Mariel Goddu

Biologist folk (especially in evolutionary biology and/or ecology, but it don’t matter):

Can you give me your favorite examples of trade offs in biology? Organism or system don’t matter. Primary literature or reviews preferred.

Behavior drives morphological change during human evolution Dietary shifts and corresponding morphological changes can sometimes evolve in succession, not concurrently—an evolutionary process called behavioral drive. Detecting behavioral drive in the fossil re...

Really cool study looking at how behaviour precedes morphological change across taxa - and implications for human evolution 💀🧪 massive congrats to all the authors, including @vivek123.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet) | NOEMA To understand life, we must stop treating organisms like machines and minds like code.

"Eventually, the first-person, embodied experience of being hot or feeling cold was pushed aside as a phantom epiphenomenon, while abstracted quantities like temperature, became more real. This amnesia of experience is science’s blind spot."

@noemamag.com

www.noemamag.com/why-science-...

all about the overall trajectory. 📈

––
Goals for the next 2 years:
-Read/talk about philosophy in German;
-Read more literature;
-Develop a German writing voice

8/8

logic for the first time this year, and feeling more open to doing other activities I'm not very good at (yet), like yoga & weightlifting.

In general, I have much greater faith that steady, medium-level effort pays big dividends over time.

And I don't stress out when I have a bad day –– it's

7/

learning languages in part because of neuroplasticity, but also (I believe!) in large part because they DGAF about whether they're making mistakes. The whole point is to *communicate*, to *use* it.

The "beginner's mind" mindset has translated to other domains, too–– like learning mathematical

6/

The most exciting & sweet part of the process has definitely been getting to know people I already loved in their native language–– like reading poetry in the original!

But the most constructive element has definitely been how it's encouraged me to get rid of perfectionism. Kids are fast at

5/

Outside of personal relationships, the most helpful has been 30-60 min/day, ~5x/week of either Netflix w/ German subtitles, or podcasts.

Language Reactor is a Google Chrome plugin that lets you click words you don't know & see translations-
www.languagereactor.com

4/

new mouth-shapes & lung-noises!)

You have to be motivated, for sure–– and I had good reasons (e.g., Frege, Heidegger, Kant; my mother-in-law). But aside from that, the most important thing has been to have a positive attitude, and try to find contexts where the language is meaningful.

3/

interesting way to:
1. Observe yourself learning in real time;
2. Marvel at the automaticity of our deepest–– & simultaneously most arbitrary! ––cognitive skills/habits;
3. Appreciate language as a *motoric* act–– like doing gymnastics or playing the piano (literally learning to make

2/

L: April 2023 - First day of German A1.1
R: July 2025 - Speak at home; text & email w/o thinking; speak with colleagues & friends; movies w/o subtitles; starting to think & dream in both.

Learning a new language later in life is challenging but POSSIBLE, & deeply rewarding! It's a profoundly

1/

Top of my August reading list (h/t @beakr.bsky.social)-

The evolution of learning (Moore, 2007)
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

look at bird species with varying degrees/varieties of social learning/emulation, & see whether those correlate with features of altriciality

(Has anyone done this?!)

cognitive & neuroscientific. Cusack et al.'s original paper (www.cell.com/trends/cogni... ) does a nice job of highlighting that.

We'll be better able to evaluate evo-devo/life history proposals like these with more developmental data from a variety of animals... Would be cool (e.g.) to

@richardmoore.bsky.social's comment also gives great context re: human-unique social cognition &learning-https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rspb.2025.1072
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IMO, this whole discussion highlights the need for *genuinely* comparative developmental science, both

Loved this line from your paper:

"This perspective highlights the importance of understanding behaviour from the perspective of the organism within their environment, and the opportunities for action it provides."

@enactedmind.bsky.social- Zettersten, Foushee, & Goddu (2025) commenting on Cusack et al. arrive at a similar conclusion to you - although we emphasize infants' social niche as site of earliest intentional actions & 'developmental cascades' from feedback loops:

escholarship.org/content/qt4w...

Here's a new contribution to this conversation!

Postnatal dependency as the foundation of social learning in humans (Kliesch, 2025) @enactedmind.bsky.social
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

(Love the "helplessness" rebrand to "postnatal dependency" !)

Philosophy of Biology Welcome to Cambridge Core

All ~40 Cambridge Elements in Philosophy of Biology are available to download for free this week. Find them at www.cambridge.org/core/publica...

Totally! And heck yeah re: multimodal learning, there’s not *nearly* enough research on it

I was waiting for this reply! I agree of course, but I think it’s more than that! Like, I bet you could run an experiment where various quantitative efficiency/info measures were constant, but people would still prefer one or another better - do you share that intuition?

1. Same 🍌
2. Is there any good cog sci/phil of mind analysis of why/what is going on when some things are easier to remember for sheerly aesthetic* reasons? (e.g., a catchy tune)

*(as opposed to, I guess, more information-chunking / efficient-compression-y reasons?)

Figure 3 is tattoo-worthy

I read this repeatedly:

"The Dynamics of Perception and Action" (Warren, 2006)
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/200...

"[B]ehavioral dynamics... integrates an information-based approach to perception with a dynamical systems approach to action"

The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations “In recent months, a curious fixation has emerged in corners of academia: the em dash. More specifically, the apparent moral panic around how it is...

"Writers have been using me long before the advent of AI. I am the punctuation equivalent of a cardigan—beloved by MFA grads, used by editors when it’s actually cold, and worn year-round by screenwriters. I am not new here."

Spotted in the wild! 👀

(courtesy of @camrobjones.bsky.social at the @mitpress.bsky.social book store)

A cell type in the visual system that receives feedback about limb movement Hartman et al. describe a cell type in the Drosophila visual system that is activated during head grooming through visual and non-visual signals arising from foreleg movements. These neurons inhibit a...

New paper from our lab! This was such a fun project to be a part of - proof that sometimes following a spurious observations down the rabbit hole leads to awesome findings.

www.cell.com/current-biol...

3. Avoids collapse into mysterious metaphorical language ("sense-making", "bringing forth a world", etc.)

Re: #3, Rob Rupert's (2016) triple-book review in Mind is my (so far) favorite synthesis & critique of open questions and challenges for Enactivism:

drive.google.com/file/d/1jNw7...

1. Articulates a bridge btw 'sensorimotor' and biological 'autonomy' (the latter plays a leading part in early formulations, but then seems to drop out; this article explains why & proposes a path toward recovering the connection);

2. Illustrates theoretical concepts w/ modeling;

Grappling w my identity as a reluctant enactivist...
My favorite formulation of the approach so far is @xabibaran.bsky.social's "Autonomy and enactivism: Towards a theory of sensorimotor autonomous agency" (2017)

link.springer.com/content/pdf/...

IMO, it does three great things: