iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Another enraging thing about this "report" is it claims to represent all of music studies (including ethnomusicology/comparative musicology, which has been devoted to the study of non-Western music for over 140 years), but it's data exclude ethno and focus almost exclusively on music theory

Report on Music Studies Kit Fine in collaboration with Simon Morrison Music Studies is a broad field, encompassing musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology, performance and composition. There is also a growing empirical division: cognition, which brings Music Studies into contact with psychology and neuroscience. For the purposes of the present report, we have largely focused on the first three areas; although there are significant differences between them, we have concluded that there are enough similarities in the issues to which they give rise to justify a common treatment. It should be emphasized, however, that we have not been as thorough or systematic in our review as in the case of other disciplines.

Figure 1.3 Simplified adaptation of Adlerʼs (1885/1981) classification of the field of musicology, including sub-fields such as historical musicology and comparative musicology.

Source: “Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals and the science of the world’s music” (Savage, 2026, Oxford University Press)

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Correct. Increase in the study of any music that is not "Baroque, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century common-practice period, and modernist European (Western) canon" represents, by their methods, a decrease in scholarly standards. It's so bad, it's beyond parody.

The main trend we detected is the shift from what one might call the central areas of music scholarship to the more peripheral areas. Of course, “center” and “periphery” are not well-defined terms, though convention since the nineteenth century has tended to push vernacular and liturgical genres of music to the outside of the high art secular traditions. Jazz only began to be incorporated into studies of musical modernism in the second half of the twentieth century, even though jazz was perceived outside of the Americas as modernist music. But, in general, “center” focuses on the repertoire within the Baroque, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century common-practice period, and modernist European (Western) canon and uses the time-tested tools of music theory (formalfunctional analysis involving Riemannian harmonic labels; Schenkerian voice-leading graphs, theories of mode, rules of counterpoint, schema theory, and neo-Riemannian modeling methods) to understand the harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic syntax of the works within that tradition.

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Good question! Here's the summary:

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Vanderbilt sub-report on Music Studies is out. TLDR: it is utter garbage. The long-awaited evidence of our “deterioration in scholarly standards” is...: "the shift from...central areas of music scholarship [Western art music] to the more peripheral areas". www.vanderbilt.edu/principles/s...

Counted as canonical only if the list is exactly: western_art_music none Counted as non-canonical if the list contains any of these: popular_music jazz_and_blues traditional_and_non_western screen_media

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Glad I get to include Kokuho in my "Musics of Japan" course this year

Title slide for 1st class of my "Musics of Japan" course featuring photos of BABYMETAL, Awich, Oki, Kokuho, and myself

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

We have put in a bid to hold the next @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social conference in Auckland 🇳🇿 from Feb 17-19 2028! We could really use your input in this survey to help us plan for if/how this conference is held (particularly re: in-person vs online participation): us.list-manage.com/xEOnWEahXJf?...

CES 2026 Post-Conference Survey

Next 2028 CES Conference

Would you attend CES if we hold it in Auckland Feb 17-19 2028?

Yes (in person)

Yes (online)

No (In this case, please proceed to Question 41)

Maybe: dependent on my availabilities and funding.

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

One reason I'm so upset about Henrich's report is that anthropology is THE main example used to justify the Vanderbilt report's wild claims of "deterioration in scholarly standards" throughout the humanities (see osf.io/ta6kg). And it turns out to be almost completely unfounded. What a travesty.

The report’s conclusions are somewhat unclear, since the title is vague and it contains no abstract or executive summary of conclusions. However, the following paragraph mostly summarizes the main conclusions:
“…there is serious scholarship in every field we have studied, and at their best, the humanities and the social sciences are as rigorous and as fruitful as they have ever been. Taken as a whole, however, our review of the disciplines paints a mixed picture. Every field we have studied shows some signs of the pathologies sketched above: a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity. In some fields (e.g., philosophy) the problems are largely confined to a single subfield focused on a charged topic. In others (e.g., history), while there are streams of scholarship in which standards have been politicized in problematic ways, they run alongside more dominant streams in which a wide range of views is tolerated, and appropriately scholarly standards are brought to bear. In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.”

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

This is a good analysis of Henrich's sub-report on anthropology for the Vanderbilt report on the humanities. I particularly appreciated the point that "For all his complaining about autoethnography, his report is utterly dependent on it."

