Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

James Winters

@replicatedtypo.bsky.social

1.3K followers 670 following 67 posts

Simulating sci-fi novels and calling it cultural evolution Centre for Culture and Evolution | Brunel University London | https://j-winters.github.io

j-winters.github.io

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

James Winters @replicatedtypo.bsky.social · Aug 15

🚨🚨 New preprint 📜 with Mathieu Charbonneau (@matcharbonneau.bsky.social‬): Modelling the emergence of open-ended technological evolution (arxiv.org/abs/2508.04828). Feedback welcomed! #Evolution #Technology #Culture #OpenEnded #TechnologicalEvolution #CulturalEvolution 🧵: 1/29

Modelling the emergence of open-ended technological evolution

Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively improve technologies in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually exp...

arxiv.org

1 9 20

Reposted by James Winters

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 21h

Agreed! It was one of my 5 recommended books on cultural evolution here:
shepherd.com/best-books/c...

3 6

James Winters @replicatedtypo.bsky.social · 23h

My favourite book by Mokyr is A Culture of Growth: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb.... Here, Mokyr draws on cultural evolutionary theory to develop some his key ideas about the evolution of science, technology and the origins of modern economic growth. Really accessible and packed with ideas!

A Culture of Growth

Why Enlightenment culture sparked the Industrial Revolution

press.princeton.edu

2 8

James Winters @replicatedtypo.bsky.social · 23h

It was cool to see that Mokyr got the Nobel in economics. @antonhowes.bsky.social has a nice write up here: www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-inv...

Age of Invention: Joel Mokyr's Nobel

A triumph for history and the importance of ideas

www.ageofinvention.xyz

2 13 32

Reposted by James Winters

Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 1d

🚨New Preprint: We develop a novel task that probes counterfactual thinking without using counterfactual language, and that teases apart genuine counterfactual thinking from related forms of thinking. Using this task, we find that the ability for counterfactual thinking emerges around 5 years of age.

2 10 69

Reposted by James Winters

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 4d

Swipe up to try a new variant on Conway's Game of Life. And another. And another. This is how artificial-life researchers spread the joy after the #ALIFE2025 conference! They say it's like TikTok, but I wouldn't know.... ⚙️🧫 rulehunt.org?rulesetHex=7... #cellularautomata #gameoflife

10 28

Reposted by James Winters

Sergi Valverde @svalver.bsky.social · 5d

The Innovation Game: How Arcade Genres Evolve, Imitate, and Collapse
www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20... @blaividiella.bsky.social @andrejpaleo.bsky.social

The Innovation Game: How Arcade Genres Evolve, Imitate, and Collapse « News# « Cambridge Core Blog

What can Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Mortal Kombat teach us about cultural evolution? In shopping malls of the 1970s, arcades were where people played digital games together, huddled around custom-bu...

www.cambridge.org

5 7

Reposted by James Winters

Enrico R. Crema @ercrema.bsky.social · 11d

⚠️Paper Alert!⚠️
Excited to share this paper with @roccoro.bsky.social where we examined whether ceramic technology in Saharan Africa was the result of a single or multiple episodes of innovation & diffusion
rdcu.be/eJi3g

Bayesian analyses of radiocarbon dates suggest multiple origins of ceramic technology in Early Holocene Africa

Nature Communications - Several possible points of origin have been proposed for the spread of ceramic technology in Saharan Africa between 11–10,000 years ago. Here, the authors...

rdcu.be

2 14 41

Reposted by James Winters

Centre for Culture and Evolution @brunelcce.bsky.social · 8d

🧵 1/ New paper from CCEs @rebeccasear.bsky.social led by @hggaddy.bsky.social with @anthrolog.bsky.social challenging some common assumptions about polygyny (there are many…)

it's open access 🔓 🧪 @brunelpsy.bsky.social

High rates of polygyny do not lock large proportions of men out of the marriage market

www.pnas.org

1 7 16

Reposted by James Winters

Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 10d

🌟 New preprint 🌟, by @olivia.science and me:

📝 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025). *Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists*. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🧪

Table 1

Core reasoning issues (first column), which we name after the relevant numbered section, are characterised using a plausible quote. In the second column are responses per row; also see the named section for further reading, context, and explanations.

