Kevin Lala

Revisiting the human sociobiology debate What have we learned 50 years on?

New commentary in Science, with Gillian Brown and Kevin Lala, on the human sociobiology debate 50 years on: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very happy to share this article, coauthored with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social and Clark Barrett, on the contemporary relevance of the human sociobiology debate, 50 years after publication of Wilson's landmark book.

Development developing - Biology & Philosophy Lala et al.’s (2024) Evolution Evolving is an excellent book. It offers a compelling case for the relevance of development to the study of evolution. It takes a pluralistic stance on the forms of unde...

Thanks to Tim Lewens for a wonderful review of our 'Evolution Evolving' book.

"In this exceptionally ambitious and impressive book, Lala and collaborators... show how an understanding of development is essential to an understanding of evolution"

Read it here: shorturl.at/mgGEm

#evolution #evodevo

Really happy to share this article I'm grateful to have been a part of: 'Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience' coauthored with @kevinlala.bsky.social, @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social and Marcus Feldman. Check out a preprint here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
#ScientificRacism #Antiracism

Slide highlighting article that has argued for retraction of articles using fraudulent 'national IQ dataset'.

Excellent talk by @rebeccasear.bsky.social at @ishpssb2025.bsky.social on maintenance of scientific racism in contemporary academic literature.

Academic journals play a role in platforming scientific racism (eg failure to retract articles using fradulent 'national IQ dataset').

#ishpssb2025 #ehbea

I was very happy to bump into my dear friend Eva Jablonka at the ISHPSSB meeting in Porto. What a great scientist and wonderful person she is.

I'm happy to share our latest manuscript "Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience", coauthored with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social @kztwyman.bsky.social & Marcus Feldman.

Thanks for your great talk @petinozappala.bsky.social

A really thoughtful and inciteful review of my book "Evolution Evolving" by @cassandrazieyang.bsky.social in Bioscience.

"By taking into account the structure of development, we can begin to envision how the system of evolution will itself be evolving."

See BioScience doi.org/10.1093/bios...

The extraordinary legacy of Conrad Waddington was the focus of a terrific workshop held at the KLI last week. Superb talks, a beautiful venue, and great discussion made for a lot of fun. Thanks to all the participants, and particularly organizers Alejandro Febregas Tejeda & Francisco Vergara-Silva.

An excellent short video by @rebeccasear.bsky.social on the resurgence of eugenics. Definitely worth investing 10 minutes of your life to watch.

been a long time coming, there's now a preprint along with Will Hoppitt describing our new R package for creating, fitting and interpreting bayesian NBDA models (STBayes). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... Documentation is here michaelchimento.github.io/STbayes/inde...

Evolution at a Tipping Point - Biological Theory This is a review essay on Evolution Evolving, by Kevin Lala, Tobias Uller, Nathalie Feiner, Marcus Feldman, and Scott Gilbert. The review suggests that the book marks a tipping point in the debate ove...

A terrific review of my recent book in this month's Biological Theory:

Enrico Petracca argues that "Evolution Evolving marks a tip-
ping point in the study of evolution".

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

Cover of the book Evolution Evolving.

Look what I got from my local library. I'm stoked! @kevinlala.bsky.social

Disability in ecology and evolution In this TrendsTalk series ‘Disability in ecology and evolution’ in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, we will be hearing from people about their experiences being disabled in ecology and evolution. We a...

Love this article/series, particularly this quote from Hella Péter:

"Just because me and the other featured ecologists are still in the field, it does not mean ecology is an accepting and accommodating place for disabled people in general."

www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

“By lending his Harvard credentials to Aporia, Pinker contributes to the normalisation and spread of dangerous, discredited ideas.”

"Trump and his allies hope to resurrect biologic race as the key explanatory variable that underpins patterns of morbidity and mortality.... to achieve this, they must discount decades of research that confirms Homo sapiens does not contain biological races."

New by Joseph Graves

shorturl.at/bWoLY

there are times when the dangers of inaction become sufficiently threatening to individuals or the planet that
scientists who are able and willing to do so will have to enter the public arena and bring their voices to debates of critical societal importance. This is such a time.

Teaching developmental biology to drive social change: Pedagogy that challenges biologically deterministic views on phenotypic variation Discrimination against groups of people based on socially-normed phenotypic variations is commonplace in many societies. The stigmatized phenotypic va…

Paxson (2025): "Science has contributed to... discrimination through biological essentialism, either by assigning specific undesirable biological characteristics to socially-normed... groupings or... assigning a genetic basis for these phenotypic differences." 🧪
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Image of cover of book called Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour, with a quote beside it saying, "Sense and Nonsense is the ultimate insider's guide to the history of one of our most ambitious attempts to understand ourselves" from Clark Barrett, University of California, LA.

The new edition of 'Sense & Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour', co-authored with
@kevinlala.bsky.social , is available!

Get 30% off (promotion code ASPROMP8): global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Ebook is available on Kindle.

Thank you to Prof. Clark Barrett for the endorsement! 🧪

I really enjoyed Adam Rutherford's book "Where are you really from?". It's a great book to give to kids to educate them about race and learn how modern science undermines racism.

@adamrutherford.bsky.social

Kostas Kampourakis' "Darwin Mythology" book is a very interesting read. A strong cast of authors deconstruct myths and misunderstandings about Darwin. I particularly appreciated historian Erik Peterson's analysis of why Darwin's dislike of slavery does not equate to a belief in racial equality.

The Social Construction of Human Nature Abstract. What is the job that the term ‘human nature’ is expected to do? Three notions are prevalent but are problematic: (1) Distinguishing what is biolo

The social construction of human nature: “Given that the term has little explanatory power but carries extensive baggage, we suggest that it should be abandoned” [2018]

academic.oup.com/book/25419/c...

Sex Is a Spectrum Why human biology is far more expansive than the simple categories of female and male

Enjoyed reading 'Sex is a Spectrum' by
@anthrofuentes.bsky.social: "Human sex and gender are complicated. Every human body, and life, is a blend of biological and cultural processes, & nowhere is that more evident than sex biology".

press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... @princetonupress.bsky.social 🧪

I am please to share my latest article "A developmentalist’s view of inheritance", just published in acta ethologica.

rdcu.be/em4wW

Inheritance is a time-distributed developmental process by which diverse developmental resources become available to the next generation.

Odling-Smee offers some thought-provoking conceptual contributions.

Should be a great day!

📣 CCE's final seminar of this year is by the amazing @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social on "Are human mate preferences ‘universal’? A critical evaluation" 🌏👥 📣

📅 21st May / 13:00 - 14:30 / Online and in person (ESGW 111)

Joining info below 👇

🔓 Open to all 🧡💚💙

Quote from 'Evolution Evolving.The Developmental Origins of Adaptation and Biodiversity', with Tobias Uller, Nathalie Feiner, Marc Feldman & Scott Gilbert.

Find out more at www.evolutionevolving.org

#evodevo #nongeneticinheritance

@princetonupress.bsky.social

It's always a great pleasure to chat with @thedissenteryt.bsky.social ...here is our latest conversation