For all his complaining about autoethnography, his report is utterly dependent on it. He begins the report with a story about his arrival at UCLA in 1993, along with an autoethnographic accounting of his intellectual journey from cultural to biological anthropology. His analysis is, to quote a critic of autoethnography, one in which he “take[s] a central role…in a narrative of struggle and suffering as [he] confronts the challenges of life” (Henrich pg. 37-38). It’s just that rather than emphasizing “the experience of racism, sexism, capitalist exploitation and othering” (pg. 37-38), he instead emphasizes the experiences of ideological pressure, professional intimidation, and the marginalization of dissenters in the discipline (of which he is apparently one). He bases his understanding of the biological/cultural split in some departments almost entirely on his own experiences in two different departments at elite private schools. There really is no attempt to be systematic and rigorous in his analysis of those events in a broader, more general way than what he and his friends experienced.

Throughout the report, he explicitly states his own positionality as exactly the kind of credence-lending thing he rebukes when others do it. “My immersion in these other disciplines, which includes earning tenure and promotion to full professor, gives me a unique perspective on Anthropology” (pg. 3) may as well have been phrased, “as an anthropologist myself…” This is precisely the kind of work autoethnography and reflexive positioning does, but I guess it’s only verboten when it is Others positioning themselves in relation to structures of oppression. In his case, it’s just adding context and is totally apolitical!

At the top of pg. 39, Henrich quotes Susan Pickard’s critique of autoethnography:

What distinguishes self-expression from scholarship? What are the limits of subjectivity as data? What about distortion, selective seeing, the dangers of solipsism? The speakers were a…

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

@stephaniemlee.bsky.social is becoming the Isaac Chotiner of academic interviewers (complimentary). She managed to get two prominent anthropologists with opposite views (Joe Henrich & Carolyn Rouse) to give interviews that make them both look bad.

Lee: For example, did you consider reaching out to the AAA? I ask because, as you know, that is a criticism that the AAA's president brought up when we chatted - that no one from the Vanderbilt group consulted with the AAA.

Henrich: Well, I mean, I feel like I did consult with them in the sense that I read the presidential peeches since 2013, and I made an in-depth study of American Anthropologist, which is the flagship journal of the AAA...

Lee: OK. So on the question of this particular idea being “settled science,” as the AAA said at the time, there was a survey in 2022, published in the journal Forensic Anthropology, that asked forensic anthropologists about this question, and 42 percent of them said they agree that sex is binary, and 56 percent disagreed that it’s binary. So that ratio would seem to indicate that, in the field, the question hadn’t actually been settled, and I was wondering how you explain that.

Rouse: I don’t believe in opinion research. Not to disparage them, but a lot of forensic people, they’re coroners, they’re doing it in a practicing level, where they’re actually asked on forms to determine whether this body is male or female, oftentimes they haven’t had advanced schooling. Things are in the air. I just don’t trust opinion polling. That’s from just being an anthropologist and spending a lot of time with people in the field. People don’t know a lot.

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

It does provide interesting evidence from the "science wars" within anthropology, particularly a relative decrease of scientific methodologies within elite US anthropology departments and journals. I.e., elite US anthropology has become more humanistic and less scientific over time.

Figure 2. The figure plots the percentage of six content codes found in abstracts from 1980 to 2025. LLMs coded 212 abstracts for the use of quantitative evidence, one or more named methods, and inferential statistics, as well as for an advocacy stance and framing involving binary power oppositions and critical theory.

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Some personal news: My local social basketball team made a huge comeback last night after being down ~20 points at half time to win the finals in overtime! Pretty sure this was the first time in my 41 years I made the game-winning shot in a final. 👴🏀

Nspire Blazzin posing with our Wellington Basketball Association Social Division 1 Men's Championship T-shirts

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

So if academics lose their jobs for plagiarism, what happens to political leaders? Identical typo is a “coincidence”?! How dumb do they think people are?!?!

“Asked about the typo that appears in both Make New Zealand Healthy (the NZ First policy) and on Make New Zealand Healthy (the organisation)’s website, Jones said “these are matters of detail”.
“It's a coincidence of priority….”

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The incredibly large "d=3.98" reported in the abstract seems a bit of an exaggeration/cherry picking, but still looks really cool! (Though still need to give it a proper read)

Abstract including "Results showed large cultural differences (d = 3.98 [2.50, 5.43]) that were previously obscured by flawed measurement."

Paper text includes more nuance "For example, the responsibilism scale found large differences between East Asian and Western cultures, t(22) = 8.87, P < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 3.98, 95% CI [2.50, 5.43] (Fig. 3)."

To test this possibility, we gave the English scale to participants in Hong Kong, where English is a common language of education. Differences between the USA and Hong Kong were significant, t(814) = 19.11, P < 0.001, d = 1.38...

