iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Do supernatural punishment beliefs promote cooperation beyond parochial boundaries? And is this effect stronger in "moralistic" religious traditions (eg Christianity, Hinduism)? Working with some of best & brightest in our field, that's what our new prereg aims to answer: github.com/bgpurzycki/G...

github.com

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AnthroTools: A Package in R @anthrotools.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

"Modeling Uncertainty around Free-list Cultural Salience Scores" by @rcc-au.bsky.social's @djsmith90.bsky.social and @bgpurzycki.bsky.social OnlineFirst up now at Field Methods journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... #AnthroTools #quantethnography

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Alba Fernández-Sanlés (Dr, she/her) @albafsanles.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

I am devastated because our cat Trasno is critically ill and needs urgent treatment to survive, but it’s financially overwhelming. If we’ve ever made you smile or feel supported, please consider sharing or contributing: gofundme.com/f/help-save-... Thank you from the heart, Alba

gofundme.com

Donate to Help save our cat Trasno: Urgent treatment needed, organized by Javier Ortiz De Guinea

Help save Trasno: Urgent Treatment needed for our cat’s life… Javier Ortiz De Guinea needs your support for Help save our cat Trasno: Urgent treatment needed

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

The world may be a burning shit-storm, but we're trying to do our little bit to make science slightly better - Our new Registered Report on climate concern and mental health was just recommended/accepted at @pci-regreports.bsky.social doi.org/10.24072/pci...

doi.org

Climate change concern doesn't impact the subsequent mental heal...

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Abbey Page @abbeyepage.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

📣 New paper by myself @djsmith90.bsky.social and colleagues published today in @royalsociety.org Proc B 📣 Grandmothers are often seen as key carers, but this isn’t always the case. We explore why in Agta forgers reflecting on the implications of demography for evolution of grandmothering 👵🌍

royalsocietypublishing.org

Demography of grandmothering: a case study in Agta foragers | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Grandmothers are often presented as key carers due to low costs and high inclusive fitness returns. Empirically, however, grandmothers are not consistently important. Understanding the factors that pr...

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AnthroTools: A Package in R @anthrotools.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

AnthroTools 2.0 is live! Nine new functions that propagate, plot, and summarize uncertainty around item and cultural salience values. @djsmith90.bsky.social @bgpurzycki.bsky.social @rcc-au.bsky.social

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

Can religious beliefs shape peoples' attitudes and behaviours regarding climate change? We explored this using data from a large-scale UK cohort study (ALSPAC) In short: Perhaps, but it's complicated. Answer depends on generation, religiosity measure and climate question doi.org/10.1371/jour...

doi.org

Associations between religiosity and climate change beliefs and behaviours in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC)

Individual actions are crucial to mitigating the impact of anthropogenic climate change. Understanding the factors shaping individuals’ climate beliefs and behaviours is therefore essential to help en...

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

Are you into free-list methods and want to incorporate uncertainty into your group-level estimates (eg Smith's S)? Of course you do! Then @bgpurzycki.bsky.social and I have a new preprint for your delectation! doi.org/10.31219/osf...

doi.org

OSF

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Aarhus University's Religion, Cognition, and Culture Unit @rcc-au.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

No clear co-causal evidence of religion and mental health! Hot off the digital press from RCC's @djsmith90.bsky.social! journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 17/02/2025

New blog post! Sometimes, when reviewing a manuscript, it's really unclear to me what precisely the authors are trying to do -- which makes it hard to evaluate the work properly. So, here's some advice for how to ensure that readers don't get lost. www.the100.ci/2025/02/17/r...

the100.ci

Reviewer notes: Avoid any ambiguity about analysis aims

For any central statistical analysis that you report in your manuscript, it should be absolutely clear for readers why the analysis is being conducted in the first place – that is, the analysis goal s...

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Abbey Page @abbeyepage.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

1/ 🧵 New preprint out today 🤩 With @djsmith90.bsky.social and co we have done deep-dive into grandmothering in the Agta to unpick the role of demography in shaping the role of grandmothers in direct childcare 👇🧪🏺 #Grandmothering #demography #BioAnth #EvPsych

osf.io

OSF

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Centre for Culture and Evolution @brunelcce.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

📢 The final CCE seminar of 2024 is coming up soon with @djsmith90.bsky.social leading us into the 🎄 festive 🎄season with a presentation on *Religion and mental health: a causal Christmas carol* 🎅 📆 18th Dec 2024 - 12:45 in person start with food, 13:00 online talk start 🔓Open to all

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

Did not expect my first inclusion in a starter pack to be "people named Dan Smith with PhDs"! 😅 Still, at least you now know where to find us!

