Catalina I. Fernández, PhD

A photo of the Susan Welch Liberal Arts building at sunrise

📢 Come join us! Penn State Anthropology is hiring *two tenure-track assistant professors*, one in human reproductive ecology and one in archaeology. Here are just a few reasons why working at Penn State is awesome:

Why the total fertility rate doesn’t necessarily tell us the number of births women eventually have The fertility rate is commonly confused with the eventual number of births per woman. This can result in misinterpreting the impact of policies and trends over time.

New Bluesky rule: you can’t post a figure showing dramatic decline in the TFR without either explaining what TFR can, and can’t tell us, or posting the excellent explainer by @scientificdiscovery.dev on the topic.

A few friendly reminders about autism:

- Autism is not inherently a bad thing.
- Autism is not a death sentence.
- Autism is not a pejorative term.
- Autism is not a moral failing.
- Autism is not something to shame or ridicule.
- Autism is not something to hide.
- Autism is not a crime.

‘Fear and hopelessness’: study finds one in four professors consider leaving US south Survey by American Association of Professors shows nearly quarter of respondents are switching due to states’s politics

Survey by the American Association of Professors shows nearly 1 in 4 professors in the US South are considering leaving their state due to the political climate.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

How Universal Child Care Could Change the Economy

Universal childcare wouldn't just relieve working families of a massive cost burden. It improves the whole economy.

"There are a lot of reasons building a child care system that works for everyone is important to our children, to parents, to employers and to economic growth."

Stop blaming yourself for your expanding waistline. It’s the food supply, expert says | CNN A leading nutrition researcher overturns nutritional myths that have led to fat-shaming in his new book, “Food Intelligence.” Here’s who to blame instead.

Thanks to Sandee LaMotte @cnn.com for interviewing me about topics from my new book FOOD INTELLIGENCE with @juliabelluz.bsky.social that will be published tomorrow! www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/h...

One more week left to apply for a 3-year postdoc in Demography (deadline: Sept 30, 12:00 midday UK time). Join me at the Sociology Department in Oxford to study global fertility change as part of the DIVREP project!👇

Extended Data Table 1: a compendium of estimates of deaths attributed to anthropogenic climate change

Climate change is causing excess deaths at every scale, from global trends in the burden of disease down to the number of people who die in the first 24 hours of a heat wave or hurricane.

"Health losses attributed to anthropogenic climate change," a brief communication in the journal Nature Climate Change. There's a map showing regions of the world, and pie charts of relevant studies as they apply to different health impacts like "heat-related deaths" and "maternal and child health"

🚨 NEW: Climate change is already causing 30,000 deaths per year - a global annual economic loss of $100-350B USD - but the true damage is probably 10x higher. Out TODAY in Nature Climate Change: the first systematic look at the science of "health impact attribution" 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Transmission networks of long-term and short-term knowledge in a foraging society Abstract. Cultural transmission across generations is key to cumulative cultural evolution. While several mechanisms—such as vertical, horizontal, and obli

💙New paper!💙

How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society?

With @danielredhead.bsky.social
we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

We're organizing a new CARTA symposium this November 7 on "Ancient DNA: New Revelations"! We have an amazing lineup of speakers who will showcase the biggest discoveries in ancient DNA over the past 5 years - and offer a sneak peek of what's next. Mark your calendars and don't miss it!

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised!

3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution

2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions.

Please share and apply!

www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...

Title of Project: Examining school-based body image interventions in Africa and/or Latin America Start Date: January, April or October 2026 Application Deadline: 20th October 2025 For more information including how to apply please see: PhD advert BIRES studentship

PhD post! 2 students sought to join the BIRES project, taking a body image intervention developed in Nicaragua and Colombia and examining how (and if!) It can be adapted in other LatAm and African youth.
Please share with your students.

#PsychSciSky
#Anthropology

www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...

This #RSOS study derives a new theoretical growth model permitting exploration of how genes, diet, and disease, through their effects on body proportions and #metabolism, cause variation in children’s growth trajectories: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... @catferna.bsky.social

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview.
cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

A causal model of human growth and its estimation using temporally sparse data | Royal Society Open Science Existing models of human growth provide limited insight into underlying mechanisms responsible for inter-individual and inter-population variation in children’s growth trajectories. Building on genera...

