iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Charles C Roseman @evoroseman.bsky.social · 1h

If you are in the greater Washington DC area on Friday 6 November and have an afternoon to spare, I’m giving a talk at George Mason University. I’d love to see you there. (baboon skull diagram from Theibault et al. 2026) 1/7

Poster for a talk by Charles Roseman entitled "Spencer's Long Shadow: Why we should abandon the extended evolutionary synthesis" featuring a diagram of baboon skulls from Thiebault et al. 2026, some clipart mice, and a picture of the speaker whose father came in second in an uglyman contest.

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Finally got around to making Raup's mollusk shell model work in R. Also spent too much time trying to give a retro look. #marinelife #molluscmonday

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Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I became a biologist because of a museum exhibit. Real artifacts tell stories that are more powerful than anything we can get from scrolling. They are part of our engine for training the next generation of scientists. 🧪 scienceforeveryone.science/the-awesomen...

scienceforeveryone.science

The awesomeness of museums

Genuine artifacts tell the richest stories that fill our souls. And they fuel the scientific enterprise.

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Andreas Brandmaier @brandmaier.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Ever looked at your graph and thought: this needs a more dramatic exit strategy? Make your R base plots self-destruct with style. If you must, download here: github.com/brandmaier/d... #RStats #DataVisualization #RProgramming #DataScience #OpenSource #AcademicHumor #noAI

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C. Brandon Ogbunu @cbo.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

In my latest for @undark.org, I compare AI adoption in science to the Ship of Theseus: "If you swap out every wooden plank on a ship over time, is it still the same vessel?" I argue that science derives authority from something more than data generation + publication. undark.org/2026/09/25/o...

undark.org

AI Presents Science with a ‘Ship of Theseus’ Problem

Opinion | AI can replace each part of the scientific process, leaving the enterprise recognizable but devoid of human judgment.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

maybe it seceded

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Phil Klinkner @pklinkne.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I really love this chart. I'm guess that the correlation here (.85) is about as big as you would find for any other variable. Also, a less serious scholar than @tesler.bsky.social (namely me) would have made a crude Freudian reference to the slope of the line.

Chart shows a close positive relationship between Trump's 2024 vote and Google searches for testosterone boosters.

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Dan Hirschman @asociologist.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"If Rubin were actually sincere about not having sufficient evidence to make sweeping claims about the discipline, then she would not make such sweeping claims about the discipline. Yet she does. Over and over again." @juliango.bsky.social on the U Chicago responses to the Rubin report on sociology.

scatter.wordpress.com

guest post: scholarly malpractice and the vanderbilt-washington university report on sociology

The following is a guest post by Julian Go. By now readers of scatterplot will be aware of the Sociology portion of the Vanderbilt-Washington University Report (VWUR) by Ashley Rubin. Part of the “…

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Dr. Davey F. Wright ⛏️🦕🧬 @daveyfwright.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

"Our results highlight the limits of using extant, species-depauperate lineages to infer deep ancestors and the importance of fossils and other evidence that more directly sample early evolutionary history."

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Pieter T. L. Beck @ptrbck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

My article arguing that Nathan Cofnas's race realism is rightly labelled as pseudoscience is now also published at @skeptic.org.uk. Honoured to have it up there.

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Charles C Roseman @evoroseman.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Thread RE: Henrich’s report on the state of anthropology in which I offer a different take on the state of the field. I’m a mostly lapsed anthropologist who got his PhD in one of the split departments mentioned in the report who is currently faculty in a biology department.1/18

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Charles C Roseman @evoroseman.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I should say that @thedissenteryt.bsky.social is among the best interviewers I've ever met.

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Charles C Roseman @evoroseman.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Goddamnit, there is an upside…

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The shifting of responsibility from “the village” to individual parents is likely a significant reason for low fertility. If the new eugenics will individualise reproduction still further, an “interesting” side effect may be even lower fertility

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Charles C Roseman @evoroseman.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Best. Review. Ever.* *Among reviews not written by Dorothy Parker.

