iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Tired of the taste of tale? I completed the 23-part blog post series about my 9th trip through Sapiens by Harari. ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/09/sapi...

A dragon-like ouroboros in a 1478 drawing in an alchemical tract. from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros#/media/File:Serpiente_alquimica.jpg

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Maybe it's because I was raised in the Bible belt, but I'm out here pressing these tiny not-so-hard-to-read print Haraway+Le Guins into my students hands... bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

photo of palm-sized print and bound copy of The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, with Introduction by Donna Haraway

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

To ham-fistedly illustrate (as an tech-troglodyte) what I mean, here's what I show my students as an alternative. It's no more the truth than the prior image, so it's not meant to replace it, per se. But merely imagining it is helpful towards imagining the unknown, isn't it?

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Everyone has seen this map. 4.4 million have seen this exact one from @pbseons.bsky.social. But has anyone ever seen a map of prehistoric human dispersal with 360 degrees of arrows at any given point? As humans dispersed thru space and time, surely they didn't ALL move with their backs to Africa.

screen grab at 2:58 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNQPQkV3nhw of mainstream, ubiquitously used image of unidirectional prehistoric, "out of Africa" human dispersal, with arrows only pointing away from Africa and only one arrow at each point marked rather than, say, spinning round and round to indicate multi-directional gene flow that's just as imaginary back that far as the unidirectional arrows are.

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

New by Orli Dahan: "“Bleeding” is not the word: Autoethnographic insights into abortion and the female body’s adaptive ejections" journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Abstract of article linked in post:
This article explores the embodied experience of medication-induced abortion through
a critical feminist and evolutionary lens. Drawing on personal diaries and narrative,
I examine how the physiological process of abortion, particularly the unexpected intensity of the expulsion of large tissue clots, evoked associations with other adaptive ejection functions of the female body: menstruation, childbirth and lactation. I argue that the
term “bleeding,” as commonly used in relation to medication-induced abortion and
rooted in biomedical and risk-oriented discourse, fails to capture the agency of the process. Rather than perceiving abortion as a site of trauma or shame, I experienced it with
visceral awe at the female body’s self-regulating force. Building on traditions of
embodied knowledge, I situate abortion within a dual lens of function and sensation
—showing how the same adaptive function can be lived as pain, relief or empowerment,
depending on context. By reframing abortion as a powerful act of embodied ejection,
like birth and lactation, I invite a shift in how we understand reproductive physiology
and its relationship to agency and language. This article contributes to feminist psychology by foregrounding corporeal experience and reclaiming women’s bodily knowledge
as a generative source of both understanding and cultural meaning

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Todays front page of the NYT is brought to you by Coach Buttermaker

Screen grab of front page of New York Times website featuring the U.S.A. sliding into oblivion on the left, and, on the right, "Hooters Says Bring the Kids: The chain known for skimpy uniforms and “bikini nights” is trying to change its image. Hooters onesie, anyone?"

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

I fully accept evolution and yet I wouldn't demonstrate that to you by talking about any of the topics in the evobio questions in this study. Fossil, ape, monkey, deep time: these are all absent. Eeeeek! Manosphere may be enthusiastic Darwinians but are they *really* scientifically literate?

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

My first thought was this. (Good read in this thread!)

Terry Gross: Can you share some of your favourite comments from readers that you’ve gotten over the years?

Maurice Sendak: Oh, there’s so many. Can I give you just one that I really like? It was from a little boy. He sent me a charming card with a little drawing. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters—sometimes very hastily—but this one I lingered over. I sent him a postcard and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim, I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

Fresh Air
NPR
April 1986

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

In this text is a hyperlink that's relevant too: ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/02/you-...

American science had not, by the 1990s, figured out that race is the meaning people make of biological variation. Instead, they frequently (if not typically) equated race to human biological variation. You could be against racism and still be racist without knowing it. You could believe that people could be good and fair and just (that is they could be not racist), but still call skin color variation "race" or still believe that people are born white or born Black. Now, I hope things have improved. I think they have? I think that, now, fewer scientists hold that racist perspective. We know that you aren't born with a race, you're born into race. There's human biological variation and then there's race, which is a human invention with real-life power that, in America, includes the myth that it's not a human invention (high-five, Pirsig)!

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

"Conceivably" is the new way to write, "As they say on X". www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/s...

screengrab of two grafs in the article: The findings, if they hold up, don’t clarify what sort of mating preference was at play. Conceivably, Neanderthal men used violence, even raiding other groups for women. But Dr. Nowell was skeptical of such explanations. “It is a possibility, but we don’t have any thing in the archaeological record that would support that,” she said, noting a lack of evidence for violence between groups of humans 50,000 years ago or 250,000 years ago.

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

I found the whole body in my files, but I am clearly misremembering. This one could be but isn't obviously. I know I've seen an obviously pregnant one somewhere. Can't picture or source it though.

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

People--especially lefty, white anti-racists--need to change common sense about "race". Race is the MEANING people have made, through history, of human geographic variation; it is *not* the variation itself. Tolerance and kindness are not cutting it. Society must enact new common sense.

This is a flowchart that says, “You said race, but are you actually talking about race?” and then asks a series of questions as a way to think through what race is (the meaning people make of biological variation that has resulted throughout history in today's system of unequal power and oppression) and what race is not (biological variation, skin color, genes, ancestry, ethnicity)

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

Don't be surprised when the next generation of female techbros dress like this:

Elon Musk combining fashion inspo from Men in Black and the Ice Road Truckers.

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

Omg. This is why evolutionary science (including especially in its popular understanding) is so much “hallucination” too! www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

The OpenAI research identified three mathematical factors that made hallucinations inevitable: epistemic uncertainty when information appeared rarely in training data, model limitations where tasks exceeded current architectures’ representational capacity, and computational intractability where even superintelligent systems could not solve cryptographically hard problems.

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 29/08/2025

Great read at @sapiens.org today that ends on a note I very much disagree with, but is (thankfully) forcing me to figure out exactly why. www.sapiens.org/archaeology/...

Screen grab of last grad in article that says, “There is danger in fictionalizing the past. The present “post-truth” moment shows how easy it is for misinformation, propaganda, and conspiracy theories to thrive. Yet millions, including myself, learned to think about Neanderthals as living, breathing humans (rather than dry, dusty fossils) in reading books like The Clan of the Cave Bear. There is fiction in archaeology even when we’re not writing novels or playing games. Without imagining the past, we can’t connect to it. And without connecting to the past, we can neither learn about it nor care about it.”

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Just astounded by how magnificent (and readable) this book by @philipcball.bsky.social is! It’s the book I’ve always needed but didn’t know it until I saw someone post it here. It will keep me logging in, just in case I hit such a jackpot again.

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

I’m finishing up one with exactly what I wrote. Lots of good books critique the traditional narratives but few of those show a way to think evolutionarily without them. But Feminism in the Wild is great. mitpress.mit.edu/978026204963...

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

No one can look over what remains from the last million years and see sexual assault. You’d have to watch a recording like a film. It’s never going to happen. So what’s he talking about? A mainstream but completely fucked up idea of evolution that he shares w/ the manosphere & influential …

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Google alerts me to my name appearing in a blog post. The post describes my idea fine, but cites a wholly fake reference attributed to me. I Google that made-up paper. Google’s AI says, in effect, “oh I know that paper! Let me summarize it for you!” Help us.

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Re-reading this by terrific paper by @anthrofuentes.bsky.social because it’s on my syllabus this week: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... Email me for pdf if you hit a paywall!

Pic of printout of great last paragraph of this article: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/711582

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

How to exceed HIGH expectations about your new book? Just be @ambikamath.bsky.social & Melina Packer and make it look so easy. This book speaks to anyone who thinks they know how evolution works or who wants to. SURPRISE! It’s not what any of us thought or were taught. Neither is feminism! #booksky

A pic of the cover of FEMINISM IN THE WILD by Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer. A must-read.

A screenshot of page 90 of “Feminism in the Wild”

My dog eyeballing me because it’s second breakfast time.

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Race is something we're born into, not something we're born with. Pass it on...

A too wordy flow chart. Here's the nut: Race is the myth/lie that populations are biologically distinct, which leads us to believe that social, political, and economic inequities that pattern with race are just the natural consequences of differences in biology, which discourages us from changing the social and economic policies that perpetuate racial inequity.

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

How to delete genetic data from 23andMe www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

“The company said there will be “no changes” to the way it protects consumer data while in bankruptcy court. But unless you take action, there is a risk your genetic information could end up in someone else’s hands — and used in ways you had never considered. It took me just a minute to delete my data on the 23andMe website, and I’ve got instructions on how to do it below.”

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

—Without imagination, it is easy to believe in things that are simple, and superficial, and wrong. With it, we can begin to understand the lives of those who are different from ourselves — and respond to their struggles with compassion, and kindness and grace.— www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

❤️❤️❤️ www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Good morning to the 8%ers who’ve got just as much magical meaning in their lives as the 92%. nyt.et.e.sparkpost.com/f/a/ioaASos2...

A figure by the New York Times conveying some results of today’s pew results linked in skeet. 92% of respondents said yes to one or more of the following: they believe in a soul or spirit in addition to the physical body, they believe in god or universal spirit, there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, there is an afterlife.

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

You’re not living until you read this paper. If you don’t have subscription access, look up my email, and I’ll send it to you. IS EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY POSSIBLE? asks Subrena Smith. And her answer is NO. Even if modularity is true, it’s impossible. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Photo of first page of print out of the article “Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?” with a handwritten summary of the article’s answer: “No”

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

This is only a test. The test begins now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now

Screengrab of the first page of this paper: Overdoing Gender: A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis Author(s): Robb Willer, Christabel L. Rogalin, Bridget Conlon and Michael T. Wojnowicz Source: American Journal of Sociology , Vol. 118, No. 4 (January 2013), pp. 980-1022

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

First novel of 2025–Orbital by Samantha Harvey—was lovely. Not pictured: First nonfiction of 2025–The Caveman Mystique by Martha McCaughey—which was also lovely.

Cover of paperback book Orbital by Samantha Harvey

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Jordan Peterson relies on the obstetrical dilemma being fact in his latest book which describes separate male and female human natures. I would be a liar if I didn’t admit this makes me feel 😈😈😈about my upcoming book. Thank you @newscientist.bsky.social ! www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...

Excerpt screenshot from link provided, discussing Jordan Peterson’s new book.

Now, you might expect Peterson, a psychologist, to offer psychological evidence for these differences between men and women. You would be wrong. But he does try to link it to the biology of childbirth. Labour, he explains, is painful and dangerous because human babies have evolved bigger brains, which must fit through a narrow birth canal that cannot get any wider or "women would have trouble running".

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Here’s how I feel about evolutionary storytelling that puts women on top, brought to you by Pumpking Imperial Pumpkin Ale and truth serum!

A screenshot from Instagram of a comment where I argue that liking bullshit evolutionary stories that make us feel good is not an option when the same stories about evolved patriarchy and race make misogynists and racists feel good. Also, it’s not science.

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Feeling all the love and happiness for @jasondeleon.bsky.social whose outstanding book SOLDIERS AND KINGS won the National Book Award for non-fiction last night!

Covers of the five winners of the 2024 National Book Award

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

I’m sorry I climbed up and ate all the cookies?

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