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

At the risk of exposing myself to ridicule, I have done cluster analysis to group songs into groups sharing musical similarities and found it at least moderately useful. (Our application was inspired by population genetics clustering mentioned elsewhere in these replies). doi.org/10.1080/1741...

Figure 2. Multidimensional-scaling visualisation of the cluster analysis of 680 traditional folk songs from 35 populations in and around Japan. Each point represents a single song, with different shapes representing different source regions (see legend to left). Songs that are closer together in the plot have greater average musical similarity—as based on their CantoCore/Cantometric codings —than songs that are further apart. Songs are colour-coded in greyscale according to their membership in one of five cantogroups (stylistic song-types), as identified through cluster analysis and shown in the legend. Two or three example songs from each cantogroup are highlighted with arrows. These songs are described in detail in Table 4, along with notable musical features of each cantogroup.

Figure 3. A musical map of the 35 populations based on cantogroup frequencies. Relative frequencies of all five cantogroups (colour-coded in greyscale as in Figure 2) are shown separately for each of the 35 populations using pie charts. See Figure 2 for cantogroup identification. Population locations are based on approximate recording locations.

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

If I had a nickel for every retracted snake study I’ve recently shared, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t much, but still a weirdly large number

This isn’t the first snake study with unorthodox methodology to be retracted over ethical concerns. In 2025, Scientific Reports retracted a study that involved softly stepping on venomous snakes to see when they would bite. Last week the work won an Ig Nobel Prize.

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Big congratulations to my PhD student @zixuanjia.bsky.social who won the Australian Music & Psychology Society / Asia-Pacific Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music Student Keynote Award! amps.org.au/2026-student-and-ecr-keynote-awardees

The recipient of the 2026 Student Keynote Award is Zixuan Jia, a PhD candidate in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland, with a particular interest in the relationship between music and language. Prior to her PhD, she completed an MSc in Phonetics at the University of Edinburgh and assisted in psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience research at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her doctoral research draws on large-scale cross-cultural data, combining acoustic analysis and behavioural measures to investigate how music and speech differ in their acoustic properties and social functions. With an interdisciplinary background in phonetics and psychology, Zixuan’s long-term goal is to develop a comprehensive framework for understanding the music-language interface across structural, acoustic, and cognitive levels.

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Taking a moment to reflect and be grateful I decided to become a music scientist, rather than a snake scientist

As reported in a Q&A with Alves-Nunes in Science, he stepped on 116 snakes 30 times each, totaling over 40,000 steps. In tests with a different type of snake, the bite pierced his boot. That’s when he learned he is allergic to snake venom and antivenom.

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

😱 “we have direct evidence that, yes, in fact, this falsified analysis was conducted and included as a response to a request from reviewers”

In the right panel we see the 13 observations with altered grades. And, critically, 12 of these were in the direction of the authors’ hypothesis that spreading deadlines improves grades

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Among the many ironies of this report, I was particularly shocked that Joe Henrich - who coined the "WEIRD" acronym -was one of its 10 (all US-based) authors, making sweeping unsupported generalisations from very limited, "WEIRD" data

This over-generalisation from specific US anthropology examples is particularly shocking to me given that the sole anthropologist to coauthor the report is Joseph Henrich (who I generally greatly respect as a scholar). Henrich’s most influential academic research – cited in over 20,000 other academic research articles – demonstrates that much research on participants from the US and other societies he dubs “WEIRD”– “Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic” – does not generalise to other contexts (Henrich et al., 2010). So it’s particularly ironic that Henrich of all people would coauthor such a sweeping “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” based on very limited, almost exclusively “WEIRD” data.

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Boghossian et al.'s "Vanderbilt report" claimed "a deterioration in scholarly standards” in the humanities. What was their evidence? The companion reports have begun to trickle out. I argue that they show no evidence to support this claim. The report should be corrected or retracted: osf.io/ta6kg

Boghossian et al.’s (2026) critique of humanistic scholarship is itself bad scholarship and should be corrected or retracted

Patrick E. Savage1,2
1School of Psychology, Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland, Aotearoa | New Zealand
2Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan

[This version dated August 28, 2026]

Abstract: Boghossian et al.’s (2026) “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” argues that humanistic scholarship has experienced “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria”. I argue that their report itself represents low scholarly standards. Specifically: 1) it is primarily based on unpublished, unverifiable data; 2) the limited data that have been published (largely from unvalidated LLM categorisations) do not support the main claims of a “deterioriation in scholary standards”; and 3) the report unjustifiably generalises from a narrow set of examples (e.g., the cancelation of a panel on sex and gender by the American Anthropological Association) to make sweeping conclusions about global humanities scholarship. I describe counter-examples from past and present research in the humanities and the sciences by myself and others to show that biased and low-quality scholarship is not a new or unique problem for progressive humanistic research. While I agree with the authors that critical evaluation of the quality of academic scholarship (both humanistic and scientific) is urgently needed in today’s global political climate, the report’s strongest conclusions are not justified by their data and thus are not of sufficient quality to achieve their intended goal of helping university leaders to make policy decisions. I recommend it be corrected or retracted to resolve these issues.

