Ehud
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duhe.bsky.social
Ehud
@duhe.bsky.social
4.3K followers 780 following 5.4K posts
Do you really don’t know?

(I’m a philosopher and historian of biology, interested in all things evolutionary, #genetic, or #cognitive. I find most things ridiculous.)
http://www.ehudlamm.com
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duhe.bsky.social
Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · May 29
New paper alert:
Finkel & Lamm, Cultural evolution beyond the individual: what human collective knowledge adds to high fidelity copying.

This is the third in the Distributed Adaptation series.

Many thanks to the diligent reviewers! #philbio #cultevo

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Our analysis points to several conclusions. First, the phenomena highlighted by the notion of DA are contexts of selection, and may favor traits beyond high-fidelity copying. Second, high-fidelity copying is neither necessary nor sufficient for explaining these cultural phenomena. Studying these DA phenomena draws attention to the likely importance of cognitive abilities beyond copying (i.e.– imitation or emulation), that support knowledge aggregation processes. They also highlight the importance of population structure, distribution of a population in the environment, and population density, that are also emphasized by other proposals discussed above. Third, because DAs rely on a variety of population level processes there does not seem to be a general mechanism ensuring a ratchet effect on DAs, unlike the role attributed to high fidelity copying in CCE. Fourth, some games through which children acquire skills are contexts of information acquisition or learning that occurs not only through imitation.
Reposted by Ehud
rebeccasear.bsky.social
"We assess the contributions of behavioural ecology to fundamental science & its application to global challenges. In all cases, progress has relied on a hypothesis-driven approach that combines mathematical modelling with empirical testing and the strategic choice of simplifying assumptions"
Behavioural ecology in the twenty-first century - Nature Ecology & Evolution
This Perspective discusses how the field of behavioural ecology has contributed to fundamental science and tackling global challenges, ranging from understanding how natural selection leads to adaptat...
www.nature.com
November 27, 2025 at 9:11 AM
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sanjasreckovic.bsky.social
✨️Call for abstracts✨️
Excited to be organizing together with @leonarddung.bsky.social, @birchlse.bsky.social and Albert Newen the RUB-LSE joint workshop
"Animal Minds: New Theories and New Observations"
Bochum 9-10 Feb 2026

Join us! 🦧🐦🐙🐀🐬🦀🐜
Abstracts due 1 Dec 2025
philevents.org/event/show/1...
Ruhr-University Bochum & London School of Economics joint workshop “Animal Minds: New Theories and New Observations”
The following speakers are confirmed: Colin Allen, Kristin Andrews, Jonathan Birch, Tomer Czaczkes, Rebecca Dreier, Leonard Dung, Albert Newen, Simone Pika, Sanja Sreckovic, and Daria Zakharova.
philevents.org
November 27, 2025 at 12:24 AM
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rebeccasear.bsky.social
Retraction Watch has covered the problem of the “national IQ” database. Should be noted I’m far from alone in working to remove these publications. The spreadsheet of pubs which use NIQ - linked to in the article - was started by @kohngregory.bsky.social; a project also worked on by Cathryn Townsend
November 26, 2025 at 3:33 PM
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We are getting a Hadza hunter friend to teach us about leopard and lion roars. These can feature as mimicry in Epeme ritual
November 27, 2025 at 7:26 AM
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socphilneuro.bsky.social
If you would like to volunteer as a mentor for the SPAN Mentorship Program, you can fill out a form on our website. We cannot guarantee that volunteers will be paired with mentees, but we will consider you when pairings are made.

Mentors suggested on an app do NOT need to fill out the form.
Mentorship Program | SPAN
www.philandneuro.com
November 26, 2025 at 8:10 PM
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bhgross144.bsky.social
Back in the old days, people used to hate the Phlegmatic Screen of Death...

#histmed #histSTM
#Microsoft #Windows
November 26, 2025 at 8:40 PM
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devezer.bsky.social
the tl often makes me think about this. we all would be better off remembering it.

(read up also)
consume.red surrogate corpse @consume.red · Oct 17
whenever you say "grow up" you are both failing to communicate explicitly and fairly while also revealing a repulsive attitude toward children as inherently worthy of lesser treatment. it is always and everywhere immoral
November 26, 2025 at 7:43 PM
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pnasnexus.org
An online game shows that when extreme wealth is visible in social networks, lower-income players support higher taxes—and feel less satisfied with their own situation. Making wealth more visible could boost support for redistribution. In PNAS Nexus: https://ow.ly/1ItG50Xyijf
A group of friends toasting on a boat. Stock photo.
November 26, 2025 at 8:01 PM
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jayvanbavel.bsky.social
Waitlisting people can lead to inequality.

