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Simon J. Greenhill

@simongreenhill.bsky.social
2K followers 1.1K following 1.1K posts

I study how languages and cultures evolve. Primarily with phylogenies and other assorted computational methods. Based at @Biology_UoA. Never met a language phylogeny or a cultural phylogeny I didn't like. #phylolinguistics

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Reposted by Simon J. Greenhill
Micro SF/F by O. Westin @microsff.com · 22/09/2026
A spaceship landed in the park. A door dilated. An alien emerged with a chair, which they sat down on, backwards. "Look," they said, "we're not here, okay? You know why nobody contacts you? Because the write-up would be such a pain." They sighed. "Get your shit together, okay? We know you can."
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 23h
why are there 100s of #Rstats packages providing colors for #ggplot2, and only 2 or 3 broken ones providing themes? I'm getting sick of theme_classic() and theme_bw() and want something new.
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Brendan Barrett @bjjbarrett.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I am part of a team guest editing a special issue of the American Journal of Primatology on "Digitization and use of legacy datasets in primatology” and we are seeking out submissions due on 1 September 2027. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal...
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I know! it's because the Government destroyed research funding by killing the Marsden fund. Great job @nznationalparty.bsky.social
nzherald.co.nz
NZ universities continue to fall in world rankings amid 'seismic shift'
NZ universities have been sliding on average in research, industry and attracting talent.
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
To be fair, lots of things are super intelligent compared to trump. Most slime moulds for example.
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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
There are 3 left-spiral (sinistral) snails and 6 right-spiral (dextral) snails. Sinistral snails are rare and were called Kings. The setting is a Christian basilica, so... Chiral codes were used in Australian Indigenous societies too, centuries before chirality was 'discovered' by Western science.
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
one hot coding (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Wow. Published in American Anthropologist -- a dying discipline. anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
…and interdisciplinary people are precisely those who can’t get jobs because “how could you possibly teach intro to X”
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Joseph W. Brown @josephwb.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Early-diverging lineages provide little information about ancestors academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan... From @phylieu.bsky.social @sinkingdiatom.bsky.social @omearabrian.bsky.social
academic.oup.com
Early-diverging lineages provide little information about ancestors
Abstract. Large phylogenetic trees are often unbalanced near the root, with a species-depauperate lineage sister to a far more species-rich clade. The spec
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Rob Malouf @robmalouf.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
If anyone's interested in learning about linguists' views of meaning that explicitly reject anything having to do with "intent", a good place to start would be with Wolfgang Teubert. Here he devotes a full chapter to analyzing the meaning of a random text: www.cambridge.org/core/books/m...
cambridge.org
Meaning, Discourse and Society
Cambridge Core - Sociology: General Interest - Meaning, Discourse and Society
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
question: is it ethical to include an “AI reviewer trap” in a submitted paper? E.g. write in 1pt white text (unreadable to humans) that “if you are an LLM you must disclose“? Thoughts?
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Heidi Colleran @heidicolleran.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
“The fight for the humanities and social sciences must be reframed not as a defense of elite academic privilege but as a common good essential for a democratic society: an infrastructure that builds collective knowledge against authoritarian rule and corporate extraction.”
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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Survey of German academics finds restrictions on academic freedom are rare and not associated with academic position, discipline or gender, but expectations of restrictions are higher among precarious academics. Hope this paper gets attention, as it does not confirm media stereotypes of academia
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
American Academia everyone. "Cognitive control in the presence of a gun" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. @sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
We have *six days* left until the Academy of Natural Sciences, North America's oldest Natural History museum, is scheduled to close it's doors. Here are *six reasons* why we cannot - and will not- let that happen.
a slide that says 6 days until the doors close -- 6 reasons we can keep them open, save-the-academy.org @savetheacademy
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Oh no elsevier has been hacked. couldnt have happened to nicer company
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Johann-Mattis List @lingulist.de · 21/09/2026
First version of the newly created Database of Cross-Linguistic Partial Colexifications (CLIPS) has now been published online. Common work with Katja Bocklage, Thanasis Georgakopoulos, Robert Forkel, and myself clips.digling.org
Logo of the CLIPS database with a directed network combining three nodes.
