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Gregory Kohn

@kohngregory.bsky.social
3.2K followers 999 following 728 posts

Professor specializing in bird social behavior. Interested in developmental systems thought, ontogenetic niches, organismal agency, and ייִדיש. PI: Avian Social Ethology Lab

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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Starting a new project with these guys (bengalese finches) on the development of, and thermal consequences of, “cooperative”breeding and communal roosting. They basically form an avian version of a “beit yeladim” that we know very little about.
Group of bengalese finch faces in the middle of a nestbox, in the bottom middle is the face of a young nestling.
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I rescued a few Yiddish books from heading to the dumpster this summer. I've started to go through them and was excited to find this pristine copy of "World of Science / די װעלט פֿון װיסנשאַפֿט" by Sol Podolefsky that contains, I believe, one of the few discussions of bird song science in Yiddish.
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Ammon Perkes @alltheperkes.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Cool paper alert! Lots of other cool stuff here, and you won't believe how many hours of fish video were involved.
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
אַ גוט געזונט יאָר
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I really enjoyed reading this review paper on the function and influence of song outside the breeding season. It moved from individual-level processes to group level consequences, and reiterates that we still have much to learn about why birds sing. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Eastern kingbird (Tyrannus tyrannus) in Keene Valley NY.
Eastern kingbird out on a branch.
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Erin Siracusa @erinsiracusa.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Animals are known to prefer kin as social partners. But non-kin bonds are surprisingly common too. So, who forms them, how stable are they & what drives them? In our new @animbehsociety.bsky.social paper we tackle these overlooked questions in free-living rhesus macaques: tinyurl.com/mwsbkjve (1/5)
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...
journals.uchicago.edu
The English Working Cat: J. B. S. Haldane and a Noncapitalist Experimental Organism | Isis: Vol 117, No 3
AbstractDuring the 1940s and 1950s, the celebrated and controversial British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane decided to investigate heredity in house cats (Felis catus) by initiating a breeding program at...
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
On this day in 1749 Goethe was born in Frankfurt. I’ve been revisiting Goethe more these days, and his writings on observation and its role in science impacted me deeply. Just recently I found this book of his holiday sketches titled “Reise, Zerstreuungs, und Trostbüchlein”.
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RUB History & Philosophy of Science @roto-rub.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Great new open access book by Pim Edelaar: "The Selective Organism: An Expanded Theory of Adaptive Evolution" Check it out here: academic.oup.com/book/63165?l... #HPBio #PhilSci
Front cover of the book "The selective organism: An expanded theory of adaptive evolution" by Pim Edelaar.
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Wood storks (Mycteria americana) and Great Egrets (Ardea alba) highlighting their different foraging strategies.
Angled view of a pond with Wood storks (Mycteria americana) with bills in water and Great Egrets (Ardea alba) standing straight up.
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Also, for all of Cofnas's posturing about his expertise in genetics and biology of behavior (he has none, his arguments would have been stale in the 1980s) there is only one biologist and not a single molecular geneticist as a signatory. The rest are the standard "heterodox" clique.
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Yellow-crowned night heron (Nyctanassa violacea)
Yellow-crowned night heron on mud flatYellow-crowned night heron with crab in his mouth
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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
The reductionism and the simple enumerative differencing is dead in evolutionary biology? Species differentiation by thresholding genetic distance (e.g. 2 %) is just a scientized bullshit? Reminds me the custom of programmers to count lines of code. www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1... 🧪 #EvoBio #PaleoBio
Average measured mean-scaled additive genetic variance
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Charles C Roseman @evoroseman.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Here's a better version of my talk on race science. Many thanks to Dwane Monroe (@cloudquistador.eurosky.social) for fixing the audio. Thanks again to Pieter Beck (@ptrbck.bsky.social) for the invitation. youtu.be/NsTg6JlC39w?...
youtu.be
Race science, genetics, & evolution: A scientific evaluation [BETTER AUDIO]
YouTube video by Charles Roseman
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The Institute for Bird Populations @instbirdpop.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
🪶Cool new research on female Passerines by @joannaxwu.bsky.social and colleagues at IBP and UCLA. Read more about it here-> bit.ly/4zfjbdY
Photo of a female Black-headed Grosbeak by Richard Griffin. Text on the graphic says: "Female birds are less likely to survive than males, but why?
