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Will Gervais

@willgervais.com

9.5K followers 5.3K following 1.8K posts

psych prof & author | culture & evolution | atheists | methodological pluralism FTW | comic & horror nerd | he/him Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species https://www.amazon.com/Disbelief-Origins-Atheism-Religious-Species/dp/1633889246/ .. more

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Will Gervais @willgervais.com · Nov 13

Hi all 👋

I’m a cultural & evolutionary scientist obsessed with 2 ideas:

1) humans are the only species with religion
2) within our religious species, atheism comes naturally

I wrote a book on that, here’s a short 🧵 with some fun book tidbits. Enjoy & share!

💙📚
🧪

www.amazon.com/Disbelief-Or...

Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species: Gervais Ph.D, Will M.: 9781633889248: Amazon.com: Books

Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species [Gervais Ph.D, Will M.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species

www.amazon.com

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Reposted by Will M. Gervais

d.ly @dly.bsky.social · 20h

ME: ugh why does my back hurt all the time

ALSO ME:

Tim Robinson super slouched on a chair looking at his phone like a doofus

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Reposted by Simon J. Greenhill, Kostas Kampourakis, Rebecca Sear , and 2 more Simon J. Greenhill, Kostas Kampourakis, Rebecca Sear, Awais Aftab, Will M. Gervais

Eric Turkheimer @ent3c.bsky.social · 1d

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are

Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.

www.theatlantic.com

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Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 1d

YES. Let chaos reign 🤘🏻

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Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 1d

Might have to professionalize the blog a bit for this round, haha

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Reposted by Lesley A. Hall, Rebecca Sear, Will M. Gervais

Centre for Culture and Evolution @brunelcce.bsky.social · 1d

🧵 1/ Excellent and impactful work from CCE second in command @loraadair.bsky.social published in the New Metro over the weekend about Outcry Witness

It’s an anonymous website where sexual-assault survivors can safely tell their stories.

No names, no pressure. Just a record in their own words 🗣️🛡️

Home - Healing starts when people bear witness

Outcry Witness is the platform where survivors of sexual violence keep an anonymous record of their experience, always under their control.

outcrywitness.com

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Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 4d

Yeah that wouldn't be my first choice.

#2 perhaps

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Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 4d

Also: Yeah, I'm in London and the mnemonic came out regionally applicable with THAMES.

I kind of hate that, but those were the letters I needed and the other acronyms were less...fit...for various reasons.

AS METH
SH MEAT
HAM SET

you see the problem

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Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 4d

Thinking about dusting off the ol' blog to talk about the methods/stats/skills revamp we did here at Brunel. This module is now 1 of 9 (!) in our methods/stats/skills stream. So many cool things going on there!!!

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Reposted by Rebecca Sear

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 4d

Teaching a fun science & critical thinking course this semester.

Trying out THAMES as a handy mnemonic for what to look for in evaluating science papers & such (obvs not all are as relevant for every paper)...

THAMES mnemonic for reading science:

T
Theory
•What BIG IDEA is the focus?

H
Hypothesis
•What SMALLER IDEA is actually getting tested?

A
Assumptions &
Alternatives
•What needs to be true to connect T:H?
•What else could explain results/predictions?

M
Methods:
Measures & Manipulations
•Were methodological tools validated?
•Evidence that we’re measuring/manip what’s claimed?

E
Evidence &
Ethics
•Are claims calibrated to EVIDENCE? Is EVIDENCE appropriate?
•ETHICALLY sound in practice/intent/implication/application?

S
Sampling
Statistical Model
•Who was studied? Who are claims about?
•Do stat results match verbal ideas?

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Reposted by Timnit Gebru, Mario Gollwitzer, Mark Rubin , and 4 more Timnit Gebru, Mario Gollwitzer, Mark Rubin, Lesley A. Hall, Rebecca Sear, Michael W. Kraus, Will M. Gervais

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 10d

New preprint 🌟 Psychology is core to cognitive science, and so it is vital we preserve it from harmful frames. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I use our psych and computer science expertise to analyse and craft:

Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🧵 1/

Cover page of Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 1 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 2 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

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Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 18d

Oh cool, glad to see these are up! And thanks for the kind words

I really enjoyed your commentary! Hope the enthusiasm for the ideas and conversation moving forward comes through in my bit

Reposted by Rosemary A. Joyce, William J. Brady, Martin Paul Eve , and 2 more Rosemary A. Joyce, William J. Brady, Martin Paul Eve, Zen Faulkes, Will M. Gervais

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 22d

Yet again, machine learning — even gussied up via the transformer architecture — encodes and reinforces societal biases.

This study reveals that LLM-based peer review relies heavily on author institution in its decisions.

arxiv.org/abs/2509.15122

Prestige over merit: An adapted audit of LLM bias in peer review

Large language models (LLMs) are playing an increasingly integral, though largely informal, role in scholarly peer review. Yet it remains unclear whether LLMs reproduce the biases observed in human de...

arxiv.org

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Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan @london.gov.uk · 27d

In London, hate will never win.

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Reposted by Timnit Gebru, Dorothy Bishop, Steve Peers , and 8 more Timnit Gebru, Dorothy Bishop, Steve Peers, Jonathan Wolff, Elizabeth Stokoe, Martin Tomko, Peter Gratton, Stella M. Rouse, Nathan P. Kalmoe, Will M. Gervais, Southern Africa

Oliver Darcy @oliverdarcy.bsky.social · 27d

Scoop: Business Insider informed its staff this week that they are allowed to use ChatGPT to generate first drafts of their stories, while also indicating the newsroom will not disclose such A.I. use to readers.