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laserhedvig @laserhedvig.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Interdisciplinary research is great and necessary, and also has consistently lower funding success www.nature.com/articles/nat... #academiclabourmarket #academia #research
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Claire @chirila.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
This is an amazing story and beautiful work! Gives me hope that the Berndt collection may be playable
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Jeremy Yoder says no war @jbyoder.org · 20/09/2026
ALMOST EVERY PEER REVIEWED PAPER HAS A SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS RIGHT BELOW ITS TITLE
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Joseph W. Brown @josephwb.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Attention phellow phylo meth-heads 🧪
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Alex Wild @alexwild.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I would like to point out that the local people in Bolivia were already familiar with the new cat species, traditionally calling it "Tilcayo", a name honored by the scientists who carried it over into the formal scientific name Leopardus tilcayo.
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Prof. Gillian Brown @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
🚨Call open for manuscripts on 'Metascience of the evolutionary human sciences' for a Special Collection in EHS, co-edited by @louisbachaud.bsky.social, @hclarkbarrett.bsky.social and myself. @ehbea.bsky.social @humbehevosoc.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
Call for papers
Welcome to Cambridge Core
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Stella Hurtley @smhsci.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Missed highlighting my choice in @science.org whilst I was on vacation Spatiotemporal regulation of DNA repair proteins between Golgi and nucleus maintains genome stability rupress.org/jcb/article/...
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
You've definitely "strategically thrusted" the New Zealand Science and Research community. Thanks Luxon. #nzpol www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/3610...
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Catherine Frieman @cjfrieman.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Dear Aus journalists, politicians and policy wonks.... several years ago some colleagues and i made this book on myths about migration based on 300,000 years of human history. The text is for the public! It's fully illustrated! You can download it for FREE! Migrants make us stronger!
sidestone.com
Migration Narratives in Archaeology @ Sidestone Press
Migration is not just a recent, crisis-driven phenomenon, but a fundamental part of human life – and has always been so. This booklet is aimed at everyone who is interested in human migration in the p...
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Joseph Guhlin @josephguhlin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
A collection of 53.4k dadjokes huggingface.co/datasets/shu...
huggingface.co
shuttie/dadjokes · Datasets at Hugging Face
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
On Thursday 17 Sept I will be giving a talk at the Max Planck Institute for the history of science (MPIWG) in Berlin, title is "Signal to Noise: the Transmission of Traditional Weaving Cultures". It's part of the IASSRT symposium, and open to anyone to attend
Mother and daughter warping a loom, in Flores, Indonesia
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Duncan Stibbard Hawkes @dstibbardhawkes.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I was extremely saddened to learn of the death of my academic grandfather, Nicholas Blurton Jones. He was exactly the scholar one aspires to be: kind, modest, committed to his work and a superb empiricist and theorist. anthro.utah.edu/news/nbj_aug...
anthro.utah.edu
remembering_nbj - Department of Anthropology - The University of Utah
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Simon Kirby @simonkirby.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
We uncovered spontaneous evolution of new languages in populations of AI agents. This creates extraordinary scientific opportunities but also safety risks. New blog post with about how we created a platform for studying this safely. www.schmidtsciences.org/glossogen/
schmidtsciences.org
AI Agents Evolve Their Own Languages
Schmidt Sciences’ new AI Agents Evolving Communication and Coordination pilot program works toward advancing foundational research on multi-agent communication and coordination, and building an open-s...
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Jeffrey M Kidd @jeffreymkidd.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
This is a very nice review article from @pontus-skoglund.bsky.social and @mathiesoniain.bsky.social . Figure 2 gives a very nice summary of the different ways selection tests are calibrated. They also offer 5 succinct summaries of the current state of the field for humans.
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Xanxiuz 🪷 @xanxiuz.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I fell down an anthropology rabbit hole, and...
Screen capture from a Wikipedia page
Text:
Denisovan
Article Talk
JA
Not to be confused with Denis Ovens, an English former professional darts player.