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 08/10/2024

I found @djsmith90.bsky.social's figure about ethical publishing so helpful for students I added it to my guide to academic reading/writing/publishing (osf.io/p37zj)

Screenshot from article including meme and figure of more and less ethical academic publishing options

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 04/10/2024

New blog post I cobbled together for the Bristol Reproducibility Network Ethical Academic Publishing: How to Make Academic Publishing Fairer, More Open and Less Wasteful openresearchbristol.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2024/09/23/e...

openresearchbristol.blogs.bristol.ac.uk

Ethical Academic Publishing: How to Make Academic Publishing Fairer, More Open and Less Wasteful – Open Research at Bristol

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 03/10/2024

Tak! Excited to start working with all the wonderful @rcc-au.bsky.social folk in Aarhus too! 🙂

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 23/09/2024

We all know that – alongside global warming, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin and other evils – selection bias is one of the largest threats to humanity* But how bad exactly is selection bias? This is what we aimed to explore in our recent paper: doi.org/10.1080/2153... *Perhaps a slight exaggeration…

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Centre for Culture and Evolution @brunelcce.bsky.social · 23/09/2024

📢📢📢💫 CCE's seminar series is kicking off in November with some amazing speakers lined up 💫📢📢📢 These are 🔓 open to all - in person and online - joining information shared closer to the date 📅 ⏲️ Talks are scheduled between 12:30 - 14:00 @Bruneluni

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 23/09/2024

Interested in causality, DAGs and human evolution? If so, then why not join the Evolutionary Human Science journal webinar on 'Causal Inference from Evolutionary Human Sciences'? Join us October 3rd 2PM BST | 3PM CEST More info here: cambridge-org.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

cambridge-org.zoom.us

UPCOMING WEBINAR: Causal Inference from Evolutionary Human Sciences Join us October 3rd 2PM BST | 3PM CEST Register Now

In recent years, researchers have made groundbreaking advances in methods for drawing strong causal inferences with observational data. These advances have also revealed that some mechanisms, with so...

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Ariel Rokem @arokem.org · 05/09/2024

New paper out! "Ten simple rules for scientific code review" journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol..., in which I detailed how to use *code review* in academic research in a didactic, effective, and enjoyable manner.

journals.plos.org

Ten simple rules for scientific code review

Author summary Scientists are increasingly writing code as part of their research. Code review is a common practice in software engineering, which entails detailed and continual examination of additio...

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 27/08/2024

New blog post! If you're a substantive researcher, you mainly do statistics to answer substantive questions. So let's stop putting the statistical model first. www.the100.ci/2024/08/27/l...

the100.ci

Let’s do statistics the other way around

Summer in Berlin – the perfect time and place to explore the city, take a walk in the Görli, go skinny dipping in the Spree, attend an overcrowded, overheated conference symposium on cross-lagged pane...

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Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 22/08/2024

Researchers should stop paying to publish their papers. Tom Morgan and I wrote a short piece about it. (1) osf.io/preprints/os...

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Dr Emily Emmott @ehemmott.bsky.social · 20/08/2024

Job alert! 9m fixed-term teaching role (cover for a colleague) in Human Behavioural Ecology within the Biological Anthropology team at UCL Anthropology: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... Teaching focused role but research time is included as the role spans over the summer when there's no teaching 🙂

ucl.ac.uk

UCL – University College London

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 20/05/2024

Recently took part in Carbon Literacy training & my action to try and reduce carbon emissions was to share recipes encouraging plant-based foods (as lower impact vs meat/dairy). Thought I'd share here in case of interest Gnocchi w/ tomato sauce - Enjoy! 😋 danmajor-smith.netlify.app/2024/05/20/c...