See paper for full details: ** Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

2 27 66

Reposted by James Winters

Richard D. Morey @richarddmorey.bsky.social · 10d

For me this is a hard red line in psychological science. If you advocate the use of "silicon samples" you do not understand what it is we're supposed to be doing (and likely don't understand LLMs, or are a grifter). Luckily I haven't seen much of this among people I'd consider my peer group.

Except from Table 1 of Guest & van Rooij, 2025:

3) Displacement of Participants

“I can use AI instead of participants to perform tasks and generate data.”

The providence of the data used in these models indicates it is not ethically sourced, falling below standards for our discipline, involving sweatshop labour and no consent for private data used in experiments. The output can contain direct original input data (i.e. double dipping), but smoothed to remove outliers, conform to our pre-existing ideas of what it should look like (data fabrication), and all-round irreplicable. Psychology is meant to study humans, not patterns at the output of biased statistical models.

1 13 59

Reposted by James Winters

steven t. piantadosi @spiantado.bsky.social · 13d

A paper by Josh Rule from my lab providing some formal tools for how to think about innateness -- and trying to pinpoint exactly why Fodor's claims that everything is innate is nonsense.

arxiv.org/abs/2505.18277

The end of radical concept nativism

Though humans seem to be remarkable learners, arguments in cognitive science and philosophy of mind have long maintained that learning something fundamentally new is impossible. Specifically, Jerry Fo...

arxiv.org

1 2 18

Reposted by James Winters

Franziska Brändle @frabraendle.bsky.social · 12d

What influences whether people have fun with a task?

Our paper “Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations and success influence enjoyment in video games” with @thecharleywu.bsky.social and @ericschulz.bsky.social now in Scientific Reports!

rdcu.be/eI069

Paper summary below 1/4

Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games

Scientific Reports - Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games

rdcu.be

1 16 56

Reposted by James Winters

Alejandro Pérez Velilla @apvelilla.bsky.social · Jan 29

My first PhD project is out there. Thank you to my advisor @psmaldino.bsky.social and to mentor, co-author and friend @babeheim.bsky.social for encouraging and helping build this exciting and insightful collaboration. Onwards!

Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · Jan 28

The Development of Risk Attitudes and their Cultural Transmission

New preprint w/ Alejandro Pérez Velilla & @babeheim.bsky.social. This is one of the best modeling papers I have ever been involved in, tackling developmental, cultural, and class differences in risk attitudes.
osf.io/preprints/so...

The Development of Risk Attitudes and their Cultural
Transmission. We use cultural evolutionary models to examine how individual experiences and culturally-inherited information jointly shape risk attitudes under environmental uncertainty. We find
that learning processes not only generate plausible variation in risk attitudes, but also that conservative learning strategies—emphasizing the preservation of generational knowledge—excel in high-risk environments, promoting stable wealth accumulation and long-term survival but limiting asset growth as conditions improve. In contrast, exploratory learning strategies—leveraging risk-free juvenile exploration and peer influence—foster risk-tolerant attitudes that thrive in affluent, low-risk settings where wealth buffers and social safety nets reduce the costs of miscalculations. Introducing economic stratification to the model reveals how wealth disparities and
inter-class interactions reinforce these patterns, exacerbating differences in learning strategies and risk-taking behaviors, and perpetuating socioeconomic inequalities through the cultural inertia of excessive risk aversion. By uniting developmental, social, and evolutionary perspectives,
our framework provides a novel lens on the cultural evolution of risk attitudes and their broader
societal implications.

1 14 38

Reposted by James Winters

Alberto Acerbi @acerbialberto.com · 14d

New preprint!