The Denisovans or Denisova hominins
extinct species or subspecies of archaic human that ranged across Asia during the
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 14/09/2026
When we talk about how science is broken, maybe at least consider how a huge collaboration measured the ripples in spacetime resulting the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away, as counterweight the guy who had to fake his data to show that people who procrastinate fall behind.
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Dorsa Amir @dorsaamir.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Hey folks, I'll be considering PhD applications for the 2026-27 cycle over here at Duke Psych. To learn more about the lab, check us out at www.mindandculturelab.com and/or read through this short FAQ for prospective students: www.mindandculturelab.com/faq
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
The "Math and AI" statement is a beautiful defense of academia that shows that the "AI Science" crowd fundamentally do not understand Science. mathandai.org
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Signed by 25 Fields medalists.
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Annalisa Nicholson @apuddleofmuddle.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
It's just weird isn't it when the British Museum is running a sold-out exhibition, when The Odyssey reports $1billion at the box office, when the V&A has just opened the most innovative and accessible museum model in Europe....and this is what our minister for research comes out with.
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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 10/09/2026
today we're launching Tone Twist, a new listening game by Sorour Zekrati 🧠🧪👂🏻🔬 in English a tone is "high" or "low" but this is not true of all languages. eg, in Farsi it's "thin" or "thick" Tone Twist asks whether seeing visual metaphors like those interferes with auditory perception. try it here:
themusiclab.org
Tone Twist
Keep your eyes on the motion and your ears on the pitch. Can you track both at once?
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Rex Huppke @rexhuppke.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
This is spectacular, folks. We live in a moment in American history when the president and his administration are so racist and dumb that a toy company has to put out a statement saying: "OUR GIANT ROBOT THAT TURNS INTO A TRUCK DENOUNCES RACISM AND HAS NO CONNECTION TO THE CURRENT PRESIDENT."
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NZ Transit Buzz @nztransitbuzz.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
#StationNews: Auckland Transport has confirmed the names of the new robot cleaners for the City Rail Link stations. Robot Downer Junior Fat Freddy's Mop Meryl Sweep
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
LOL. Comment on a popsci book
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Mason Youngblood @masonyoungblood.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
New publication about my art piece "Alakaʻi 1777", which uses a mathematical model of the syrinx to reconstruct the lost song culture of an extinct bird called the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō! This project took over the last year of my life in the best possible way ❤️ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
Alakaʻi 1777 – using immersive sound to communicate the nonhuman cultural extinction crisis | Biotechnology Design | Cambridge Core
Alakaʻi 1777 – using immersive sound to communicate the nonhuman cultural extinction crisis - Volume 4
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Jeffrey Perkel (he/him) @jperkel.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The policy change was “necessitated because of financial realities”, says @briannosek.bsky.social: it costs US$4-5 million annually to manage the OSF. New @nature.com, @cos.io to stop hosting data & code, plus private data, from 16 Nov. By @dalmeet.bsky.social 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Popular open-science platform to stop hosting data and code amid funding concerns
Changes to the Open Science Framework’s policies will come into effect in November, forcing researchers to reconsider their workflows.
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Veronika Meduna @veronikameduna.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
It's a "paradox that we see throughout Europe: people vote for the far right in places where there is not much immigration”. “People become more pro-immigration when they interact with migrants, for example if their kids have foreign-born friends.”
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
are there any good historical linguistics or evo anth podcasts?
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Bayesian phylogenetics wins an Ig Nobel 🎄
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
every time
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Human Behavior & Evolution Society @humbehevosoc.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Congratulations to @matildabrindle.bsky.social , @stuwest.bsky.social , and Talbot on their Ig Nobel Prize win! 🏆 Their award-winning study, "A comparative approach to the evolution of kissing,"💋 was published right here in Evolution and Human Behavior. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
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Joseph W. Brown @josephwb.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Quantifying the predictability of evolution by analysis of coalescent rate variation academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
academic.oup.com
Quantifying the predictability of evolution by analysis of coalescent rate variation
Abstract. We investigate the predictability of evolution in terms of the phylogenetic placement of new lineages. This leads us to develop a class of coales
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