Details in @status.news: www.status.news/p/business-i...

Business Insider and the Bots

The Axel Springer-owned newsroom is buzzing over new ChatGPT writing guidelines—part of an aggressive A.I. strategy pushed by its German parentco and detailed in a memo obtained by Status.

www.status.news

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Reposted by Will M. Gervais, Southern Africa

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 28d

what to do when a "let's all respectfully debate the intelligence of Black people" guy pops around is itself a political intelligence test and it's wild how poorly allegedly Serious Thinkers score on it

Stephen Nuñez @socio-steve.bsky.social · 28d

Maybe but then "let's all respectfully debate the intelligence of black people" was/is a part of that. And if he doesn't understand that then he has an enormous blind spot and I hope someone close to him sits him down for a talk.

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Reposted by Julie L. Lockwood, Euan G. Ritchie, Stephen D. Murphy , and 3 more Julie L. Lockwood, Euan G. Ritchie, Stephen D. Murphy, Alessandro Nai, Urška Demšar, Will M. Gervais

Dr Nadiah Kristensen @nadiah.bsky.social · Aug 25

Check out the graphical abstract for a paper recently published in Ecological Modelling.

I have papers published in Ecological Modelling. Never again, I guess.

A diagram titled "Ecological Network Optimisation" with attractive landscapes and networks and very clear AI-generation artifacts.

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Reposted by Will M. Gervais

Salty MacTavish @saltymactavish.bsky.social · Aug 21

It all went to hell when we quit painting pictures of oryxes on cave walls

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Reposted by Shannon Vallor, Michelle Everson, Adrian Vickers , and 5 more Shannon Vallor, Michelle Everson, Adrian Vickers, Margot C. Finn, Christine Kooi, Karen L. Cox, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Will M. Gervais

John Gallagher @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social · Aug 21

When the dust settles, and if universities have meaningfully survived, it will be worth asking how institutions usually so resistant to thoroughgoing change chose to leap with both feet into an untested technology they didn't understand and didn't know how to use.

Karen Graubart @kbgraubart.bsky.social · Aug 20

Universities doubling down as public sentiment shifts away from dependence upon AI. This is the problem with the buy-in.

Theo Nash @theonash.bsky.social · Aug 20

The University of Michigan is now claiming that students have an ‘ethical responsibility’ to use AI.

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Will Gervais @willgervais.com · Aug 19

Online reaction seems to have an interesting mix of “I dnf 30% in, too bleak and pointless” and “so glad I pushed through, so worth it, my favorite book 🥰”

Take that for what it’s worth

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · Aug 19

I tried to go a bit immersive for the second read. I’d listen to music from the era/areas (found some rad 70s 🇦🇷 tunes). Followed maps & scoped scenery online. Read up on artists and architects mentioned. Located houses.

Every deep dive was 100% worth it. A 700+ pager with iceberg-like hidden depth

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Will Gervais @willgervais.com · Aug 19

On second read, a masterpiece.

History, power, (in)humanity, all on full display across decades & continents.

Characters you feel deeply for & about. Depth of worldbuilding, tersely and sparingly revealed.

It’s dark, it’s bleak, it has passages that’ll sear.

Not for all, but richly rewarding

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Reposted by Will M. Gervais

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · Aug 19

4. Science of Science, with its data-intensive descriptive approach is useful, but insufficient. Metascience, with its laser focus on a replication crisis in psychology, likewise.

We need broader humanistic thinking about the social processes involved in the construction and valuation of knowledge.

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Reposted by Will M. Gervais

Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · Aug 18

Obviously you need empirical work, and the best mature work integrates both models and empirical data. And obviously there’s a lot of crap modeling (and also tons of crap empirical studies). But the best thing about the field of cultural evolution is arguably its mathematical theoretical foundations

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Reposted by Will M. Gervais

Ryan Boyd @ryanboyd.bsky.social · Aug 18

Brilliant strategy: become the contemporary version of a Victorian bachelor whose debts keep him from having Prospects

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Reposted by Will M. Gervais

Ryan Boyd @ryanboyd.bsky.social · Aug 18

Gotta say genius move by me to accumulate student debt in my 20s that would haunt me in my 40s while I struggle at my genteel-precarity brain job

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Will Gervais @willgervais.com · Aug 17

Say what you want about the tenets of Darkseid, Dude, at least it’s

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · Aug 14

Haven’t been on here much this summer. Have a picture about it

The prettiest mutt ever swimming in a Welsh mountain lake with green-covered ridges and cliffs in the background

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · Aug 14

Lady Tasting Tea?

Dienes?

Just a bunch of fun blog posts?

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Will Gervais @willgervais.com · Aug 14

Heya stats nerdy friends!

Brainstorming materials for a new 1st year course aiming to teach just the conceptual side of stats -- the kinds of things we're trying to do with stats, how things like NHST work at a purely conceptual level.

Any tips for short/fun/accessible/cheap books to pair?

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Will Gervais @willgervais.com · Aug 8

I'm tentatively game! Will have to see what my fall semester schedule looks like before committing to midnight.

My Brunel email from the website would be best! That gets things into my long-term memory (inbox)