Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 24/11/2025Snow has come to Lower Austria! #art #painting Our first snow of the season. This is a watercolor I did of our local castle, Burg Kreuzenstein. Very simple palette: ultramarine and indanthrene blue with burnt sienna. The key trick was spraying the still-wet paint to get that sweeping snow look... 1180
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 22/11/2025Scary data from the long-term study of wild chimpanzees at Ngogo: lethal attacks on neighboring groups (almost exclusively by males) increased female fertility and offspring survival in their own group. “Demonic males” indeed… 060
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 22/11/20251 New paper from my former PhD student Raffaela Lesch's lab used a citizen science database to show that urban racoons, who are rapidly becoming less afraid of humans, also have shorter snouts than wild-type rural racoons. Link: rdcu.be/eRcpT 150
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 22/11/20252. Nice writeups in the BBC: bbc.com/news/article... and Scientific American: www.scientificamerican.com/article/racc...bbc.comCuter and closer: Raccoons may be on their way to becoming America's next petThe rubbish raiders are showing reductions in snout length, a sign of early domestication, researchers say. 040
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 22/11/20252 This is consistent with our "neural crest/domestication syndrome" hypothesis that the shorter snouts of domesticated animals is developmentally linked to the ultimate selective force underlying domestication: increased tameness: academic.oup.com/genetics/art...academic.oup.comThe “Domestication Syndrome” in Mammals: A Unified Explanation Based on Neural Crest Cell Behavior and GeneticsAbstract. Charles Darwin, while trying to devise a general theory of heredity from the observations of animal and plant breeders, discovered that domestica 050
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 22/11/20253 The causal linkage is due to the joint origins of many tissues implicated in domestication syndrome - in this case the adrenal glands and HPA axis (reduced for tameness), and the bones and muscles of the face (reduced as a side effect) - from the embryonic neural crest. 020
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 22/11/2025New paper from my former PhD student Raffaela Lesch's lab used a citizen science database to show that urban racoons, who arerapidly becoming less afraid of humans, also have shorter snouts than wild-type rural racoons. Link: rdcu.be/eRcpTrdcu.beTracking domestication signals across populations of North American raccoons (Procyon lotor) via citizen science-driven image repositories | Frontiers in Zoology 164
Reposted by Tecumseh FitchLimor Raviv 🐘🤗🦒🍄🦄 @limorraviv.bsky.social · 21/11/2025Interested in the evolution of human language? Check out our new paper in @science.org where we synthesize latest findings and outline a multifaceted, bio-cultural approach for studying how language evolved. Super proud of this work, and hoping it leads to exciting new research! tinyurl.com/ykacvanpscience.orgWhat enables human language? A biocultural frameworkExplaining the origins of language is a key challenge in understanding ourselves as a species. We present an empirical framework that draws on synergies across fields to facilitate robust studies of l... 24115
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025Tired of posting about my much-derided brain painting for the Phil Trans cover... here's a watercolor painting I did last year of my father in law. Paint on paper: No ChatGPT was used, just an old black-and-white photo: 070
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025My art is not "AI slop" I am very proud of the artwork on the cover of our recent Phil Trans issue on consciousness. It was the product of 10+ hours of hard artistic work on my part, drawing, painting, and interacting with ChatGPT to try to get something in the style of an old Victorian engraving. 090
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025The goal was a scientifically accurate but aesthetically appealing cover, capturing the fundamentally conservative nature of the vertebrate brain over millions of years of evolution. The brains by themselves weren't enough, so I decided little figures of the animals to clarify this message. 191
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025I am very proud of the artwork on the cover of our recent Phil Trans issue on consciousness. It is based on watercolor paintings and ink drawings on paper I did myself, based on published diagrams by recognized experts on comparative brain anatomy (detailed in the caption which it seems no one read) 0112
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025My art is not "AI slop" I'd been thinking about joining Bluesky for a while, but it's ironic that I finally joined NOT to combat right-wing propaganda or AI-generated nonsense, but to defend myself and my own artwork which has been widely labelled, and derided, as "AI slop" on this platform... 0170