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 17/05/2024

Here's a short blog post I wrote on 'Using Synthetic Datasets to Promote Research Reproducibility and Transparency' for the Bristol Reprpducibility Network openresearchbristol.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2024/05/10/u... TL;DR: Share your data! (But if you can't, share synthetic data) 😀

openresearchbristol.blogs.bristol.ac.uk

Using Synthetic Datasets to Promote Research Reproducibility and Transparency – Open Research at Bristol

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Jess Butler @jessbutler.bsky.social · 16/05/2024

Wiley closing 19 journals and retracting ELEVEN THOUSAND academic publications for being fake archive.ph/ouZUd (Wall Street Journal)

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Peter Tennant @pwgtennant.bsky.social · 10/05/2024

JAMA introduces a new framework for drawing causal inferences from observational data. Including a call for adopting explicit causal language. This is a key moment in the embrace of contemporary causal inference methods within health science! jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... #EpiSky #CausalSky

jamanetwork.com

Causal Inference and Effects of Interventions From Observational Studies in Medical Journals

This study examines drawing causal inferences about the effects of interventions from observational studies in medical journals.

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 30/04/2024

Gave a talk on 'Ethical Academic Publishing' earlier, so thought I'd share the slides in case of interest to anyone: osf.io/urpx5 Basically, the system is f**ked, so we need to publish more ethically (e.g. support Diamond OA & not-for-profit journals) This slide is a summary of my current thinking

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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 21/03/2024

New blog post! Have you (like me!) wondered what the ATT means and how it's different from average treatment effects? I use #rstats to explore why we care about the ATE, ATT, and ATU + how to calculate them with observational data! #polisky #episky #econsky www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2024/03...

Before we calculate these different treatment effects with the realized outcomes instead of the hypothetical potential outcomes, let’s look really quick at the practical difference between the true ATE, ATT, and ATU. All three estimands are useful for policymaking!

The ATE is −15, implying that mosquito nets cause a 15 point reduction in malaria risk for every person in the country. This includes people who live at high elevations where mosquitoes don’t live, people who live near mosquito-infested swamps, people who are rich enough to buy Bill Gates’s mosquito laser, and people who can’t afford a net but would really like to use one. If we worked in the Ministry of Health and wanted to know if we should make a new national program that gave everyone a free bed net, the overall reduction in risk is −15, which is probably pretty good!

The ATT is −16.29, which is bigger than the ATE. The effect of net usage is bigger for people who are already using the nets. This is because of underlyi

Mirrored histogram showing “weird” parts of the population: treated people who were unlikely to be treated, and untreated people who were likely to be treated

Mirrored histogram showing pseudo-populations of treated and untreated people that have been reweighted to be more comparable and unconfounded

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Nicolas Mouquet @nmouquet.bsky.social · 12/03/2024

As director of CESAB, I'm incredibly proud to share the latest article of our postdocs today in Ecology Letters. 👏 They call for a more ethical academic publishing landscape but also ask to not let only the Early Career Researchers pay the price of this paradigm shift ! doi.org/10.1111/ele.... 🧪🌍

The publish-or-perish culture in academia has catalysed the development of an unethical publishing system. This system is characterised by the proliferation of journals and publishers unaffiliated with learned societies or universities— that maintain extremely large revenues and profit margins diverting funds away from the academic community. Early career researchers (ECRs) are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of this publishing system because of intersecting factors, including pressure to pursue high impact publications, rising publication costs and job insecurity. Moving towards a more ethical system requires that scientists advocate for structural change by making career choices that come with risks, many of which disproportionately impact ECRs. We illuminate major issues facing ECRs in Ecology and Evolution under the current publishing system, and propose a portfolio of actions to promote systemic change that can be implemented by ECRs and established researchers.

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 13/03/2024

Interested in hearing how synthetic datasets can help promote open science and reproducibility? Then come see me waffle on about this at an online ReproducibiliTea talk on the 21st March 🙂 Sign up here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/using-synt... @reproducibilitea.bsky.social

eventbrite.co.uk

Using synthetic datasets to promote reproducibility, with Daniel Smith

Dr Daniel Smith discusses how synthetic datasets can be used to increase reproducibility in the context of restricted data access

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 21/02/2024

Say hello to our delicious new foster kitten Tinks! She's six weeks old and was found under a bush in a park (her mum was a feral, we think) 😥 But she's super lovely and playful and ruddy adorable 😍

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 19/02/2024

Delighted to share our new paper detailing how to create synthetic data to help promote open-science practices (specifically within longitudinal population-based studies) using #ALSPAC as an example wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/9-5... /1

wellcomeopenresearch.org

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 13/02/2024