Sergi Valverde

CC: @andrejpaleo.bsky.social

Conformity and individual preference shape nest material use in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) Culture, learned behaviours shared within a group, is found in diverse species and critically impacts fitness. Culture arises through social learning and persists when newcomers adopt group norms via…

A new study by @julself.bsky.social and colleagues reports that male zebra finches balance social conformity and individual preference when selecting nest materials.

Many thanks for sharing your work; I’ll definitely read your book.

I believe that the best ideas emerge from a state of calm, as well as the freedom to explore without the external pressures of grant hunting and its risks. Enjoy!

Demographic shifts, inter-group contact and environmental conditions drive language extinction and diversification.
#linguistics

Many thanks also to @elena-moos.bsky.social, who just joined bsky. Elena was the master knapper in the new study who made the application of the new method possible.

Follow Elena, and I am sure you'll see amazing stone tools (and even dice!) made by her.

Steve Brusatte for The Story of Birds at Pilrig St. Paul's / LARCH

Friends in Edinburgh!

Join me on June 27, as I unveil The Story of Birds at our wonderful local bookshop, Toppings.

Get your tickets early here!
www.toppingbooks.co.uk/events/edinb...

Thanks for the invitation — a very interesting synthesis.

One angle for a commentary could be tinkering under ecological and network constraints, especially in software and technological systems. I’d be happy to contribute from a complex-systems perspective if useful.

cc: @andrejpaleo.bsky.social

Thanks @replicatedtypo.bsky.social for pointing this out.

For a more informal overview of the intuition — including the ecological implications — I also wrote a short Bluesky thread here:

bsky.app/profile/sval...

The Evolutionary Ecology of Software: Constraints, Innovation, and the AI Disruption This chapter investigates the evolutionary ecology of software, focusing on the symbiotic relationship between software and innovation. An interplay between constraints, tinkering, and frequency-depen...

You can freely read a preprint of the chapter here:
arxiv.org/abs/2512.02953

This appears in The Economy as an Evolving Complex System: Part IV (2026), Santa Fe Institute Press.

cc: @mh-christiansen.bsky.social

Nice to see “tinkering” being highlighted in cultural evolution.

We recently published a chapter synthesizing our work on tinkering-based models of software and technological evolution.

The growing convergence suggests this idea is now part of our shared toolkit. @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

Thank you, James.

As a side point: the term "tinkering" is not even new in the context of cultural evolution -- Francois Jacob had a paper on this in 1977 called "Evolution and tinkering" and @svalver.bsky.social + colleagues directly refer to tinkering in their papers on tech evolution

YouTube video by Open By Accident Special Criminal Investigation (Arcade) - SCI Longplay [With Commentary]

Interesting! Is there any connection between "Top Speed" and "Special Criminal Investigation" (both from Taito)?

youtu.be/3Eal0mjjepE?...

Very happy to see our ice-fishing paper on the cover of @science.org this week! 🎣🎉

We tracked large groups of Finnish competitive ice-fishers to study how social foragers use social information when searching for resources. 🐟

Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (contact me for open access)

Dactylioceratidae raw species richness (thick black line with square symbols), without temporal singletons (light gray line with triangle symbols), without geographic singletons (medium gray line with diamond symbols), comparedwiththecorresponding estimators Chao2 (bluelinewithcircle symbols) andincidence‐basedcoverage estimator (ICE; red line with square symbols).

"diversity peaked before a sharp decline, suggesting a possible link between ecological specialization and extinction risk..aligns with hypotheses proposing that overspecialization limits adaptability, leading to extinction under background conditions"
doi.org/10.1017/pab....
🧪 #Geology ⚒️ #Paleobio

Sun rising behind a mountain. In the foreground, two strings demarcate the edges of an ancient monumental road that lines up with the sunrise.

Happy #WinterSolstice ❄️

In Chaco Canyon in the US Southwest, ancient monumental roads align with the winter solstice sunrise over Mount Taylor. Features of both land and sky were (and still are) ritually important to the region's Indigenous people.

🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

🏺 #Archaeology

Graphical summary of differences between disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity and some key conditions to achieve the latter.

📢 New Blog Post
Achieving true interdisciplinarity is hard! @shumon.bsky.social makes an argument for accepting the transformative nature of #interdisciplinary research - even if that means researchers must revisit their standard methods and assumptions!

🔗 read on here:
shorturl.at/YE4gx

Imagine you have no clue that there is an entire universe of people with diverse capabilities centering on the generation of new ideas and the refinment of old ones.

I dislike that Time Magazine has chosen to conflate CEOs with the people who actually got their hands dirty making the technology work.

I’m incensed that Fei Fei Li is half off the page. I’m sure she is too gracious to say it.

YouTube video by The Dissenter #1029 J. Doyne Farmer - Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World

In episode 1029, I talk with Dr. J. Doyne Farmer (@doynefarmer.bsky.social) about his great book, Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World. #Economics #Science

youtu.be/h0Vfoz9n2kQ

So Long, and Thanks for All the Submissions - Biological Theory Biological Theory -

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I’d like to thank Stuart Newman for his editorial work in one of my favorite journals these days. Biological Theory is one of the few journals that takes seriously the intersection between empirical and theoretical approaches to biology. I wish the best to Kevin Lala in his new role as editor.

The Evolutionary Ecology of Software: Constraints, Innovation, and the AI Disruption This chapter investigates the evolutionary ecology of software, focusing on the symbiotic relationship between software and innovation. An interplay between constraints, tinkering, and frequency-depen...

arxiv.org/abs/2512.02953

Much of this work was developed during stays at the Santa Fe Institute. It provided a perfect environment to think about technology as an evolving system. It’s an honor to bring these ideas into this classic book series.

Thank you.

YouTube video by niceandgames Nice and Games -- Pro Rally [Nintendo GameCube]

This research began years ago when I worked at Ubisoft Barcelona @ubisoft.com. Building Pro Rally 2002 for PlayStation 2/GameCube, I kept wondering whether complexity science could help us understand the challenges of large software projects.

youtu.be/ZymLjhhccW0

Thanks to my coauthors @blaividiella.bsky.social and @sduran-nebreda.bsky.social, as well as the editors @francoislafond.bsky.social, @doynefarmer.bsky.social, @maria-drc.bsky.social for their kind invitation. @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social

These ideas come from our forthcoming chapter in the @sfiscience.bsky.social volume The Economy as a Complex Evolving System, Part IV:

“The Evolutionary Ecology of Software: Constraints, Innovation, and the AI Disruption.”

🔗https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02953