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John McBride

@john-mcbride.bsky.social
297 followers 378 following 286 posts

Scientist studying the evolution of proteins and music (so far, separately). scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&… github.com/jomimc

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Reposted by John McBride
George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 8h
For the sake of a slogan achieving nothing except great concern and distress to British Jews, Green members have probably destroyed any hope that a party - their party - which consistently and clearly opposes the #genocide will join the next government. Genius. 🤦‍♂️ www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
theguardian.com
Labour figures rule out working with Greens after ‘Zionism is racism’ vote
Minister says they could not see parties cooperating, while official says coalition should be formally ruled out
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Kevin Marks @kevinmarks.com · 13/02/2024
Also
Screenshot of 2 tweets by Chris Marks:
Steven Pinker's books are like "people say that life is unjust and intolerable under neoliberal capitalism. But in fact, mean global consumption of fruit-by-the-foot is up 300x when compared to our 19th century counterparts"

But fruit by the foot didn't exist in the 1800s?

Steven Pinker: Not as we currently think of it, no. But if you consider fruit that had dropped from trees and was literally by people's feet, the picture starts to become much clearer
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Then I'll be asking, in an ecosytem of tunes, what makes some of them more successful than others? Using 13 years of popularity data on 20,000 tunes, we measure selection directly. Some tunes are common but grow slowly, others are rare but fast-growing. How much of this can we explain? 3/3
arxiv.org
Population Ecology of Tunes
How cultural repertoires maintain diversity under selection is a fundamental question in cultural evolution. We address this using thirteen years of weekly popularity data for approximately 20,000 Iri...
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I'll be talking about applying bioinformatics analyses on a massive set of Irish folk tune variants (or "settings", as known within the community). How do tunes evolve over time? What makes some parts evolve faster or slower? With ~40,000 pairwise comparisons, the patterns become quite clear. 2/3
arxiv.org
Contrasting statistical patterns in melodic and molecular evolution reveal distinctive constraints in a culturally evolving system
Evolved sequences can be used to infer the rules of evolution. Orally transmitted folk melodies are evolved sequences whose similarity to protein sequences (one-dimensional, drawn from a limited alpha...
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Heading now to Würzburg on the train. Good time to write up my talk on "Evolution and Ecology of Irish folk tunes". #ICCCM26 #musicscience 1/3
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Nicolas Audebert @nshaud.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
I'm burnt out of discussing "AI". I don't care for the press releases from big companies. I hate having to comment immediately. I dislike "hot takes". I'm worried we, as scientists, are losing touch with scientific values. We've become customers, salivating at ads marketed to investors. 1/15
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Look, I'm telling you from experience, there are use cases. And they are 100% defensible. You seem to want to take what I say in the least charitable way. That's okay if you want to dogmatically stick to your point. If you're curious about what might be defensible, you can ask.
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
If you get told by a LLM, the number can be found on page 5 of paper 3, and here is the quote, that's a pretty good use case. Perhaps I'm defending something that is different from what you're critiquing
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
They solve the precision reading (i.e. search) problem. Often if you want to verify a simple statement, or find a number that you recall being in one of maybe 10 papers, it will be much more efficient to ask a LLM. To be clear, I'm not defending the Nature paper - that seems weird tbh...
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
One could respond by "if you don't read, you're not doing your job, or you don't like it". But anyone in academia knows that everyone, and I mean everyone, has a problem with the volume of literature. Maybe some people have seriously niche fields and don't read outside them, but they'd be exceptions
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Let's be honest with ourselves, though. How many papers do you know that you should have read but you didn't? How many colleagues are the same? Reading takes time. Sometimes you want to read a full paper. Sometimes you want precise details. There are different modes of reading.
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Looks interesting. Been waiting for more people to study metal as a counter example to traditional notions of consonance. For some reason people cite Lithuanian singers, instead of looking in their backyard. Looks like it might have already started... I found a link online for you
pure.hud.ac.uk
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Henkjan Honing @musiccognition.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
anthropology.net
Monkeys Have Rhythm, a Study Said. The Data Disagrees.
A 2025 study said two macaques could synchronize to a beat. A rebuttal, and what newborn brains already do, say otherwise.
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Terence Tao @teorth.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...
mathandai.org
Declaration — Math and AI
Read the declaration and add your name.