Figure 2. Key data provided from each of the three internal disciplinary reports published so far do not demonstrate “a deterioration in scholarly standards”. A) History (Fleming & Wilentz, 2026), B) Literary Studies (Appiah, 2026), Sociology (Rubin, 2026). Y-axes have been adapted for clarity.

Figure 1. Distribution of Boghossian et al.’s 10 coauthors by country, gender, race, discipline, and institution type. Sources: Boghossian et al. (2026) and Whitford (2026). Data and code available at https://github.com/pesavage/humanities.

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

In the past few weeks, I've read/ watched/ listened to these beautiful works of art. In one way or another, they tell powerful stories of what makes us human that transcend time, place, and language.

All Of A Sudden (「急に具合が悪くなる」) film poster

The Odyssey (audiobook, translated by Emily Wilson, narrated by Claire Danes)

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

PS If you're worried the meme takes Pinker's "auditory cheesecake" quote out of context, check out the full quote and discussion here: academic.oup.com/book/62353/c... (If anything, the full quote is even more wrong!)

“Auditory cheesecake”
Particularly influential proponents of the byproduct hypothesis include William James (1890), who argued that music “is a pure incident of having a hearing organ,” and Steven Pinker (1997), who argued that:

“music is auditory cheesecake… As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless… It shows no signs of design for attaining a goal such as long life, grandchildren, or accurate perception and prediction of the world. Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology….”

(Pinker, 1997: 528)
Here, the “auditory cheesecake” metaphor followed Pinker’s earlier argument that we did not evolve to eat cheesecake, but rather it is a “pleasure technology” resulting from adaptations to encourage us to enjoy eating sugars and fats:

“We enjoy strawberry cheesecake, but not because we evolved a taste for it. We evolved circuits that gave us trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water. Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons. Pornography is another pleasure technology. In this chapter I will suggest that the arts are a third.”

(Pinker, 1997: 525)
Pinker’s dismissive phrasing frustrated many scholars of music (Levitin, 2006; Ball, 2010; Lawson, 2022), and to me, his “auditory cheesecake” metaphor feels fundamentally flawed. Among other things, it conflates a specific cultural manifestation (e.g., cheesecake, piano) with the universal category that it represents (e.g., food, music). All human societies eat food and make music, but in some societies people eat cheesecake and play the piano, while in others they …

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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. Fitch

Synchronised 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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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

This predatory publisher spam sounds almost like a warning against pursuing a career in academia

Predatory publisher spam reading "Publish now. Pay over time."

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

First post-publication review of my book now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social. @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social concludes: “Those seeking a concise, authoritative overview of the past, present, and future of research into human musicality need seek no further than this book.” doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

Excerpt from Tecumseh Fitch's review of my book in Current Biology, ending:
“This is an unusual book in multiple respects. All chapters are freely available online. Each chapter forms a self-contained introduction with references to the main topics, including ‘History’, ‘Universals’, ‘Evolution’, and others. An introductory chapter walks beginners through the process of analysing musical examples (including, the author urges, a recording of themselves singing). The book offers an invitation to participate directly in musicological research and thus is ideal for new students in this field. This approach is consistent with the strongly inclusive nature of much of Savage’s research, which involves large teams of researchers from around the world.
Those seeking a concise, authoritative overview of the past, present, and future of research into human musicality need seek no further than this book.”

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Good that Cambridge's failures in hiring Arday are being investigated. I hope these irregularities in de Vries hiring Cofnas at Ghent (clearly documented by his own department) are also thoroughly investigated:

Background information on the research project and the
job opening.