A study of 274,316 students finds that low-SES students are much less likely to wait for offers to preferred schools. This led low-SES students to ultimately enroll in programs they liked less and that were less prestigious.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
November 26, 2025 at 7:33 PM
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standing-together.bsky.social
We were also just in France! Standing Together leaders Sondos Anabtawi, Itamar Avneri, and Thawra Abukhdeir visited Paris and Bordeaux and met with @fostfranceeurope.bsky.social, Foreign Ministry representatives and politicians from various parties, as well as the organization SOS Racisme. (1/2)
November 25, 2025 at 5:35 PM
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pbarmby.bsky.social
Pals, I have been cleared to populate the “philosophical speculative fiction” shelf in the mini-library at @rotmanphilosophy.bsky.social — so what do you think should be on it?

Besides “Philosophy Through SF Stories” eds de Cruz (RIP), de Smedt & Schwitzgebel www.bloomsbury.com/ca/philosoph...
Philosophy through Science Fiction Stories
Bringing together short stories by award-winning contemporary science fiction authors and philosophers, this book covers a wide range of philosophical ideas fro…
www.bloomsbury.com
November 16, 2025 at 12:42 AM
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kjephd.bsky.social
"Sunsteinian centrism" as a phrase deserves a life in the public sphere. Its defining feature seems to be a debilitating politeness that precludes honestly accounting for the history of how we got here.
This attempted symmetry ignores that it isn’t Sanders, AOC or Judith Butler who’ve called to overturn America’s constitutional order and replace it with illiberal authoritarianism. It’s right wingers weaned on the National Review who’ve declared that liberalism is “old and exhausted and dying” and committed themselves to undoing it. From longtime National Review writers and Hayek stans like Ben Shapiro to virtually the whole of the Republican party—they’ve all dutifully fallen into line with the MAGA agenda. That’s where they didn’t enthusiastically endorse MAGA to begin with. This is important because it demonstrates an unwillingness on the part of polite centrist liberals to grapple with how we got here. Doing so would require examining the extremism that has been present in the American right for a long time; from Reagan throwing millions of people into jail while crusading against labor unions, to Bush era officials declaring that people in the “reality based community” were a bunch of dweebs that the strong men who truly made history could freely ignore.
November 26, 2025 at 6:34 PM
duhe.bsky.social
Important!
davidamodio.bsky.social David Amodio @davidamodio.bsky.social · 20h
So, is "When Prophesy Fails"—the foundation of cognitive dissonance theory—debunked?

Unclear. The article making this claim is... odd.

It describes Festinger and Schachter as leftwing radicals, critiques the political slant of their funding, generally refers to their work as failed...

1/n
briandavidearp.bsky.social Brian D. Earp, PhD @briandavidearp.bsky.social · 2d
Wow - debunking “When Prophesy Fails” - the canonical foundation of cognitive dissonance theory onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
November 26, 2025 at 5:20 PM
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What a privilege and a delight to work with @coltoncasto.bsky.social @ev_fedorenko and @neuranna
on this new speculative piece on What it means to understand language, nicely summarized in this
Tweeprint from @coltoncasto.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757
November 26, 2025 at 4:34 PM
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jwherrman.bsky.social
I'm deeply skeptical of mainstream disinformation discourse, and it's pretty clear that most of the foreign X accounts are just engagment farming. But to the extent they're politically important, it's to X's gathered elites, not the masses nymag.com/intelligence...
X is where the MAGA movement talks to itself in public and where its leading lights cultivate their online personas. They regularly drive themselves insane — or, at least, further to the right. Thinking in terms of a 2016-ish threat model, the risks associated with a huge number of popular political accounts masquerading as Americans on X lay less with the voting public than with the new set of elites that stew in the platform's memes all day, interpreting and internalizing what they see there as evidence of broad support or new political consensus. If we imagine this as proof of a sort of organized scheme or foreign-influence operation, in other words, its target wouldn't be the median American lurker. It would be J.D. Vance, a man who frequently talks, and presumably thinks, in posts.
November 26, 2025 at 4:42 PM
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multiplicityct.bsky.social
I'm fascinating by how many concepts are really markers of our ignorance. Amélie Rorty says here that 'emotion' is one, a grab bag of leftovers from supposedly clearer concepts like will & reason.

