25/05/2025

Also interesting that they found greatest support for a North African origin of Homo sapiens - although I guess the larger point of the paper is that there isn’t a single origin, it’s a pan-African origin

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 25/05/2025

Fascinating latest model of Homo sapiens evolution within Africa. Interesting finding that cultural innovation was accelerated by both population size increases, but also recombination across partially isolated regions (e.g. Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa)

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 20/05/2025

Well at least they’re up front about their terrible gender balance royalsociety.org/news/2025/05...

Screenshot of Royal Society website stating
“25% of this year’s intake of Fellows, Foreign Members and Honorary Fellows are women”

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 14/05/2025

Updated the reinforcement (+social) learning models in my cultural evolution agent-based modelling in R tutorial. Now uses cmdstan rather than rstan (and more importantly now works again). On github (Model 17): github.com/amesoudi/cul... and bookdown: bookdown.org/amesoudi/ABM...

A graph showing the frequency of correct responses over time in a reinforcement learning model

A graph showing frequency of correct responses over time in a reinforcement learning + conformity model

Parameter estimates from a stan model fit to data from a reinforcement learning + conformity simulation

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 23/01/2025

Also justified my use of Timothee Chalamee to represent the human species in my lectures last term

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 23/01/2025

Question for maths types: does this kind of equation have a general name? (a value in a set raised to a power, divided by the sum of all values in the set raised to the same power) In cultural evolution, it’s sometimes used to model conformity (e.g. Nakahashi 2007, where the image is from)

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 18/01/2025

but most of all farewell to this terrifying statue I saw in the castle, which will haunt my dreams until I die

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 18/01/2025

and farewell to Trento’s beautiful architecture and majestic surrounding mountains

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 18/01/2025

Farewell Trento, and thanks to @acerbialberto.com for hosting me. Really interesting talks at the 1st ever Italian conference for computational social science

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 15/01/2025

Trento is also impressive!

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 15/01/2025

Quick stop in Venice before going to Trento for the 1st Italian Conference for Computational Social Science in Trento. Going to try to find the library that used to be a church where the crusader is buried in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 10/01/2025

What a difference a century makes! Kroeber (1917) arguing that birdsong couldn't possibly be a socially learned tradition. Research since has shown how wrong he was.

In any event, whether one bird does or does not in some degree "learn" from another, there is not a fragment of even alleged evi- dence that bird song is a tradition, that like human speech or human music it accumulates and develops from age to age, that it is inevitably altered from generation to generation by fashion or custom, and that it is impossible for it ever to remain the same: in other words, that it is a social thing or due to a process even remotely akin to those affecting all constituents of human civiliza- tion. (Kroeber 1917)

Title page of Lynch & Baker (1993): A population memetics approach to cultural evolution in chaffinch song: Meme diversity within populations

Title page of Lachlan et al.: "Cultural conformity generates extremely stable traditions in bird song"

Title page of Youngblood & Lahti: "Content bias in the cultural evolution of house finch song"

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 18/11/2024

New paper in PNAS with @maximederex.bsky.social , @glupyan.bsky.social & Piers Edmiston: Trade-offs, control conditions, and alternative designs in the experimental study of cultural evolution www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 16/11/2024

For the new listeners, here’s a free tutorial I made for learning how to make simulation models of cultural evolution in R, on github: github.com/amesoudi/cul... and as a bookdown version with outputs: bookdown.org/amesoudi/ABM...

Content page of Agent Based Modelling tutorial

Graph showing how vertical and horizontal cultural transmission differ in the speed with which they cause traits to spread

Fluctuating empire sizes simulating historical dynamics

Graph showing how group size and frequency of Intergroup conflict support different levels of cooperation

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 24/10/2024

Such a cool talk by Yuko Ulrich @exetercec.bsky.social today. Nematode worms infect ant brains, increase within-colony interactions, but curiously also increase hostile inter-group behaviour

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 15/09/2024

Greatly enjoyed the @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social conference in Durham last week. Excellent talks, great keynotes, superb organisation - thanks @rachkendal.bsky.social and all the organisers! CES members stayed tuned for a newsletter with the announcements (election results, prizes, 2026 conference)

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 04/09/2024

What all the cool kids will be wearing at #CES2024 next week

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 30/05/2024

Finally, cultural group selection also works, where groups in which individuals share information with each other outcompete groups of information free-riders. But only with strong within-group punishment (or potentially some other within-group mechanism of cooperation)

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Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 30/05/2024

Partner choice can also maintain information sharing. If you get an increased reputation by sharing info, and others share conditional on reputation, then sharers receive beneficial traits due to their high reputations. This depends on the ability to detect and update reputations

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