The research project for which Nathan Cofnas was hired is ,tled
The Birth Problem of Liberalism
and is funded by the Special Research Fund (BOF) of Ghent University through the Starting Grant awarded to Bouke de Vries. The project description reads as follows:
“Across all Abrahamic religions, it has been found that the more religious people are, the more children
they have. However, whereas poli)cal demographers such as Eric Kaufman have shown that the growth
of religious fundamentalist groups that combine rela)
vely high fer)lity with rela)vely high reten)on
rates such as the Haredim, Laestadians, Salafi
-
Islamists, and Orthodox Calvinists poses (long
-
term)
challenges to liberal democracies, philosophers have not considered what, if anything, states may or
sh
ould do about this. Are there morally permissible/necessary ways of ensuring that there remain
enough liberal
-
minded people to maintain liberal ins)tu)ons, assuming, as sociologist Chris)an Joppke
puts it bluntly, that ‘you cannot run a liberal state th
at is filled up to the ceiling with illiberal people’?
This scholarly project is the first to provide an answer to this (understandably) sensi)ve ques)on.
”
Key words are: religious fundamentalism, demography, and liberalism. Bouke de Vries situates the
project within the field of
‘
social
&
poli,cal philosophy.
’
In addi,on to general informa,on about Ghent University, the
job pos,ng
also included the following
text:
“The Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University invites candidates to apply for
a 55% postdoctoral research posi)on (one year) on the future of liberalism, under the supervision of
Prof. Dr. Bouke de Vries.
Liberalism
—
understood as a poli)cal doctrine emphasizing individual freedom and equality
—
is
increasingly being challenged, both from the le_ and the right. This raises urgent ques)ons as to
whether liberalism can endure, and if so, in what form, a…

Cofnas's Google Scholars shows no obvious recent research on liberalism

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Or wait for the return of the true king...? (Not sure who that is... not Jack Dorsey surely...)

Rafiki telling Timon, Pumbaa, and Nala that "The king has returned"

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

"I haven't been on Twitter since Scar and the hyenas took over" 🤣 🤣 🤣 Never heard it put this way before, perfect description. Likewise agree with the rest of the post too.

Sarabi telling Scar "It's over. There is nothing left."

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Has anyone here actually read the original "Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities..." (www.vanderbilt.edu/principles/s...) and recommend reading it? Thinking of proposing for a journal club, but getting a strong negative reaction to the idea of this panel opining on this topic...

Chancellors Diermeier and Martin presented the charge to Paul Boghossian, who assembled the following scholars to work as an independent group to address the issues raised in the charge: Kwame Anthony Appiah, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law, New York University Paul Boghossian, Silver Professor of Philosophy, New York University Kit Fine, University Professor, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics, New York University Joseph Henrich, Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University Katherine E. Fleming, Professor of History, New York University, and President and CEO, J. Paul Getty Trust Jason Merchant, Lorna Puttkammer Straus Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics, University of Chicago Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities; Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern University Gideon Rosen, Stuart Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University 3 Ashley Rubin, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Hawaii Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Princeton University The committee began its work in September of 2025. In the initial phase we compiled detailed internal reports on what we take to be a representative sample of disciplines in these areas: philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies and music studies. These reports were the result of extensive research on the part of the authors in consultation with experts in fields unrepresented on the committee, with the indispensable assistance of Gavin Cook and Yu Guo, who developed tools for gathering and analyzing data relevant to the work of the committee.1 These internal reports form the basis for the general report to follow, which is signed by all members of the committee.

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I enjoyed the movie and am now enjoying your translation, thank you! However, isn't your critique about Nolan dehumanising the Trojans by not showing their faces a bit unfair, given that Athena repeatedly appeared to Odysseus in the form of the Trojan priestess brutally executed in front of him?

The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face.

Zendaya as Athena, the goddess of wisdom, warfare, and handicraft, who protects Odysseus on his journey.[9][12] She also portrays the young Trojan priestess of Athena who is killed during the sack of Troy and whose form Athena later takes.

Matt Damon as Odysseus with Zendaya as Athena in the form of the executed Trojan priestess

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Really enjoyed being a guest on the season finale of @marcomaiolini.bsky.social "Acoustic World" podcast to discuss the evolution of music and language! open.spotify.com/episode/5o0f...

Screenshot of me and host Marco Maiolini from my episode of "Acoustic World"

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Just watched The Odyssey. Lots of thoughts I want to discuss. In particular, I'm enjoying watching academics beef about ancient moralising religions (www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/a...) as an audience member 🍿 rather than as a main character 🤣 (doi.org/10.1080/2153...; www.nature.com/articles/s41...).

How Emily Wilson’s Takedown of ‘The Odyssey’ Ignited a Debate
Wilson, whose 2017 translation of Homer’s Greek classic influenced the director Christopher Nolan, panned his screenplay for the movie version in an essay for The London Review of Books.

