Ed Hagen
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edhagen.net
Ed Hagen
@edhagen.net
5.6K followers 1.9K following 890 posts
Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University. Faculty page: https://anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/people/hagen/

Views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer or other organizations I'm affiliated with.
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edhagen.net
But it's a great one to describe systems with two mating types (e.g., sperm only fuse with eggs, and not with other cells, and there are evolved mechanisms to ensure this). Here's a recent paper on binary fusion mechanisms (but there's a lot we still don't know): elifesciences.org/articles/93131
Abstract A crucial event in sexual reproduction is when haploid sperm and egg fuse to form a new diploid organism at fertilization. In mammals, direct interaction between egg JUNO and sperm IZUMO1 mediates gamete membrane adhesion, yet their role in fusion remains enigmatic. We used AlphaFold to predict the structure of other extracellular proteins essential for fertilization to determine if they could form a complex that may mediate fusion. We first identified TMEM81, whose gene is expressed by mouse and human spermatids, as a protein having structural homologies with both IZUMO1 and another sperm molecule essential for gamete fusion, SPACA6. Using a set of proteins known to be important for fertilization and TMEM81, we then systematically searched for predicted binary interactions using an unguided approach and identified a pentameric complex involving sperm IZUMO1, SPACA6, TMEM81 and egg JUNO, CD9. This complex is structurally consistent with both the expected topology on opposing gamete membranes and the location of predicted N-glycans not modeled by AlphaFold-Multimer, suggesting that its components could organize into a synapse-like assembly at the point of fusion. Finally, the structural modeling approach described here could be more generally useful to gain insights into transient protein complexes difficult to detect experimentally.
December 4, 2025 at 1:41 AM
edhagen.net
Anisogamy (the binary sex concept) helps explain variation within-species, but, interacting with ecology, it also helps explain speciation itself: 🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Speciation by sexual selection: 20 years of progress. Twenty years ago, a seminal paper summarized the role of sexual selection in speciation as the coordinated evolution of (male) courtship signals and (female) preferences leading to prezygotic (behavioral) isolation between divergent lineages. Here, we discuss areas of progress that inspire an updated perspective. First, research has identified multiple mechanisms of sexual selection, in addition to female mate choice, that drive the origin and maintenance of species. Second, reviews and empirical data now conclude that sexual selection alone will rarely lead to reproductive isolation without ecological divergence, and we discuss the assumptions and possible exceptions underlying that conclusion. Finally, we consider the variable ways in which sexual selection contributes to divergence according to the spatial, temporal, social, ecological, and genomic context of speciation.
December 3, 2025 at 11:46 PM
edhagen.net
Outlier appropriately named 🧪
Scatterplot showing kcals per kg for game animals of different sizes. The Edible dormouse has exceptionally high caloric value for its size.
December 1, 2025 at 4:22 AM
edhagen.net
Twitter's original lead (for a time, only) developer @blaine.bsky.social discussing @bsky.app, & more crucially, the @atproto.com on which it runs atprotocommunity.leaflet.pub/3m6mw6rogyk2t

One chaotic possibility for #AcademicSky? One day our papers could be published here, on OUR personal servers
Herzog and the Jungle One of my favorite clips comes from Werner Herzog’s Burden of Dreams, where he reflects on the chaos of the jungle while filming Fitzcarraldo. “Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of harmony — the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder… We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and lack of order. There is no real harmony as we conceive it… But I love it against my better judgment.” There’s an incredible tension in Herzog — this rational man trying to find order in chaos. He loves the creativity, even though it terrifies him. Blue Sky is like that: a simulacrum of Twitter, designed to be approachable and understandable — an amazing achievement. But the jungle is more interesting. AT Protocol could be the jungle — if we let it. Its flexibility and culture of openness can be fertile ground for new experimentation. We’re already seeing it: not just existing mediums like events, portable moderation tools, or communities-as-mediums, but weird stuff — experiments that stretch the imagination of what “social” can be.
November 27, 2025 at 9:04 PM
edhagen.net
2/2 Agent-based models have revealed even more complexities. Here's a recent example in @asn-amnat.bsky.social