New study uses MAPS data to explore sex-biased survival in North American Passerines..... Read more on our blog!"
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...
academic.oup.com
Evolution of sexually dimorphic plumage patterns in estrildid finches
Abstract. Pigmentation patterns aid in camouflage and may also serve for communication. To understand the evolution of different types of within-feather pi
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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
What does a single-celled organism tell us about the origins of complex behaviour? Delighted to see the final version of our paper: Embodied behavioural complexity in a ciliated microorganism out in@natcomms.nature.com (Funded by @erc.europa.eu ERC) doi.org/10.1038/s414... #cilia #protistsonsky
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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
The Long-wattled Umbrellabird (Cephalopterus penduliger) are the weirdest birds, from pompadour/mohawk to long fleshy neck-tie shaped wattle that converts to a feather duster on command. Native to the Pacific coasts of Ecuador & Colombia, these extraordinary accessories are mostly found in males.
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Moving some planters in the garden and suddenly felt something moving against my hand. This could have gone a lot worse. Florida cottonmouth (Agkistrodon conanti).
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
In the wake of Arday's death, Nathan Cofnas (who led the X mob against him) states his motivation. Beyond whistleblowing, he states that after a 'revolution' removes professors like Arday, it will open opportunities for him to become 'head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard'.
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Joanna Bagniewska @joannabagniewska.com · 14/08/2026
Monkeys make friends with other species, and that can tell us a lot about how keeping pets came about. Great article by @cyrilgrueter.bsky.social et al., reporting friendly primate interactions with a whopping 55 non-primate species! 🧪🐒🐕 link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Examples of affiliative interspecific interactions involving non-human primates. a Adult female white-faced capuchin (Cebus imitator) monkey grooming an adult female black-handed spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi) in Santa Rosa, Costa Rica; photo by Nicholas Chapoy. b Capped langur (Trachypithecus pileatus) grooming a Phayre's leaf monkey (Trachypithecus phayrei) in Satchari National Park Bangladesh; photo by Sabit Hasan. c A tufted gray langur (Semnopithecus priam) stroking a grizzled giant squirrel (Ratufa macroura) in Yala National Park, Sri Lanka; photo by Senthi Aathavan Senthilverl, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. d Stump-tailed macaques (Macaca arctoides) grooming a domestic dog at Khao Tao Mo temple, Thailand; photo by Neil Challis. e Female northern white-cheeked gibbon (Nomascus leucogenys) holding a mouse at the Shanghai Zoo, China; photo by Cyril Grueter. f Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata) mounting and riding on the back of a sika deer (Cervus nippon) at Yakushima, Japan; photo by Alexandre Bonnefoy and Cédric Sueur. g Young juvenile black-and-white snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus bieti) playing on a domestic pig at Xiangguqing, Yunnan Golden Monkey National Park, China; photo by Yanpeng Li. h) Ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta) grooming a southern bamboo lemur (Hapalemur meridionalis) in Mandena, Madagascar; photo by Timothy Eppley A tufted gray langur (Semnopithecus priam) stroking a grizzled giant squirrel.
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Complexity Cat 🐱 @amahury.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Machine metaphors built modern biology, but what happens when a useful analogy becomes a rigid ontology? In Part II of our trilogy, we explore these limits by contrasting organicist paradigms and arguments against computationalism./1 🚧 #complexitycat 🐈‍⬛ www.complexitycat.org/posts/machin...
complexitycat.org
Machine Metaphors in Biology II: Limits and Challenges
“By axiomatizing automata in this manner, one has thrown half of the problem out the window, and it may be the more important half. One has resigned oneself not to explain how these parts are made up ...