Matters Arising
Published: 07 July 2021
Treatment of missing data determined conclusions regarding moralizing gods
Bret Beheim, Quentin D. Atkinson, Joseph Bulbulia, Will Gervais, Russell D. Gray, Joseph Henrich, Martin Lang, M. Willis Monroe, Michael Muthukrishna, Ara Norenzayan, Benjamin Grant Purzycki, Azim Shariff, Edward Slingerland, Rachel Spicer & Aiyana K. Willard

Testing the Big Gods hypothesis with global historical data: areview and “retake”Harvey Whitehouse a†, Pieter Françoisa,b†, Patrick E. Savagea,c†, Daniel Hoyerd, KevinC. Feeney e, Enrico Cionif , Rosalind Purcell f, Jennifer Larsong , John Baines h, Barendter Haar i, Alan Covey j , and Peter Turchin

ABSTRACTThis Retake article presents a corrected and extended version of a Letterpublished in Nature (Whitehouse et al., 2019) which set out to test the BigGods hypothesis proposing that beliefs in moralizing punitive deitiesdrove the evolution of sociopolitical complexity in world history. TheLetter was retracted by the authors in response to a critique by Beheimet al. (2021). Correction of errors in the coding and analysis of missingdata to address this critique does not, however, signiﬁcantly change themain ﬁndings of the original Nature Letter. We report the results of amajor reanalysis of Seshat data following expansion of the codebookand database and substantial improvements to our data managementmethods. We also employ a more direct statistical methodology to testtheories of evolutionary causality. Together, these results show acompellingly convergent picture, conﬁrming the headline ﬁnding of theoriginal Letter in Nature, which shows that the largest increases insocial complexity do indeed precede Big Gods in world history and thatBig Gods did not contribute to the evolution of sociopoliticalcomplexity as predicted by the Big Gods hypothesis

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I've read a lot of AI pieces, and this is by far the best I've seen yet.

AI, we’re told, will make learning more efficient. But is that what we dream of for our kids – an efficient childhood? To write an efficient story, sing an efficient song? An adequate teacher is not only teaching about Henry VIII; they’re teaching your child how to read a human character. A good teacher is showing them how to shape an argument, how to command an audience, how to tell jokes, how to pass on knowledge. A great teacher is showing your child what it is to love. They are teaching your child how to be human. A computer will only teach your child how to be a computer.

I do not know what the answer is, but I do know that it’s not to give up. The young mind is a spectacular thing. To waste its beauty and strength would be a dereliction of the trust the young are asked to put in the old. To wrap AI into the art of learning when we have overwhelming proof of the harm it does to developing minds is feeding snake oil to the people we should cherish most. We already have counterfeit AI people infiltrating our media: we must not risk sending out young people into a hard world armed only with counterfeit knowledge. We should treat it with the same urgency with which we would treat a wildfire.

There are many young people who are furious at the influx of AI slop and tech chaos into their lives, who have asked me over the last year, how do we resist? I tell them that I think, for the young, knowledge and imagination are together the first site of resistance. And that by reading books (and talking about what they have loved reading so that it becomes a community, rather than purely private, act) they can begin their fight.

I talk a great deal about reading for pleasure; I’ve written elsewhere about the necessity of pleasure in the classroom, and why it is not an optional extra but the hallmark of true education. We must find ways to show children that reading gives you access to an inexhaustible source of delight. But I worry, too, that we are limiting the meaning of the word pleasure. Learning is a strange and discomfiting experience; it’s a struggle and a frustration, and epiphanies are rare. It is not always pleasure in its easiest sense.

So I think we also need to talk to young people about reading to outrun and outfight injustice. Reading to get faster, swifter and tougher; to develop powers of scrutiny and criticism and huge creative imagination. Reading human work to insist that we are human. Reading for liberation and emancipation; reading for intellectual freedom, and to have the strength to fight in the arenas of the mind, becaus…

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Pleased to see 27 commentaries to @manvir.bsky.social 's BBS article published, along with Manvir's response. Particularly appreciate his thoughtful engagement with my commentary, but they're all worth a good read and think! www.cambridge.org/core/journal... @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

Goals, power, and selection: Foundational issues in the naturalistic study of culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 July 2026

Manvir Singh

Abstract
The commentators mostly endorsed the value of attending to goals and evaluations in explanations of cultural patterns, including super-attractors. They also voiced concerns about subjective selection, enumerated other factors influencing goals and evaluation, proposed additional super-attractors and processes that might shape them, and demanded greater engagement with power and influence. Many issues signal larger disagreements in the naturalistic study of culture. Here, I respond.