Long et al (2025) A Life History Perspective on the Evolutionary Interplay of Sex Ratios and Parental Sex Roles www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...
The parental roles of males and females differ remarkably across the tree of life, and several studies suggest that parental sex roles are associated with biased sex ratios. However, there is considerable debate on the causal relationship between sex roles and sex ratios and on the relative importance of the operational sex ratio (OSR), the adult sex ratio (ASR), and the maturation sex ratio (MSR). Here, we use individual-based evolutionary simulations to investigate the joint evolution of sex-specific parental behavior and the various sex ratios in several life history scenarios. We show that typically, but not always, the sex with lower mortality or faster maturity tends to provide most of the care. The association of parental sex roles with the various sex ratios is more intricate. At equilibrium, the OSR is typically biased toward the less caring sex, but the direction and strength of OSR biases may change considerably during evolution. When the MSR or ASR is biased, a broad spectrum of parental care patterns can evolve, although the overrepresented sex generally does most of the caring. We conclude that none of the sex ratios is a driver of parental sex roles; they rather coevolve with care biases in a subtle manner.
November 25, 2025 at 4:50 PM
edhagen.net
Still citing Trivers (1972) on parental investment? There's been a ton of empirical and theoretical work since then. Kokko and Jennions overheard a couple of goby fish chatting about some of the complexities 🧪 #BioAnth 🧵 1/2 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
The paper is open access. Click on the link for the full text
November 25, 2025 at 4:50 PM
edhagen.net
Perhaps the most influential table in hunter-gatherer studies, published in Lee's chapter in the famous 1968 edited volume by Lee and DeVore titled, ironically, Man the Hunter 🧪 #BioAnth
Lee: What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources. Table 6 Primary Subsistence Source by Latitude. The table shows that less than 50 degrees from the equator, most hunter-gatherer societies rely mainly on gathering plant foods.
November 21, 2025 at 12:58 AM
edhagen.net
November 14, 2025 at 2:35 AM
edhagen.net
In the long-running Nativism-Empiricism debate, have the impressive successes of AI based on blank slate-ish connectionist architectures dealt a knock-out blow for Empiricism? Is it game over for Nativism? @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social gently pushes back 🧪 philpapers.org/archive/KARA...
Al empiricism: the only game in town? Abstract I offer an epistemic argument against the dominance of empiricism and empiricist-inspired methods in contemporary machine learning (ML) research. I first establish, as many ML researchers and philosophers of ML claim, that standard methods for constructing deep learning networks are best thought of as a kind of empiricism about cognitive architecture. I then argue that, even given the resounding success of contemporary ML models, there are few (if any) strong reasons to interpret their success as ruling out competing nativist approaches to cognitive architecture, especially given the extreme resource capture that empiricist methods have undergone in ML research. If we care about research goals like modeling human cognition or building genuinely rational machines, I argue we have good reason to support a robust competing artificial intelligence (AI) nativist tradition. I show how this argument applies to two recent defenses of Al empiricism in the philosophical literature: Buckner (2023)'s book-length defense of moderate Al empiricism, and Long (2024)'s dilemma argument against Al nativism.
November 5, 2025 at 9:18 PM
edhagen.net
Great dogs!
Leica, an Australian cattle dog
November 2, 2025 at 1:29 AM
edhagen.net
Left: all adult women (18-60) to all adult men (18-60)
Right: all adult women (18-60) to older men (28-60)
October 29, 2025 at 4:11 PM
edhagen.net
Thanks Hampton. I agree there are strong assumptions. I view this as the boundary if all adult men pursue women capable of producing offspring, regardless of their relative ages. Here's my plot of that model:
Ratio of fertile women (18-45) to adult men (18-60) as a function of female life expectancy at birth vs. male life expectancy at birth. Most of the parameter space shows that there are fewer fertile women than adult men, with a ratio of about 0.8 for some reasonable values of e0_f and e0_m.
October 29, 2025 at 1:51 PM
edhagen.net
Thanks Hampton. As a first pass toward evolutionary implications, I'm trying to use your code to compute the ratio of fertile women to adult men (and I know nothing about demography). Would this code do the trick for growth rate = 1 (I haven't changed anything else)?
October 26, 2025 at 6:44 PM
edhagen.net
The author list for vcd 🙂
cran.r-project.org/web/packages...
David Meyer ORCID iD [aut, cre], Achim Zeileis ORCID iD [aut], Kurt Hornik ORCID iD [aut], Florian Gerber [ctb], Michael Friendly ORCID iD [aut]
October 20, 2025 at 12:17 PM
edhagen.net
I and many others have responded to substantive critiques of EP as a discipline, e.g, this chapter. Is this "circling the wagons"? Or just normal and useful academic debate? anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/media/docume...
Invariant world, invariant mind. Evolutionary psychology and its critics Edward H. Hagen
October 9, 2025 at 12:03 PM
edhagen.net
Yep, and many women *endorse* husbands beating their wives. Here are results from data I'm working on right now from 2.3 million women in low and middle income countries (TRUE: agree with at least 1 reason; FALSE: do not agree with any of these reasons):
October 7, 2025 at 7:32 PM
edhagen.net
I would bet that in all the cultures that Buckner mentions, men are also very violent towards other men. Hence, is there a sex *difference* in the targets of violence? which is the claim in question:
I bring all this up because, in a recent preprint titled ‘Why Incels Capture Attention’1, Costello & Acerbi reference what they refer to as the ‘harm hypothesis’ and the ‘greater protectiveness of females theory’, which, they write, suggest[s] that humans evolved heightened sensitivity to harm directed at women, given their higher reproductive value and centrality to offspring survival (Stewart-Williams et al., 2024). This protective bias is robust across domains (see Graso & Reynolds, 2024 for a review). For example, people are less willing to harm women than men (e.g., FeldmanHall et al., 2016), are more punitive toward people who victimize women than men (e.g., Curry et al., 2004), and are less willing to accept harm befalling women compared to men (e.g., Graso et al., 2023)
October 7, 2025 at 2:14 PM
edhagen.net
Two of the founders of evolutionary psychology, who also basically established Evolution and Human Behavior, the flagship journal in the field, devoted much of their careers to studying men's use of violence to control women.

