Adam Van Arsdale

George Philip Rightmire (1942–2025) Click on the article title to read more.

George Philip Rightmire (1942–2025) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

<em>American Anthropologist</em> | AAA Anthropology Journal | Wiley Online Library Click on the article title to read more.

Crisis Talk: Archaeology and the Narrativization of the Environmental Present anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

<em>American Anthropologist</em> | AAA Anthropology Journal | Wiley Online Library Click on the article title to read more.

Challenges to Reimagining China's Ecological Pasts anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The Ecology and Human Biology of Pastoralists: Building on the Contributions of Michael A. Little Human biologists have long studied the ecology, health, and adaptive patterns of pastoralist populations around the world. Over the last 20 years, research among pastoralists has increasingly focused...

The Ecology and Human Biology of Pastoralists: Building on the Contributions of Michael A. Little onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

I often say that reporting on sex testing in sports is like reporting on a really twisted, 100 year game of wack-a-mole where we see the same things happen over and over. This is a great example. (A short thread, if you'll indulge me.)

fellowships.si.edu/opportunity/...
#ResearchFunding opportunity in #HumanEvoultion at the Smithsonian

#AcademicSky #AcademicJobs

Trump Went to War With the Ivies. Community Colleges Are Being Hit.

the trump administration is selling its war on higher education as a strike against the elites who have disadvantaged ordinary americans. in actuality, the administration is destroying advanced education for *everyone* in pursuit of its effort to deskill the american public

Post‐pandemic Inequalities: Evolutionary Anthropological Frameworks for Long‐Term Impacts of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic The 1918 influenza pandemic was a major mortality event that is well understood in its proximate heterogeneous impacts, but its long-term impacts on inequality are less understood. Within anthropolog....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Paleoproteomics in Atapuerca - Diálogos Sapiens - Sapiens Dialogues - Podcast on iVoox Listen and download Diálogos Sapiens - Sapiens Dialogues episodes for free. 22nd episode of Sapiens Dialogues. This is the fourth dialogue of the fourth season. The paleoproteomics specialist Prof. Ma...

I had the opportunity to interview @matthewcollins.bsky.social on his recent visit to @cenieh.bsky.social. The podcast is out now! It's a fun chat about #palaeoproteomics and the ways we can study ancient #proteins at Atapuerca! Thanks Matthew for the chat! www.ivoox.com/en/paleoprot...

How Critics of Racial Hereditarian Research (Mis)Categorize Empirical Studies: Commentary on Bird et al. (2024) Federico R. Leo ́n Graduate School, Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola According to Bird et al. (2024), racial hereditarian research (RHR) is scientific racism that should be curbed by the American Psychological Association. They presented an RHR bibliography in which I found eight works of Federico R. Leo ́n addressing cognitive performance. The eight studies were animated by a socioecological rather than RHR perspective and two of them explicitly contradicted the racial/hereditarian position. I conclude that Bird et al.’s design of the RHR bibliographic classification was erroneous and counterproductive to their own aims and should be modified. I also suggest alternative ways to strengthen anti-RHR positions.

The Moralistic Fallacy in a Selective Critique of Admixture Regression: Commentary on Bird et al. (2024) Gregory Connor1 and John G. R. Fuerst2 1 Dublin, Ireland 2 Department of Biotechnology, University of Maryland Bird et al. (2024) propose an effective ban on admixture regression research that uses cognitive test scores as the dependent variable. Their core argument is moral and political, but they also offer a scientific critique of the methodology. Many highly regarded admixture regression studies examining a wide range of medical and psychological traits fall within their scientific critique, despite a lack of moral or political salience. Rejecting the scientific legitimacy of admixture regression analysis if the dependent variable is politically sensitive but accepting it if the dependent variable is politically painless may entail the moralistic fallacy.

Applying Rigorous Standards Is Not a Ban or Censorship: A Reply to Leo ́n (2025) and Connor and Fuerst (2025) Kevin A. Bird1, John P. Jackson Jr.2, and Andrew S. Winston3 1 Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis 2 James Madison College, Michigan State University 3 Department of Psychology, University of Guelph In their commentaries on Bird et al. (2024), Leo ́n (2025) and Connor and Fuerst (2025) misrepresent our position as supporting censorship or bans on racial hereditarian research. We explicitly rejected censorship and bans, and we warned against labeling researchers as “racists.” Instead, we argued for the application of stringent scientific standards from relevant disciplines. Connor and Fuerst’s argument for using admixture regression to find a genetic basis for racial differences in test scores is rejected. Their focus on this specific method fails to address the scientific and ethical issues of racial hereditarian research that we raised in Bird et al. (2024).