If lullabies and hero stories are super-attractors, what are music and language? Absolute universals imply genetic mechanisms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 July 2026

Patrick E. Savage

Abstract
I praise the synthesis and expansion of attractor theory to explain statistical universals, but critique its failure to explain absolute universals. I agree that lullabies, hero stories, and shamanism are good candidates for primarily cultural evolutionary explanations, but argue that the larger, most universal categories they are sub-phenomena of – music, language, religion – require gene-culture coevolutionary explanations.

Figure 1 (Savage). An adapted version of Figure 1 from Singh’s target article with an added red box containing some of the most complex and universal cultural domains. These “absolute universals” found in all known human societies without exception (e.g., language, music, religion) appear beyond the explanatory framework of superattractor theory, and instead imply at least some genetic component.

R3.2.1. Shamanism and dance songs are super-attractors, while music and religion are (probably) not

Observing that I treat shamanism, dance songs, and hero stories as super-attractors, Savage asks why I do not include broader domains, such as religion, music, and language. He is right that these comprise behaviors that are ubiquitous and complex (Evans & Levinson, 2009; Jackson et al., 2023; Mehr et al., 2019; Peoples, Duda, & Marlowe, 2016; Pinker, 1994; Savage et al., 2015). But, putting aside language, which I discuss below, religion and music do not strike me as super-attractors, because they do not seem to exhibit the degree of functional integration characteristic of clearer classes. I wrote: Importantly, the attractors composing a super-attractor are not merely a collection of discrete components; rather, they relate dynamically to produce new, emergent properties or functions that are not present in any individual attractor. (Section 1) Super-attractors are roughly analogous to organs like the heart or lungs. Each is complex; each has components that reliably cooccur and that work together to sustain emergent functions. In contrast, “music” is a label for a family of super-attractors, much like “organ” is a label for a family of systems. “Music” encompasses traditions like dance songs, lullabies, and healing songs, but these are not functionally integrated. There is, for example, no necessary reason why lullabies require dance songs, nor a patterned way in which lullabies and dance songs interact to yield larger functions. The components of religion may be better integrated. For example, shamans are believed to interact with supernatural agents, and such interactions might feature in myths. Yet the integration across such components seems much weaker than within-component integration. Shamanism always includes trance and services like healing and divination, often alongside dramatic initiations and self-denial. Yet, the connection between shamanism and…

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I cried reading this heartbreaking and outrageous report. The paper should be retracted and the researchers and hospital should receive a hell of a lot stronger sanction than a $4,000 fine.

The paper had an enthusiastic reception. “These promising results might pave the way for the development of an effective clinical treatment,” Kevin Bender, a neuroscientist at UC San Francisco, wrote in an accompanying commentary. At the time, Bender had no idea that a girl had received it and was already dead. Meanwhile, Chinese state media, CCTV, called the work “the first ray of hope” for “countless families suffering such diseases.” Some families in Jason and Linda’s WeChat group said they planned to reach out to Qiu about their own children.

When Jason and Linda saw that, they decided to act. They submitted a complaint to the dean of Qiu’s university, demanding an investigation and a retraction of the Nature paper “to prevent more children from suffering and our blood and tears flowing in vain.”

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Heads up: what appears to be a scam/predatory academic organisation calling itself the International Institute of Music Science and Arts is setting up. Myself and other real scholars were emailed and told we were "appointed" as Fellows, but as far as I can tell...

Research page includes these apparently fabricated journals:

IMSA Academic Journals
IIMSA Journal of Music Science
Frequency

Quarterly

ISSN

2345-6789

Impact Factor

3.12

Scope

Music neuroscience, acoustics, psychology, AI, and technology

Submit a manuscript
IIMSA Journal of Music Arts & History
Frequency

Biannual

ISSN

2345-6790

Impact Factor

1.87

Scope

Music theory, history, ethnomusicology, and performance studies

Submit a manuscript

Leadership Team includes fabricated and/or misleading information (e.g., Prof. Robert Sterling as "former president of the American Musicological Society" who "has led IIMSA since 2018")

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Pedagogically, I prefer mine (osf.io/preprints/ps...), but I have to admit this is funnier.

Figure 3. Stylised figure showing my proposed reading/writing order to maximise efficiency given diminishing marginal returns as you read academic research in greater detail. While analogous approaches can be applied to many books, review articles, and humanities articles (e.g., Adler & van Doren, 1972), this approach is particularly suitable for empirical scientific journal articles. Meme from Adam & Walker (2019).

