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Tecumseh Fitch

@tecumsehfitch.bsky.social
184 followers 37 following 21 posts

Professor of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna, interest in the evolution of music, language, art and consciousness. And a musician and artist on the side...

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Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
Snow 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...
painting of a castle in the snow
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Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
Scary 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…
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Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
1 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
Raffaela Lesch
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Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
2. Nice writeups in the BBC: bbc.com/news/article... and Scientific American: www.scientificamerican.com/article/racc...
bbc.com
Cuter and closer: Raccoons may be on their way to becoming America's next pet
The rubbish raiders are showing reductions in snout length, a sign of early domestication, researchers say.
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Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
2 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.com
The “Domestication Syndrome” in Mammals: A Unified Explanation Based on Neural Crest Cell Behavior and Genetics
Abstract. Charles Darwin, while trying to devise a general theory of heredity from the observations of animal and plant breeders, discovered that domestica
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Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
3 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.
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Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
New 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/eRcpT
rdcu.be
Tracking domestication signals across populations of North American raccoons (Procyon lotor) via citizen science-driven image repositories | Frontiers in Zoology
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Reposted by Tecumseh Fitch
Limor Raviv 🐘🤗🦒🍄🦄 @limorraviv.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
Interested 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/ykacvanp
science.org
What enables human language? A biocultural framework
Explaining 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...
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Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
Tired 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:
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Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
My 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.
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Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
The 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.
watercolor brains by tecumseh fitch
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Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
I 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)
hand drawn animal images by tecumseh fitch
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Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
My 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...
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