We also have chance (Darwin's Origin), freedom (Kant's Groundwork), élan vital (Bergson). #philsky
Emotions do not form a natural class. A set of distinctions that has generally haunted the philosophy of mind stands in the way of giving good descriptions of the phenomena. We have inherited distinctions between being active and being passive; between psychological states primarily explained by physical processes and psychological states not reducible to nor adequately explained by physical processes; distinctions between states that are primarily nonrational and those which are either rational or irrational; between voluntary and nonvoluntary states. Once these distinctions were drawn, types of psychological activities were then parceled out en bloc to one or another side of the dichotomies. - Amélie Rorty, "Explaining Emotions" (1978)
November 26, 2025 at 3:05 PM
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dasmiq.bsky.social
The pile of data that made Gemini's OCR possible was produced by past research! We know examples of OCR/HTR training sets that Google certainly used, so funding them was certainly helpful. bsky.app/profile/scot...
scottbot.bsky.social scott b. weingart @scottbot.bsky.social · 1d
I know this is the funding/research game, and we put a lot of money/time into soon-curtailed paths because one payoff is sometimes all we need, but: it's sobering thinking of all the clever technologies and methodologies that were swept away when fundamentally stupid LLMs came on the scene.
November 26, 2025 at 3:15 PM
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seanmcarroll.bsky.social
"The Many Hidden Worlds of Quantum Mechanics," my lecture series for the Great Courses (24 half-hour lectures), is still available on Prime video for a few days! Tell your family that watching football on Thanksgiving is hopelessly uncool.

www.amazon.com/gp/video/det...
Screenshot for the many hidden worlds of quantum mechanics -- just the title and some evocative spheres floating around
November 26, 2025 at 2:14 PM
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nicolecrust.bsky.social
Friends at Stanford (and anywhere): Join me for the Wasow Scholar Lecture next Tuesday at 5p PT (Zoom link available).

I am very excited that the emphasis of this event (and my time at Stanford) is focused on interacting with students.

symsys.stanford.edu/events/wasow...
Photo of Nicole Rust advertising the Wasow lecture
November 26, 2025 at 1:21 PM
duhe.bsky.social
Two nations divided by etc etc
cinemashoebox.bsky.social Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 1d
new favourite New York Times term for a British thing just dropped
November 26, 2025 at 11:32 AM
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ehbea.bsky.social
Working on some cool project about human evolution? Do not hesitate to submit an abstract for @ehbea2026.bsky.social 🙌

Deadline? December 15th

More info? Below 👇
ehbea2026.bsky.social EHBEA 2026 @ehbea2026.bsky.social · 18d
📢 Call for abstracts!
🚀 The time has come — abstract submission for #EHBEA2026 is officially OPEN since this week! 🎉
🗓 Submission Nov 1st – Dec 15th
📝 300 words
🧠 Important: Make an OpenReview account before submitting — it takes time!
👉 www.ehbea2026.com
Overview | EHBEA2026
www.ehbea2026.com
November 26, 2025 at 10:30 AM
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danmcquillan.bsky.social
My speaker notes & slides from today's panel on 'Resisting GenAI & Big Tech in Higher Education', co-organised with the Climate Justice Universities Union (CJUU). The full recording, slides and resources will be available soon via the CJUU site.
danmcquillan.org/resisting_ge...
A screenshot of the blog post at https://danmcquillan.org/resisting_genai_highered_cjuu.html
November 25, 2025 at 8:06 PM
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celsoneto.bsky.social
Are you interested in messy, imprecise concepts in science with huge social implications?

Join us online on Tuesday, Dec 2nd, for Yasmin’s talk. Register here: hugera.org/lecture-seri...

#philsci #STS #popgen #HPbio
November 26, 2025 at 9:12 AM
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manymindspod.bsky.social
New episode!! 🎉🎙️

A conversation with @aliboyle.bsky.social & @jomahr.bsky.social about the functions of memory.

We may not immediately think of memory as an evolutionary puzzle. But in certain respects—and from certain angles—it is quite puzzling indeed.

Listen: disi.org/what-is-memo...
November 24, 2025 at 6:26 PM
duhe.bsky.social
Science is about ideas. The rest is noise. go.bsky.app/H61xswq
November 26, 2025 at 8:30 AM