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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Donald Griffin, discoverer of bat echolocation, was born OTD 1915. I imagine “small mammals enough like ourselves to feel that I could understand what their lives would be like, and yet different enough to make it a sort of adventure and exploration to see what they were doing.” 🐋🌱🧪 #HistSTM
Fig. 11 from Griffin, Echoes of Bats and Men (1959). “The frequency and wave length of a bat's sound vary during each chirp. This diagram, which is approximately to scale, illustrates the small amount of sound reflected by one insect.”I
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Somebody needs to tell the new parking lot attendants that attempting to get into a vehicle is unlawful (they literally tried to jump right in my car right after this video).
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Drug Monkey @drugmonkey.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
I really hope someone checks my math and memory of public university starting salaries. The idea that inflation adjusted numbers reflect starting assistant professors making 20% less now than they did 25 years ago is….. whew.
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Singing softly at the edge: vocal amplitude and performance limits in star finch courtship
Studies of birdsong have long focused on long-range signals used for attracting mates and defending territory, but recent research has highlighted the…
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Forest gate in Adirondacks near Lake Placid, June 2026.
Looking at a forest on a lake with a door like opening that is framed by boughs of cedar and hemlock.
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Lichens and moss in boreal bog near Keene Valley NY
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Cristian Gutierrez-Ibañez @gallinaciega.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Neural correlates of seed-eating in songbirds royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... Our new paper showing that songbirds that dehusk seeds with the beak and tongue have an enlarged trigeminal nucleus in the brainstem, particularly the part where the tongue is represented.
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Joshua Raclaw @joshuaraclaw.com · 21/07/2026
bonding with my yiddish-speaking ancestors over our shared love of vegetarian baked beans
Add in the 1932 edition of the forward for Heinz oven baked (oyvn-gebakte) beans, “vegetarian”
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Jake Berv @jakeberv.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Happy to share this 'capstone' project from my time as a postdoc @umich.edu, where we show that hierarchically nested bursts of body-shape evolution may underlie much of perching-bird diversification over ~50 million years. Free access link here: rdcu.be/fuxB1
rdcu.be
Rates of passerine body plan evolution in time and space
Nature Ecology & Evolution - A reconstruction of the evolutionary history of passerine body plans over the past ~50 Myr shows rare bursts of phenotypic innovation near the origin of major...
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Thomas MacGillavry @thomasmacgillavry.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Ever wondered what the bizarre dances of male birds of paradise look like to females? Check out our new preprint! @izziehb.bsky.social @fusanilab.bsky.social “The geometry of visual signaling in a bird-of-paradise” ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
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Joe Morford @morfjoe.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
The WISDOM OF CROWDS emerges in flocks of thousands of migrating songbirds! Excited to share our work published by @aaas.org in Science Advances! doi.org/10.1126/scia...
doi.org
The wisdom of crowds emerges in flocks of thousands of migrating songbirds
Larger flocks of migrating songbirds orient more accurately toward their population’s migratory direction than smaller flocks.
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Anthony (Tony) J. Martin @ichnologist.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
For #FossilFriday, abundant Eocene (~50 mya) shorebird tracks from the Green River Formation, WY; seen last week in the Tellus Museum of Science, Cartersville GA. 🧪🪨⚒️🐾🐦
Beige to gray slab of fine-grained limestone mounted vertically on a wall as a display, with many thin-toed bird tracks (3 toes per track) on its surface.
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Ricard Solé @ricardsole.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
I just learned Peter Schuster passed away. A great colleague from @sfiscience.bsky.social , one of the smartest people I ever met. He made fundamental contributions to the maths of evolution and origins of life. A great inspiration for all. @josepsardanyes.bsky.social www.santafe.edu/people/profi...