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Honestly, the list of tasks that I've found an LLM can do is astonishing. It's like how I learned that you can use python as a glue for FORTRAN or C++, and then code was just faster (okay, I mostly just use numpy...). And now I am the glue. Perhaps too close to Animal Farm... not sure how to feel
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Well, I've mostly moved from proteins to music... so there's a lot of low-hanging fruit I'd say that one can reach with a computer. The main thing is that searching for data online, and writing parsers, well that's now something I ask for and then go make a cup of tea.
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
No, but I've pointed it at a few of the simple low-priority problems on my ideas shelf, and it has managed to do exploratory work that would have taken me maybe days or a week, and turned it into a few-hour job involving maybe 30 minutes of my actual attention.
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Seth Abramson @sethabramson.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
(🧵|🚨) BREAKING: *Three years* ago PROOF ran a long, well-sourced report confirming that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu *knew* from Middle Eastern “grand bargain” co-conspirators that the October 7 attack was coming before it came—and let Israelis die for political gain. Now Haaretz has confirmed it.
sethabramson.substack.com
As Israel Reels From Mass Deaths and a Seeming Intel Failure, Evidence Mounts of Negligence By Netanyahu—Or Maybe Something More Sinister
Israel has the world’s very best intel services, yet allegedly failed to foresee a massive invasion months in the making. Now media outlets are beginning to point a finger at Netanyahu—as is the IDF.
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I wish that was the case... more likely they defeat the bad guys on the right and then go back to arguing amongst themselves about how to solve the worlds problems in the most idealistic but impossible ways... oh were there a world with a credible pragmatic left...
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Careful now, if it weren't for my stash of whiskey I'd be in bed with a serious case of homesickness!
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Alexey Koshevoy @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Are you interested in lexical competition, agent-based modelling, strong inference and Ukrainian? Then this paper, just published in @pnasnexus.org, is for you. With @oliviermorin.bsky.social and @sobchuk.bsky.social, we asked a simple question: why do some words become more common than others?
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Yes, it definitely fits. As someone who moved from physics to culture I find myself wondering how much of the language/analogies to use. I wrote about this in a commentary work by a physicist using such models on musical scales. I'm still wondering how best to communicate interdisciplinary science
emusicology.org
Making sure you're not a bot!
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Cool work. I'm doing something similar with folk tunes at the moment. Must cite this. Was wondering how you now feel about using the word "ecophysics"? Personally I'm hesitant to reuse physics words in cultural evolution domains, even when the mathematics maps exactly.
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
This guy was sunday TV for me growing up. Bad ass mofo. Don't know what to believe reading the article, but I know what I want to believe
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
To be honest, this code is still probably a nightmare for people to extend. It's just more complex than the average project in this field. But I verified that the replications work on jupyter notebooks.
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Nice. I realised that this is the way forward with our work on the evolution of scales... "The code is released for replication and extension: the pipeline is modular, so you can substitute your own set of scales, or your own theory of what makes a scale favourable, without rewriting the rest."
github.com
GitHub - jomimc/ModellingScaleEvolution: Main code used to study scale evolution in, "Melody predominates over harmony in the evolution of musical scales across 96 countries"
Main code used to study scale evolution in, "Melody predominates over harmony in the evolution of musical scales across 96 countries" - jomimc/ModellingScaleEvolution
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Graeme Gooday @graemegooday.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Great to see a Leeds colleague receiving this prestigious Royal Society Award.
Royal Society announcement of  2026 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar medal for HPSAwarded of the W-B-M prize: Greg Radick
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Charles C Roseman @evoroseman.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
RE: freedom of speech, academic freedom, and race science. In this (long) thread, I’m going to 1) establish my bona fides on academic freedom and race science, 2) show why academic freedom and freedom of speech are different and… 1/34
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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
New >100-author preprint led by @zixuanjia.bsky.social @yutoozaki.bsky.social and @danya-pav.bsky.social is IMO our most important yet. TLDR: music is not "useless" "auditory cheesecake" - across 901 participants speaking 30 languages, singing bonds us together >1.5x more than speaking. osf.io/pv3m9
Drake meme:
Wrong: "Music is "auditory cheesecake...useless...compared with language" -S. Pinker
Right: "Music is "more effective for collective bonding than language" - P. Savage, P. Loui, B. Tarr, A. Schachner, L. Glowacki, S. Mithen, W. T. FitchSynchronised group singing enhances social bonding more than group conversation or recitation does: A Registered Report across 30 languages