Two critical comments on our American Psychologist paper "Confronting scientific racism in psychology: Lessons from evolutionary biology and genetics." (doi.org/10.1037/amp0...) were published recently along with our reply. 1/

I think this thread might be the most fascinating read on Bluesky right now!

Human‐Dog Symbiosis and Ecological Dynamics in the Arctic Since the Late Pleistocene, humans and dogs have coevolved in the Arctic, forming a symbiotic relationship essential to survival, mobility, and adaptation. Archeological evidence shows dogs were used...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

People often intuitively interpret genetic ancestry PCA plots as simple genetic distances, but this is not always the case. Below are random pairs of individuals that are far apart in PCA space (lines) but actually have fewer total variant differences (numbers).

Dynamics of Deleterious Mutations and Purifying Selection in Small Population Isolates Abstract. The genomic consequences of prolonged population decline and isolation are increasingly recognized, but quantitative assessments of mutation load

academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Not by Selection Alone: Expanding the Scope of Gene‐Culture Coevolution Gene-culture coevolution (GCC)—an ambitious synthesis of biological and social sciences is often used to explain the evolution of key human traits. Despite the framework's broad conceptual appeal how....

Not by Selection Alone: Expanding the Scope of Gene‐Culture Coevolution onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

The main upshot of today's birthright citizenship ruling (that I'm still making way through) seems to be that each person victimized by an unconstitutional Trump order has to pretty much sue individually.
Trump is free to act unconstitutionally to everybody individually.

The Government does not ask for complete stays of the injunctions, as it ordinarily does before this Court. Why? The answer is obvious: To get such relief, the Government would have to show that the Order is likely constitutional, an impossible task in light of the Constitution’s text, history, this Court’s precedents, federal law, and Executive Branch practice. ... The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along. A majority of this Court decides that these applications, of all cases, provide the appropriate occasion to resolve the question of universal injunctions and end the centuries-old practice once and for all. In its rush to do so the Court disregards basic principles of equity as well as the long history of injunctive relief granted to non-parties.

Sotomayor: Trump knew his birthright citizenship order was unconstitutional, so he went after the universal injunctions.

"The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along." www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in dissent, on the Court's ruling on universal injunctions and birthright citizenship:

"The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law."

Discriminant analysis of cultural traits by transmission modes.

An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years 🏺🧪
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

The period between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago appears as a crucial tipping point for the emergence of modern language.

The Homo erectus Female Revisited The Energetic Consequences of Being a Homo erectus Female was published in the American Journal of Human Biology over two decades ago. This paper drew attention to the high body-size-related reproduc...

The Homo erectus Female Revisited onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

If you were too young in 2003 here is what Bush told the American people:

1) The Iraq War won’t cost a lot of money
3) We won’t need a lot of troops
4) We’ll bring peace and freedom to Iraq
5) We’ll find WMDs
6) We’ll be welcomed as liberators
7) It will be easy
8) It won’t take long

All lies.

It's that time of year again! Drowning doesn't look like drowning; familiarize yourself with the instinctive drowning response

The shape of technology to come: An examination of evolutionary relationships between bifacial and core technologies at the Lower-Middle Palaeolithic boundary across regions in Eurasia The origin of Levallois prepared core technology is a subject of debate among Palaeolithic archaeologists. While some argue for a single African origi…

The shape of technology to come: An examination of evolutionary relationships between bifacial and core technologies at the Lower-Middle Palaeolithic boundary across regions in Eurasia www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Three-and-a-half million years of Tibetan Plateau vegetation dynamics in response to climate change - Nature Ecology & Evolution The authors present a 3.5-million-year-long pollen record from the Zoige Basin of the eastern Tibetan Plateau, 3,442 m above sea level. The ~5,000 pollen assemblages retrieved from the core reveal man...

An insanely long pollen core shows vegetational change over the last 3.5 my in Tibet (OA) www.nature.com/articles/s41... #palaeoecology

In the past week, a union leader has been arrested, a U.S. Rep charged with a crime, a U.S. Senator violently handcuffed, and reporters shot with rubber bullets and detained. There is no ambiguity. This is a regime operating as an authoritarian. Americans who believe in liberty must oppose it.

Decreasing sensitivity of human populations to temperature variability during 50–10 ka in China Understanding how ancient human population size responded to climate change is crucial for studying environmental impacts on human survival and migrat…

Decreasing sensitivity of human populations to temperature variability during 50–10 ka in China www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I love @npr, and a special shoutout today to @nhpr.org and the documents team.

Two tenure-track positions at Amherst College www.amherst.edu.

apply.interfolio.com/168795 (molecular genetics and biochemistry)
apply.interfolio.com/168794 (molecular/cellular neurobiology)

Ha! That would be my reaction since I’ve been waiting to shower since coming back from a run for this tennis match to end. But…5th set tiebreak (French Open)…

Wow