From the TOC of their classic book (which has >5k citations):
Homicide, by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson.
October 7, 2025 at 1:57 PM
edhagen.net
DIY soda maker. You need to buy 3 things:

1. A 5 lb CO2 tank. Mine cost $100 from a local beer-brewing supply store, which will swap empties for filled units for $20.

5 lb -> 100-150 liters -> $0.13-$0.20/liter vs. $1/liter for store-bought vs. $0.50/liter for sodastream.
A 5 lb CO2 tank, regulator, and PET soda bottle hose and adapter.
October 6, 2025 at 1:35 PM
edhagen.net
Thanks Ed. One clarification: I don't think science is irrelevant to social debates. I'm with Gould that science can illuminate them, but not resolve them. Eg, science can provide facts about climate change, but there will be winners & losers, & the public must decide how to weigh those & what to do
Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values–subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve. (Rocks of Ages, p. 4)
August 24, 2025 at 6:08 PM
edhagen.net
TIL that sequences from XX males and XY females were instrumental in tracking down SRY, the sex-determining region on the Y-chromosome. From the key paper, Sinclair et al. (1990) 🧪 nature.com/articles/346...
THE mammalian Y chromosome plays a crucial part in sex determination: an embryo that inherits a Y chromosome develops as a male whereas an embryo lacking a Y chromosome develops as a female. The sex determining gene(s) on the Y chromosome induces testicular development....The Y-encoded testis-determining gene has been named TDF (testis-determining factor)....Attempts to identify and clone TDF have exploited detailed maps of the Y chromosome. Three types of map have been constructed: deletion maps from analysis of the genomes of sex-reversed XX males and XY females....Most XX males have inherited Y-derived sequences, including TDF, by terminal exchange between the X and Y chromosomes. A map constructed on the basis of the Y fragments present in different XX males placed TDF in the distal part of the Y chromosome adjacent to the pseudoautosomal region.
August 10, 2025 at 8:09 PM
edhagen.net
www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9... 🧪
"The most curious fact is the perfect gradation in the size of the beaks in the different species of Geospiza....Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends." Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, 1845.
August 7, 2025 at 10:07 PM
edhagen.net
I love how easy it is to setup parallel processing on your local machine when using the #rstats {targets} package: books.ropensci.org/targets/crew...
Console displays of dispatched targets on the left, and multiple R workers running on the right
August 5, 2025 at 12:57 AM
edhagen.net
My plot of @thefireorg.bsky.social data. Early on, campus deplatforming was more from the right, then more from the left, & now equalizing at a high level.

Attacks on scholars were rare until 10 years ago, then increased by both sides, w/ a recent steep drop of attacks from the left 🧪 #AcademicSky
top left: most deplatforming by students, administrators and activists. top right: increase in campus deplatforming from 1998-2025. bottom left: most attacks on scholars by students, administrators and activists. bottom right: steep increase in attacks on scholars starting around 2014.
July 28, 2025 at 6:31 PM
edhagen.net
That's how I introduce ggplot:
July 24, 2025 at 6:23 PM