Authors 
Zixuan Jia* , Yuto Ozaki* , Danya Pavlovich* , Jiawen Huang , Emmanouil Benetos , Uswatun Khasanah , Sasha Calhoun , Gakuto Chiba , Yoichi Kitayama , Shinya Fujii , Dhwani P. Sadaphal , W. Tecumseh Fitch , , Sebastian Vaida , Simion Echim , Tudor Popescu , Zhuozhuang (Nelson) Shi ,  Massimo Grassi , Lucrezia Guiotto Nai Fovino , Jan Hajič jr. , Petr Nuska , Barbora Štěpánková , Prapatsorn Tiratanti , , Joseph A. Bulbulia , Ye He , Yukun Li , Fang Liu , Giacomo Novembre , Chloé Coissac , , Flavia Arnese , Yannick Jadoul , , Andrea Ravignani , , , , Florence Ewomazino Nweke , Oladimeji Adedayo Olajide , Oluwatoyin Olokodana-James , Neda Mousavi , Pauline Larrouy-Maestri , Ulvhild Færøvik , , Astrid Lenvik , Marianna Ruiz Loria , Jeronimo Quintero-Martínez , Juan F. Ariza , , Juan David Leongómez , Anne Cabildo , , Christina Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden , , Polina Proutskova , Daniel Macholl , Jia Hoong Ong , Chloe Wider , Bahar Tunçgenç , Francesca Talamini , Lilly Leuschner , William Forde Thompson , Gemma Perry , Lee Wolff , Robert M. Ross , Adwoa Ampiah-Bonney , Shira Gabriel , Peter Q. Pfordresher , Hineatua Parkinson , Ferenc Honbolygó , Csaba Kertész , Yuri G. Pavlov , Alexandra Kosachenko , Dmitrii Tarasov , Wojtek Krzyżanowski , Piotr Podlipniak , Shahaboddin Dabaghi Varnosfaderani , Ann-Kathrin Beck , Inkuk Kim , Taeyun Jung , John M. McBride , , Teona Lomsadze , , Sara Ripley , Katerine Bilous , Laurel J. Trainor , Joshua S. Bamford , , Marc Thompson , Martin Hartmann , Bronwyn Tarr , Kai Yi (Kaye) Han , Aston K. McCullough , Psyche Loui , Ruwin Dias , Aitana Garcia-Arasco , Anouk Bellot , Katarzyna Pisanski , , Limor Raviv , , Remi van Casteren ,, Kristoffer Bæk Kortegaard , , Niels Chr. Hansen , , Dilyana Kurdova , , Zoya Mikova , Adwoa Arhine , Michael Ohene Okantah Jr. , Kofi Kudonu Labayili , Yiqing Ma , D…Figure 5. Pre- vs. post-experiment mean bonding scores from n=901 participants across 43 sites singing/conversing/reciting in groups of 5-10 individuals at a time (1,017 participants before planned exclusions; see Table S1). Social bonding score (y-axis) represents the mean of six self-report variables (scaled from 0-100): 1) “I feel I am on the same team with the other participants”; 2) “I am similar to the other participants’’; 3) ‘‘I trust the other participants”; 4) Inclusion of other in the self (IOS): ‘‘How close do you currently feel to all the other participants?”; 5) “I feel strong ties to the other participants”; 6) “I have a lot in common with the other participants”.Figure 10. Site-level mean bonding score differences across three conditions. Each row represents one experimental site, ordered by the magnitude of the bonding score change in the Singing condition, with the smallest change at the bottom and the largest at the top. Points represent site-level mean bonding score differences (Post- minus Pre-intervention) for each condition. The dashed vertical line indicates zero change. Site labels in green indicate Indo-European languages; labels in black indicate non-Indo-European languages. Sites with multiple locations within the same language are labeled with the location in brackets (e.g., “English [Auckland]”). See Figures S7-8 for alternative visualisations using raw differences in social bonding scores or effect sizes.
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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Call for papers for the next ICMPC (Int. Conference on Music Perception & Cognition) is now up (due end Oct): www.jyu.fi/en/events/ic... I'm honoured to join the other fabulous keynote speakers (@tuomaseerola.bsky.social, Bahar Tunçgenç, and Robert Zatorre). Can't wait to see everyone in Finland!
ICMPC - ESCOM 2027 Conference
The joint 19th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC) and 13th triennial European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM) Conference in Helsinki, Finland and Online