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Drew Schreiner @schreinerdrew.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
very nice read! I've been thinking about innovation vs. copying a lot lately - motivated by my finding that increasing learning rates in zebra finches led to learning novel syllable variants. And listening to the catbirds in my yard makes me wish I could get them into the lab eh:
sciencedirect.com
Song development by grey catbirds
What are the relative roles of imitation, improvisation and invention in the development of large song repertoires in species of the songbird family M…
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Bird song has been central to the nature-versus-nurture debate. In my latest piece, I argue that new ideas from developmental science, combined with classic studies on the social shaping of song, point toward a way beyond the innate-versus-learned dichotomy. gregorykohn.substack.com/p/templates-...
gregorykohn.substack.com
Templates in Tension: the dialectic of flexibility and structure in birdsong
Flexibility
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
My favorite photo this summer. Chestnut-sided Warbler (Setophaga pensylvanica) at Norton Book in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.
A chestnut-sided warbler is singing. A small bird with a burgundy stripe on the side, a yellow cap, and a black streak under it. otherwise white except yellow and black on the wings.
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Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
A thorough documenting of the statistical shenanigans in the embryo selection company Herasight’s claims about genetic IQ prediction. The paper was published in a new Intelligence journal against the reviewers’ protest that the proprietary prediction model was not disclosed and so was unverifiable
open.substack.com
Herasight: Latent Promises, Observed Failures
Many make the mistake of rejecting Herasight on ethical grounds, but doing so gives them too much credit.
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Mathilde Tahar @drmathildetahar.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
We are delighted to invite you to the interdisciplinary workshop of @animalinvention.bsky.social on Agency between Biology and Philosophy. It will take place at UCL and online on 22-23 September. All info and registration details can be found here: www.animalinventiveness.com/post/interna...
Agency between
Biology and Philosophy
22-23 September 2026
University College London, London, UK + online
Organisers: Mathilde Tahar & Alecia Carter
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
If we lose the capacity to know anything then they can sell us anything.
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Common Loon (Gavia immer) at Chapel Pond NY
Common Loon (Gavia immer) a black and white diving bird on a glimmering lake reflecting the green of the spruce trees above them.
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Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Clearly the best way to understand Mayr... #histbio
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Mateusz Kostecki @mtkostecki.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
Am I right that this paper just shows that 1) chicks have a basic preference for round shapes, 2) this preference disappears when a stress-evoking sound is being played in the background? 1/4
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
Really interesting article (in Polish) on the science of birdsong! www.tygodnikpowszechny.pl/o-czym-spiew...
tygodnikpowszechny.pl
O czym śpiewają ptaki? Mówią więcej, niż sądziliśmy
Sztuczna inteligencja na dobre zadomowiła się już w wielu dziedzinach nauki. Dzięki jej zastosowaniu mamy szansę poznać reguły rządzące ptasimi pieśniami – a nawet ich znaczenia.
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Chestnut-sided warbler (Setophaga pensylvanica) at Norton Brook NY. This individual was exceptionally confiding and he followed me around the site.
Chestnut-sided warbler on branch. The individual is a small bird with a black mask and a yellow cap. On its flanks are two ribbons of chestnut brown. Its wings are held low and are largely black with a yellow streak in the middle. It head is cocked to the right and directly stares at the camera.
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Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
Twitter is going kind of crazy about crime and genetics right now (What's new?). My next post is a deep dive into a paper behind a widespread claim that brutal execution in Medieval Europe selected for reduced aggression, allowing civilization to develop. The title says it all, really.
sequencesandconsequences.substack.com
Capital punishment is not a breeding program
No, medieval execution didn't "genetically pacify" Europe
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Gregory Kohn @kohngregory.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
I’m pretty sure this is the first time bird conservation sparks a national revolution, and I’m looking forward to the ruling Lëvizja Bashkë-Birdlife Albania coalition. I birdied in Vjosë–Nartë around 08ish, and you’d have to be crazy to build a trashy resort there.
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Ricard Solé @ricardsole.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
What makes a new kind of mind possible? In this @royalsocietypublishing.org paper, the authors explain why cognitive transitions are not just moments when animals became smarter, but evolutionary shifts that opened new spaces of cognition. @eplantec.bsky.social pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
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