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Peter Morrell @peterlmorrell.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

QTL mapping academic.oup.com/genetics/art... Whether you are new to QTL mapping or have years of experience, you’re sure to learn something new and interesting from Shizhong Xu’s Primer. Don’t fret over the equations; there is a terrific narrative here about the past and future of QTL mapping!

academic.oup.com

QTL mapping

Abstract. Most biologically relevant traits are quantitative, controlled by multiple genes, and can be influenced by the environment. The multiple genes, c

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Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The not-so-subtly veiled animosity is mostly just holdover from the academic feud of which Pinker was an active participant. The guy is totally lost in the culture was now (e.g.)but imo the seeds were always there since he was part of the Science Wars v. 1

Steven Pinker • @sapink • Dec 7, 2025
•..
EO Wilson, as Peggy Sastre writes, was Patient Zero in academic cancel culture, the campaign to discredit scholars with heterodox beliefs by smearing them with fanciful nefarious political motives. Back in 1975, after one of the first modern challenges to the doctrine of the blank slate, he was the target of a petition preposterously accusing him of justifying slavery and genocide. Not even death was an escape: a historian trawled through his correspondence and got him re-canceled for a sympathetic personal letter to an even more reviled professor. quillette.com/2025/12/06/soc...

Steven Pinker • @sapinker
...
Ironically, the attackers, most prominently Stephen Jay Gould & Richard Lewontin, were Marxists, & in the latter case, a Maoist, praising the man whose harebrained theories led to the worst man-made famine in history. In Not In Our Genes, Lewontin et al. wrote, "Against this economic reduction as the explanatory principle underlying all human behavior, we could counterpose the ... revolutionary practitioners and theorists like Mao Tse-tung on the power of human consciousness in both interpreting and changing the world."

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Pieter T. L. Beck @ptrbck.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Cofnas tegen HLN: "Ik, een racist? Nee hoor!" HLN: "Ok, leuk! Volgende vraag." Cofnas wanneer zijn medestanders vragen waarom hij zo mak was in de KVHV-lezing in Gent: "Ik pas mijn boodschap aan wanneer de normies luisteren en ik moest oppassen om niks illegaals te zeggen."

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Ashkaan K. Fahimipour @akfbio.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I'd be grateful if you could circulate to good students: I'm recruiting PhD students for Fall '27 in the areas of species interactions and animal behavior. Ad here - jobs.rwfm.tamu.edu/view-job/?id...

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 11/09/2026

I'm excited to share this preprint by my wonderful MSc student Yihsin who's thought deeply about how psychological & neurocognitive theories relate to different types of evidence. Beyond Empirical Success: Evaluating Theoretical Virtue Across the Computational Modeling Chain doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Beyond Empirical Success: Evaluating Theoretical Virtue Across the Computational Modeling Chain
Authors/Creators

Chuang, Yihsin
ORCID icon
Guest, Olivia1
ORCID icon

Description

Computational models in psychology are typically judged by a single standard: empirical fit. Unfortunately, fit is insufficient, even misleading as a sole criterion, as the same result can arise from fundamentally different situations: theoretically faithful models, mathematically flexible ones, miscalibrated operationalizations, or implementations that compute something other than intended. Distinguishing between these is vital. Our evaluative metatheoretical account recognises that models stand in three distinct relations: a) toward the theory whose causal commitments it purports to capture, b) toward the specification and implementation it purports to compute, and c) toward the phenomenon it purports to explain. Each relation can succeed or fail independently, governed by criteria local to that stage. Importantly, relations are ordered such that theoretical content is transmitted or lost, and losses at earlier transitions are irrecoverable downstream. What a model's empirical success implicates about its theoretical commitments, therefore, depends on whether transitions are secured. Some success or failure profiles support explanatory claims; others only prediction; others establish theoretical coherence without empirical contact. Our account diagnoses what a given model shows, replacing the implicit assumption that empirical success transfers automatically to theoretical understanding with an explicit conditional rendition of what models can and cannot establish.

a figure that looks like a cloud that stays "cognitive capacity" with an arrow pointing to a lozenge with "theory" which points to a lozenge with "specification" which points to the same with "data" which is pointed to by a cloud that says "phenomenon"

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Nicolas Bierne @couplingdmi.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

A substantially revised V2 of our work on SNPs associated with rampant polymorphic duplications in the European flat oyster 🦪is out! ~15% of SNPs are associated with polymorphic duplications, with a striking concentration on 3 of the 10 chromosomes. #PopGen #MarEvol www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

Allelic coverage analyses reveal a high proportion and uneven chromosomal distribution of SNPs associated with polymorphic duplications in the oyster Ostrea edulis

Marine bivalves are known for their high genetic diversity and potentially high genetic load, as well as their structurally complex genomes. The European flat oyster, Ostrea edulis , is no exception. ...

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Jon Phillips @jowiph.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The other thing to remember amidst all the Steven Pinker discourse is that the book that made him an NPR-darling celebrity academic, The Blank Slate, was essentially an argument that non-evopsych social science is ideologically corrupt and possibly evil.

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Pieter T. L. Beck @ptrbck.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Next week, the academic year starts again. I've grown a bit tired of the polemics (& the vitriol on social media). During lunch with colleagues, we were talking about how it would be nice to communicate about the good things that happen at the department, research and teaching-wise.

