Sergi Valverde

📢 Excited to announce CompleNet 2026! Join us to share your network science research in a highly interdisciplinary conference!

🗓️ 4–8 May 2026 | 📍 Zaragoza, Spain 🇪🇸
🚨 Call for contributions open – submit by Nov 15, 2025!
🌐 Info & registration: complenet.weeblysite.com

This moment from our latest episode with science writer @edyong209.bsky.social is 🔥

We asked Ed — how do we talk up the benefits of science in the face of government cuts? He told us that's the wrong approach. 🧪

Listen wherever, or watch on Spotify 👇

open.spotify.com/episode/7Evh...

My favorite second hand bookstore! Get lost in the stacks.

Jane Goodall, Eminent Primatologist Who Chronicled the Lives of Chimps, Dies at 91. Gift link: nyti.ms/48FOuUn

Opinions of evolutionists on the prevalence of different modes of evolution.

Study is exploring what paleontologists and neontologists know about the punctuated equilibria, and how they perceive the dominant modes of evolution. As expected, there is a significant variance in views on evolution reflecting differing backgrounds.
doi.org/10.1017/pab....
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio

We're hosting the 20th anniversary meeting of the Network Science Society at Northeastern University!

Follow our account as we announce speakers and join us in Boston this summer!

Book cover of “Modelling Evolution” by Walter Veit, in the Cambridge Elements: The Philosophy of Biology series. Against a black background, the title is surrounded by Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations of marine organisms—radial, symmetrical forms in vivid blues, oranges, reds, and greens.

New Element in the Philosophy of Biology series—free to download until October 6! Walter Veit examines the role of models in evolutionary biology: their types, testability, and interrelations 👇📕 www.cambridge.org/core/element... #philsci #HPBio #evobio

Noted, but I prefer my own way of reading. Blocking now—books over bots any day.

Or we could just use social media less and rely more on other channels, including face-to-face interaction.

Fair enough. Immersion and reflection are exactly what I meant.

Fascism thrives on noise, confusion, and emotional manipulation. That’s exactly why I turn to books and history: to find clarity, and strength to resist.

If you want to dismiss reflection as ‘burying myself,’ that’s your view. I see it as refusing to be consumed by shallow outrage.

Stepping away from the noise is not self-indulgence; it is a way to regain clarity and strength. I believe there are many ways to serve one's country, including reflection and learning.

All of the noise and misinformation on social media, as well as the neverending celebration of stupidity, encourages us to seek refuge in books and old papers. See you soon.

In 2016 Geoffrey Hinton said “we should stop training radiologists now" since AI would soon be better at their jobs.

He was right: models have outperformed radiologists on benchmarks for ~a decade.

Yet radiology jobs are at record highs, with an average salary of $520k.

Why?

Very proud of this paper in BioScience :

« Too cute to be wild: what teddy bears reveal about our disconnection from nature »

🧸 are more than toys, they shape among our first emotional connections to nature. But their design may also distort how we see wildlife !

👉 doi.org/10.1093/bios...

🧪🦤

Mapping nonhuman cultures with the Animal Culture Database - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Mapping nonhuman cultures with the Animal Culture Database

Happy to share our new paper introducing the Animal Culture Database in Scientific Data: We’re putting together a resource consolidating primary research on cultural behaviors in wild animal populations and how they’re affected by human activity (1/5) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Portrait photo of a researcher

Prof. Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social will join us in Copenhagen on Wed, Sep 24, 12:30-13:15 to present at an exciting data science seminar!

Topic: Why Use An Evolutionary Perspective To Study Culture?

To attend, see: nerds.itu.dk/event/data-s...

Miyagawa Shuntei's 1898 painting, "Playing Go (Japanese Chess)"

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go!

400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it's forever."

- Carl Sagan, in Cosmos (1980)

Visualisation of our galactic cluster 💫😲💫✨💫🌌💫

NASA

Targeted Harassment of Faculty The AAUP has developed a toolkit to address the threat of targeted harassment of faculty.

@aaup.org has prepared materials for faculty who face these threats and harassment. 6/ www.aaup.org/issues-highe...

Image description: figure from review titled Map and compass navigation: the mechanism and ontogeny of animal maps. The figure shows how environmental cues can vary in predictable gradients through space, generating unique cue combinations at each location. The second part of this figure shows how animals may respond to these cue combinations, either treating them as discrete cue-location associations, or as continuous gradients. These differences may lead to differences in navigational strategies and performance.

Ever wondered how animals know where they are? Or how they find where they need to be?

The answer is that they have maps and compasses built into their heads! Excited to see this new review of map-and-compass navigation led by Joe Morford out in Animal Behaviour @asab.org

doi.org/10.1016/j.an...

The Guardian names ANDOR the Best Show of the Year.

“It is unlikely we will see something like it - politically radical with Disney budget carte blanche - ever again.”

The count down starts for #CESRabat! Follow @ces2026.bsky.social and join us May 11-13 next year for an exciting meeting in Rabat, Morocco.

Massive thanks to the #CESRabat organising committee:
Sarah Alami (co-chair)
Mathieu Charbonneau (co-chair)
Zachary Garfield
Edmond Seabright

Exciting to see the major transitions in evolution framework spanning biology, technology and now human–AI systems. From stone tools to software, humans adapt with technology — today’s large language models are just the latest iteration.
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

In our chapter ‘The Natural Evolution of Computing’ (Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution) we applied the same framework to hardware–software co-evolution — framing it as a symbiont fitness relationship:
svalver.github.io/papers/EvolC...

bsky.app/profile/jere...

Interesting discussion of human–AI integration using an endosymbiosis analogy👇

A conceptual drawing of the comparison of our conclusions and the shifting balance of clades hypothesis.

In contrast to the classical view of the shifting balance of clades, when carrying capacity changes due to external perturbation, in the new view - carrying capacity changes with perturbation: both the megaclimate and the diversity experience punctuation and stasis.
4/4

Species richness histories of three large mammal clades: Artiodactyla (A), Carnivora (B), and Perissodactyla (C).

Glad to share our latest article on the "co-coordinated stasis of large mammal diversity with the environments". Long in reviews it is finally out--a work done during the post-doc of Simona Bekeraitė
app.pan.pl/article/item...
1/4
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology #Macroecology

Final Call – COMPLEX NETWORKS 2025
📍 Binghamton, NY, USA | 🗓️ Dec 9–11, 2025
Submit your Full Paper or Extended Abstract by September 14, 2025 and join a community of researchers in network science, #complexsystems, and #computational social science.

🔗 Submit now: complexnetworks.org/submission/