Sign in

Tecumseh Fitch

@tecumsehfitch.bsky.social
183 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...

PostsRepliesMedia
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
1180
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
Oh yes… white spots will be next. And their teeth are probably already smaller. 😊
110
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…
060
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
150
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.
040
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
050
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.
020
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
164
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...
24115
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
Thx Cedric!
010
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:
070
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
Good idea - I didn't think of that : ) I actually thought setting the record straight with Sam, and sending him the original artwork, might elicit an apology or something. No dice.
100
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
Yep, I'm one of those old-school academics who actually uses email to communicate. When I was young I even used a TYPEWRITER and sent LETTERS! Those were the days... when academics were respectful of their colleagues, and of the truth. Sigh When I was really young we rode dinosaurs to school...
000
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
Actually, the concept is that vertebrate brain anatomy is highly conserved across deep evolutionary time. And that perhaps, just perhaps, consciousness is too. That's the point of the whole issue. OK, I'm just a humble evolutionary biologist not a professional artist... I did my best....
320
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
Me: Tecumseh Fitch. Read the "About the cover" caption... its all open access!
200
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
That was my first thought - so I offered the job to my go-to scientific watercolor artist (who has done other art for my science). Sadly she was too busy to take it on, under deadline, so I did it myself. ChatGPT was used only to create the "Victorian engraving" styling - I didn't expect such ire.
010
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
My art is not "AI slop" I am very proud of this artwork, based on my own watercolors and drawings. It IS scientifically accurate, based directly on the work of the great comparative neuroanatomist Glenn Northcutt (and inspired by Georg Striedter's wonderful book). ChatGPT did the styling only...
192
Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
As Sam Mehr knows, this cover was the product of a lot of hard artistic work: I did all the artwork that underlies it and only used ChatGPT for the finishing touches (he knows because I sent him an email clarifying it after he posted, to which he never responded...). My artwork isn't "AI Slop"!
200
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.
090
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
191
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
0112
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...
0170