Tim Waring

Cultural inheritance is driving a transition in human evolution url: academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

I had some Thoughts about chance in biology and why it's real+important even if the universe is 100% deterministic

Secretly it's also about RFK Jr., health as morality, and why it's hard to accept that bad things can happen for no good reason.

Thanks to @wiringthebrain.bsky.social for his input!

Three schematic diagrams. The first illustrates selective publishing of internal resection, the second selective causal focus, and the third selective access and funding for researchers.

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv.

There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

YouTube video by Senator Elizabeth Warren Donald Trump should release the jobs data.

Next week, the Fed is meeting to decide interest rates, but they'll have to do it without the most recent jobs data.

The data is ready to go, but the Trump Admin is just sitting on it.

What do they have to hide?

Release the data.

1) Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social at the University of California, Merced, for "Modeling Social Behaviour"

2) Cristina Moya @hyperadapthyrax.bsky.social (with Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Peter Richerson, Brian Vila) at
the University of California, Davis, for "Ecology, Nature, and Society"

4) Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com and Tom Currie @tomcurrie.bsky.social at the University of Exeter, for "Evolution of Human Societies"

Finally, special thanks to Kevin Lala @kevinlala.bsky.social (with Jasmeen Kanwal, Kalyani Twyman) at the University of St Andrews, who have donated their course on "The Science of Race and Racism" to the CES global teaching community

We're pleased to announce and congratulate the winners of the Advancing Cultural Evolution Course Design Awards! This competition recognises leading educators in the field of cultural evolution and their existing efforts to advance its teaching.

We have 7 winners and 2 runners up (listed below):

Thanks Paul for catching that error in our original post! Congratulations to @psmaldino.bsky.social on his ACE Course Design Awards for "Cultural Evolution" and for "Modeling Social Behaviour".

Our recently announced ACE Course Design Awards showcased excellent teaching materials from CE courses.

We're now pleased to announce the ACE Teaching Innovation Awards, aimed at those looking to include more CE in their courses. Find out more @ the link below!

vuw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

(detail) ACE Teaching Innovation Awards: aim to broaden and enrich the teaching of cultural evolution by empowering researchers and teachers to adopt and integrate award-winning course materials into novel or revised courses around the world.

The CES teaching materials library will be open once it is completed. And we are accepting applications for a teaching competition ($2000) for those who adopt these award-winning CE materials in their courses.

Apply here:
vuw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

ACE Course Design Awardees Announced - Cultural Evolution Society

Excited to announce the first ACE Course Design Awards for excellent cultural education teaching. Those award winning classes will be placed in an open teaching repository for anyone looking to enhance cultural evolution content in their courses.
culturalevolutionsociety.org/news-and-eve...

“Young adults aren’t having enough kids” bro I’m employed full-time with a damn PhD and I’m struggling to afford both groceries and rent.

I love kids but I can barely afford my pets.

Want us to have kids? Try UBI, rent control, universal healthcare, cheaper child care.

TERRORISM EXPERT HERE:

This statement is a clear example of what is known as “State Terrorism”: When the dictatorship will order all instruments of its state security & intelligence apparatus against its own citizens to terrorize the population.

Oh my god yes.

Jane Goodall reaches out and touches a small monkey.

Jane Goodall was my first childhood hero, as I loved animals as a kid and was inspired by her story. I still remember the National Geographic specials about her. RIP.

Administration Doubles Down on Erasing History and Silencing Science in National Parks "NPCA has spent months speaking out against actions that deny the legacies spread across America's parks, battlefields, monuments and historic sites. And we are not backing down." - NPCA's SVP of Gove...

The Regime doubles down on erasing history & silencing science in National Parks.

Signs Referencing Climate Change Along with Web Pages Removed from Acadia National Park The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by The Witham Family Hotels Charitable Fund.

The federal government has censored the work of dozens of scientists, including work by my lab, on the impacts of climate change on Acadia National Park. Signs have been removed from Cadillac and Great Meadow. They’re also removing signs about the Wabanaki’s sacred connections to Cadillac.

This is precisely what is needed! I would be interested to learn more. I’m planning a project for which I have funding secured, and this could be a part of it. I’ll send an email.

We stress the ethics of studying human evolution, past, present and future. Some societies are not morally ‘better’ than others. Evolution is not perfection or destiny. It creates both good solutions and brutal outcomes.

But we hope our theory can help our whole species avoid the worst parts.

Cultural inheritance is driving a transition in human evolution Abstract. Previous research on a transition in human evolution has been befuddled by the complexity of adaptive culture and made little effort toward empir

📃 Check out the paper in BioScience:

"Cultural inheritance is driving a transition in human evolution" academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

But, wait, is this bullshit?

🚨 Excited to share a new paper 📃, years in the making, with Zach Wood.

We propose that human evolution is characterized as an Evolutionary Transition in Inheritance and Individuality (ETII).

Explainer and OA paper below:

Also for the interested: @thedissenteryt.bsky.social @evolutionistrue.bsky.social

Explainer thread:
bsky.app/profile/twar...

@svenkasser.bsky.social @jnpaige.bsky.social @sarahmathew2025.bsky.social @maximederex.bsky.social @charlesperreault.bsky.social @mzefferman.bsky.social @babeheim.bsky.social @psmaldino.bsky.social @felixthehauskat.bsky.social @tomcurrie.bsky.social @michael.muthukrishna.com @kevinlala.bsky.social

Cultural inheritance is driving a transition in human evolution Abstract. Previous research on a transition in human evolution has been befuddled by the complexity of adaptive culture and made little effort toward empir

Folks who study group-level cultural evolution, or compare cultural and genetic evolution. What do you make of our estimate:

academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

Human culture is:
1 - more adaptive than genes
2 - driving gene-culture co-evolution
3 - majorly group structured
4 - causing a human ETI

So true.

Fig. 1: AIssistant processes an AI-human generated research idea along with supporting notes, routes them through a pipeline of specialized LLM agents, and outputs both a per- spective paper and a review paper.

All hype about the power of facilitating "human-AI collaboration" aside, we don't quickly implement extremely strong norms of disclosure around AI use, science is cooked.

From arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12282, one of many many efforts in this direction.