Keynote Speakers
Prof. Tuomas Eerola
Dr Patrick Savage
Dr. Bahar Tunçgenç
Prof. Robert Zatorre
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 23/08/2026
As Maya Angelou said, when people show you who they are, believe them. I'd rather have a klan member clearly articulating his views of how I should be eliminated than these garbage people dressing up their racism in intellectualism. You can fuck all the way off.
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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Lots of names on this list I don't recognize, but all the ones I do are like "Ah, OK". As I understand it, there are clear violations of contract in Cofnas's actions. The question is more: why didn't the univ notice this sooner?
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Been thinking about this... Being charitable, I think there's a group who see "academic freedom" as a holy crusade, and have simply joined the charge. Why this one? Very high profile 🤷 Is there such a good counter-example? That said, it is tempting to read the signatures as tribal marks of racists
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 23/08/2026
here is the thing. if you tell me that you believe that race is a biological category and that it is a guide to the objective superiority and inferiority of groups of people, i am not calling you a racist to *insult* you, i am calling you a racist because it best describes your beliefs.
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
I suppose the answer is to keep shouting then...
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
bless
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Like I said, that's a philosophical argument. If the words used are not exactly the same as the words from some other source, what do you then? That's a case with no direct proof of plagiarism. Sure, you can say all LLM output is plagiarism. But it's shouting in to the void. Or echo chamber perhaps
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Are you asserting a direct equivalence between "people who use AI" and "lazy people with no talent"?
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Philosophical, but I don't disagree. What about when there's no direct proof of plagiarism?
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Potentially, yes. But what about the (many) cases where LLM use doesn't result in plagiarism?
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Chris Person @papapishu.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Sorry chatbot lovers but the waning of Boolean operators in most search functions on websites has made my life actively worse. You can't find anything, you can only have things suggested to you.
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Yeah, totally agree that Google LLM is awful for searching. I use Claude to do its own web searches, and it is much faster because it can run a bunch of searches in parallel and get the information you are actually seeking while bypassing ads. That way it doesn't hallucinate the search results
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
My point was that the insights you get through writing a multiple drafts of a piece, can still come through working with an LLM. Similar to chatting to a colleague. The rubber ducky. Read up - you'll see plenty of people saying the same.
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
A lot of assumptions in there fella. But fair enough. You can make the logical leaps if you want. I understand you probably work in a field where the writing counts for more. But when I do computational analyses, the data is the product.
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
I acknowledge any use of AI in my papers. Nothing new about this admission. And I'm happy to say this in public because I can see already that there's no going back. AI is here to stay. AI will become acceptable in some ways, and not in others. And it will be difficult to police. It's a tool I use.
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Yup. It's turned into a new form of tribal politics unfortunately. And its all just people turning off their brains and dialing up the confirmation bias.
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
You would consider me a public intellectual? In that case I can tell you first hand. Writing is not my main output. It is a vehicle to deliver the ideas and empirical results that I have produced through reading, thinking, simulation, and experimentation. I'd just call myself a scientist though
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John McBride @john-mcbride.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Do you think being a scientist or a thinker is about the writing? It's just not. That's poetry. Even fiction is about the ideas. Ghost writers are used all the time to polish the delivery of a story. also... I don't know what "public intellectual" means...
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