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Nice! I like mine (osf.io/preprints/ps...), but admit yours is funnier.

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Amazing follow-up video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-W6...

Screenshot from "How I Made the Gen Alpha Melody" video by Carl E. Martin.
Captions: "to the Brits. You win. You'll never win this [FIF world cup], but you won this ["gen alpha melody" cup]

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Loved @gene.meme's article on copyright issues in the ubiquitous "Gen Alpha Melody". However, as a musicologist researching copyright (academic.oup.com/book/62353/c...), I have to point out that the shared (non-copyrightable) chord progressions obscure a lot of (copyrightable) melodic variation.

Visualisation of comparative analysis of three examples shown in Carl Martin's "Gen Alpha Melody" YouTube video show that two are very similar ("It's Only Love" and "So Am I" 65% identical) while "APT" and "So Am I" are not so similar (34%).

Examples of historical legal cases centred on melodic infringement. <45% identical melodies are usually not judged as infringing (green), while more than this can be judged infringing (red) or not, depending on context.

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Was just reminded (through a great chat with @eselster.bsky.social) of this fantastic album - treat yourself to a listen! folkways.si.edu/songs-of-the...

Spotify playlist showing the first 7 tracks from the album "Song of the Earth: Astonishing and Rare Voices"

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Amazing video and article! However, the similar chord progressions are obscuring important differences. Some of these melodies are not so similar (e.g., APT vs. So Am I: 34%) while some are very similar (e.g., So Am I vs. It's Only Love: 65%): For details, see academic.oup.com/book/62353/c...

Figure 6.2 from my book, "Comparative musicology" (https://academic.oup.com/book/62353/chapter/554463078#556813890)

Comparisons of three copyright case excerpts demonstrating decreasing melodic similarity. Plaintiff appears in top, defendant on bottom. Melodies are transposed to the common tonic of C to enhance comparability, and identical notes are coloured in red.a (a) The chorus melodies of “Hachigatsu no Rainy” (top) and “M.A.K.E.” (bottom) are 100 per cent identical. (b) The openings of “He’s So Fine” (top) and “My Sweet Lord”) show high (>60 per cent) melodic similarity. (c) The “signature phrases” of “Got to Give it Up” and “Blurred Lines” show moderately low (<50 per cent) melodic similarity. (d) These three cases and thirty-seven more visualised in terms of their melodic similarity (y-axis; see Chapter 2) and overall similarity as measured through perceptual experiments (x-axis). Note that the similarity values from a–c are not identical to those shown in d because a–c are short excerpts from the longer sections analysed.

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

+1 for "The Professor Is In" And shameless plug for my own guide for new grad (and undergrad) students: "How and why to read (and write and publish) academic research": doi.org/10.31234/osf...

How and why to read (and write and publish) academic research

Patrick E. Savage

Abstract: This article is designed to concisely teach undergraduate and new graduate students lessons in reading and writing I have learned in my past two decades as a university student, teacher, and researcher (including through publishing, retracting, correcting, and republishing articles in outlets with varying levels of “impact” and publication fees). Don’t just start at the beginning of an academic article/book and try to read straight to the end! Instead, I recommend starting by reading the title(s)/author(s) and abstract(s), then the figures, reading the Discussion section, and skimming/spot-checking the references, peer reviews, and data (e.g., spreadsheets, audiovisual stimuli, surveys), if available. Only once you have done this and evaluated whether it seems worth your time do I recommend deciding whether to read every word of some/all sections/chapters (and any accompanying supplementary material) or digging deeper into reanalysing/replicating the data. I recommend writing accordingly so that most of your key information will be conveyed even if your reader only gets through your title, abstract, and figures. I discuss various strategies to improve your own academic reading/writing and the broader culture of academia, from practical (e.g., formatting and tracking references and citations using Zotero and Google Scholar, asking constructive questions rather than self-promoting comments, publishing using Peer Community In Registered Reports, using the “sandwich thesis” model for PhD dissertations) to philosophical (e.g., ethical issues in authorship, citation, AI, publishing, and funding). I explain the intended goals of academic research (to create and distribute valuable new knowledge) and perverse incentives that lead us astray from these goals (e.g., chasing prestige and funding). I conclude by contemplating if and how we should dismantle the current extortionary academi…

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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

I completely re-wrote the AI section of my guide to academic reading/writing to be much stricter and more negative (now titled "AI-generated fabrications as academic misconduct"). Please use/share with your students, and let me know if you have any more changes to suggest! doi.org/10.31234/osf...

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