Short kids are malnourished, right? well, only maybe! In our recent paper at #RSOS we present a new theoretical model
of growth, exploring of how 🧬, 🥘, & 🦠, through their effects on body proportions & metabolism, cause variation in 👶 🚸growth trajectories. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Diverse, communal, gender-fluid: African families’ true history is being whitewashed | Wambui Kimani Rightwing moralists are pushing the nuclear family as the ideal path. But this is a neo-colonial mindset that is truly unAfrican

“How do we in the 21st century idolise a [family] model that is built on exclusion and patriarchy and call it “God’s design”?”

Beautiful short article on the diversity of African family systems
www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Two more weeks to apply! Spread the word and reach out with any questions.

Speaker standing in front of projected slide.

Excellent plenary talk by @heidicolleran.bsky.social at #ehbea2025, critiquing the concept of 'natural fertility': "pregnancy probabilities are culturally determined by cultural rules everywhere".

My bestie is hiring. I wish she would hire me! You will get the absolute best possible mentor/advisor!

I went to a pelvic PT after my 2nd birth, my PT was also recently postpartum. Carle Health only allotted 15 minute breaks. So the pp therapist caring for pp people had to stop breastfeeding at 3mo because her employer, a healthcare provider, didn't have long enough breaks to support pumping.

YouTube video by Scientific American How a cold winter changes your body

Fun video folks at @sciam.bsky.social put together on why 50deg days in spring feel warmer than in fall

Excited to see this out doc'ing 1st steps in collecting prospective daily data to tease apart links between infant feeding, social support & maternal mental health! Collab between researchers at @brunelcce.bsky.social BirthRites @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social @ucl.ac.uk Best Beginnings & new mums!

The problem with parenting interventions in the Global South | Aeon Essays Early childhood development interventions in the Global South is a huge industry built on highly questionable assumptions

Excellent critique of childhood development interventions: "The privileged of Global North & South can find solace in the idea they have little responsibility for inequality. If bad childcare & poor brain development are major contributing factors to poverty, then it's parents’ job to overcome it"

🚨CALL FOR POSTERS🚨

Last days for you to apply, and attend, the 12th EconBio Workshop on “Sex Differences in Human Life History Evolution”!

Just send your CV+abstract+cover letter before March 31 to econbio_poster@iast.fr

More info in www.iast.fr/conferences/...

@ehbea.bsky.social

Headline: Here's how to delete your data from 23andMe: -Log into your account and select Settings -Scroll to the bottom and select 23andMe data, then View. There you can download a copy of your genetic info. -Select Delete Data and then Permanently Delete Data -From Settings you can also opt to have your genetic material destroyed -Navigate to the Research and Product Consents section, and revoke permission to allow your genetic material to be used in research projects.

The popular DNA test kit company 23andMe announced it has filed for bankruptcy and is looking for a buyer. And while the company has promised to continue protecting customer data amidst a possible sale, Wirecutter’s tech experts think you should delete your data now. nyti.ms/4cbxsgQ

A card reads: "These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration." A long list of words follows, including: biologically female; biologically male; BIPOC; Black; breastfeed + people; clean energy; climate crisis; climate science; commercial sex worker; community diversity; community equity; confirmation bias; cultural competence; cultural differences; cultural heritage; cultural sensitivity; culturally appropriate; culturally responsive; DEI; equity; feminism; genders.

Agencies within the Trump administration have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid, according to a compilation of government documents. These terms appeared in government memos, in official and unofficial agency guidance and in other documents. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

As promised, here are the slides I shared with students to convince them to NOT use chatGPT and other artificial stupidity.

TL;DR? AI is evil, unsustainable and stupid, and I'd much rather they use their own brains, make their own mistakes, and actually learn something. 🪄

Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany on Saturday accused Vice President JD Vance of unacceptably interfering in his country’s coming elections on behalf of a party that has played down the atrocities committed by the Nazis. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/w...