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Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

And the basis for that argument was misunderstanding heritability and getting mad about Lewontin and Gould

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

If you read the replies you’ll see that Pinker was always a race science supporter, it’s just that nobody paid any attention. Maybe we should start noticing when celebrity scientists are fans of pseudoscientific ideas, and adjust our opinion of their competence accordingly

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 19/09/2026

"For a man whose academic field was built largely on faulty studies to ignore the intellectual fraud in his circle and lash out at people like Arday for bad scholarship – well, psychologists used to call that projection" @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social www.thenerve.news/p/steven-pin...

thenerve.news

From celebrity intellectual to anti-woke outlaw: how Steven Pinker lost his way

The pop psycholgist’s new book seems to betray a lurking fear of others’ criticism – about his Epstein links, his manosphere admirers and his discredited former field of study, writes Virginia Heffern...

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I am really not saying anything new. We KNOW all this from basic theoretical computer science -- but this knowledge, field, and expertise are being destroyed by LLMs and AI hype too (see also next post)

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Jeffrey M Kidd @jeffreymkidd.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

This is a very nice review article from @pontus-skoglund.bsky.social and @mathiesoniain.bsky.social . Figure 2 gives a very nice summary of the different ways selection tests are calibrated. They also offer 5 succinct summaries of the current state of the field for humans.

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Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Jesus, cuz ICE aren’t dystopian enough already?

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Gave my first public lecture on the return of eugenics and race science this week at the British Science Festival. Reassuring to see how much interest, and concern, there was in the room

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Dmitri Petrov @petrovadmitri.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

We are searching for an Assistant Professor in Evolutionary Biology! Looking for colleagues asking fundamental questions relating to evolutionary processes and drivers of evolutionary patterns. If you think it is you, please do apply! And please repost. facultypositions.stanford.edu/jobs/assista...

facultypositions.stanford.edu

Assistant Professor in Evolutionary Biology - Stanford University, California, United States

The Department of Biology at Stanford University seeks applicants for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Evolutionary Biology. A successful candidate will conduct research that asks fundamental que...

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Leonid Schneider @forbetterscience.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Those annoyed by my long introduction to the Cofnas case can use this link to go straight to the guest post by @ptrbck.bsky.social : forbetterscience.com/2026/09/15/n...

forbetterscience.com

Nathan Cofnas’s “race realism” is pseudoscience

“If there’s someone having a negative impact on science, it is Cofnas, not his critics. ” – Pieter Beck

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Joelle Lafond, PhD @joellelafond.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

🚨Our new preprint is out! 🤩 🌟 Mutation rates vary widely across taxa, and decades of research have sought to explain why. ♀️♂️ Reproductive modes, and evolutionary shifts between them, could help explain some of this variation. ❓ So what does the evidence tell us? 👀 Read our preprint to find out!

doi.org

Reproductive mode and the evolution of mutation rate

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

“Life history theory is often invoked to make universal predictions about phenotypic evolution. Eg it’s conventional wisdom that organisms should evolve later first reproduction if they have longer lifespans. We clarify that LHT does not provide such universal predictions about phenotypic diversity”

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Riccardo Fusaroli @fusaroli.eurosky.social · 10/09/2026

How does the architecture of a city shape the way we think, talk, and draw space? And how do spatial conventions travel across cultural generations? New paper in Open Mind, spearheaded by Z Alinam (w J Nölle, C Vesper, K Tylén & me): doi.org/10.1162/OPMI.a.380 🧵 1/

doi.org

When the City Speaks: How Urban Form Shapes the Cultural Transmission of Spatial Conceptualization

Abstract. How do urban environments shape the way people conceptualize and communicate space? Using a cultural transmission experiment in virtual reality, we asked participants to navigate one of two ...

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Period measures of fertility, like TFR, are less stable than cohort measures and are currently overstating fertility decline. New paper out on The Long-Term Trends in Cohort Fertility: Global, Regional and National Estimates and Projections for Cohorts Born in 1935–2055 doi.org/10.1111/padr...

Graph from paper comparing period and cohort measures of fertility since 1950 projected to 2100. Lines are similar until around 1990 when period drops below cohort measure and stays below cohort measure

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Mel Bartley @zetkin.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Polygenic scores as bio-social policy instruments: Educational genomics as a source of intervention and governance - Ben Williamson, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

journals.sagepub.com

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

“Saad’s trajectory should serve as a cautionary tale of what can happen to academics when they spent too much time on social media and writing popular books and place once respectable academic careers on the altar of the culture wars”

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