"Weapon and Poison: Framing Disinformation in European Commission Speeches, 2016–2024"

osf.io/preprints/so...

OSF

osf.io

1 3 5

Reposted by James Winters

spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · Aug 3

Welcome to the ✨For You✨ feed!

It finds people who liked the same posts as you, and shows you what else they've liked recently.

📌 Pin to add it to your top bar
❤️ Like the feed and repost to spread the goodness

21 150 770

James Winters @replicatedtypo.bsky.social · 18d

And most of the time the rest of us wish you said nothing at all.

Reposted by James Winters

Zach Garfield @zhgarfield.com · 22d

#HBES2026 abstract submissions are live! More exciting details to come soon.

Arrive early for @ces2026.bsky.social

@humbehevosoc.bsky.social

HBES2026 @hbes2026.bsky.social · 22d

We’re delighted to share that the 37th annual Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference (HBES2026) website is now live!

#HBES2026

5 13

Reposted by James Winters

Bret Beheim @babeheim.bsky.social · 28d

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go!

400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

Miyagawa Shuntei's 1898 painting, "Playing Go (Japanese Chess)"

2 46 110

Reposted by James Winters

Riccardo Fusaroli @fusaroli.bsky.social · 29d

Why does Western Paleolithic cave art strongly prefer animal side views and often use abbreviations? Our new paper in Topics in Cognitive Science challenges long-held assumptions about these artistic choices using cognitive science experiments. A thread 1/n
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

1 21 71

Reposted by James Winters

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com · 29d

Abstract submission now open for the next Cultural Evolution Society conference in Rabat, Morocco next May @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social @ces2026.bsky.social

Cultural Evolution Society @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social · Sep 13

We are delighted to announce that the CES2026 conference website is now live! We invite you to submit your presentation proposals using the link on the webpage, deadline November 16th:
airess.fgses-um6p.ma/ces2026

Cultural Evolution Society 2026 Conference | Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique - FGSES

airess.fgses-um6p.ma

2 20 26

Reposted by James Winters

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · Sep 14

“individuals tend to report more accurately about the partners with whom they shared knowledge than about those from whom they received knowledge….findings provide important empirical evidence on how community-wide cultural transmission is structured by demography and perception”

Transmission networks of long-term and short-term knowledge in a foraging society

Abstract. Cultural transmission across generations is key to cumulative cultural evolution. While several mechanisms—such as vertical, horizontal, and obli

academic.oup.com

1 12 48

Reposted by James Winters

Cultural Evolution Society @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social · Sep 13

The count down starts for #CESRabat! Follow @ces2026.bsky.social and join us May 11-13 next year for an exciting meeting in Rabat, Morocco.

Massive thanks to the #CESRabat organising committee:
Sarah Alami (co-chair)
Mathieu Charbonneau (co-chair)
Zachary Garfield
Edmond Seabright

2 45 61

Reposted by James Winters

Jean-Baptiste Camps @jbcamps.bsky.social · Sep 12

We're officially launching the new PSL CultureLab in 10 days !
If you're interested in the research of a collective bridging Computational Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Evolution, you can check our programme (and come to our event, if you're in Paris 22 September):
psl.eu/agenda/collo...

Colloque inaugural du Grand programme de recherche CultureLab | PSL

Recherche, CultureLab inaugure ses travaux le 22 septembre 2025 au Campus Condorcet avec une journée consacrée aux sciences humaines et sociales computationnelles et à l’évolution culturelle. , Le Gra...

psl.eu

1 12 21

Reposted by James Winters

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

99 1.6K 3.1K

Reposted by James Winters

Joshua Conrad Jackson @joshcjackson.bsky.social · Sep 5

@helenamiton.bsky.social and I have a new paper out:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Past theories focus on how we evolve complex technologies (jet engines), but neglect cultural innovations that help us operate these technologies (pilot checklist)

Paper has tons of examples and new theory!

2 11 21