Jitse S. Amelink

John Searle (1932-2025) - Daily Nous Philosopher John Searle, well-known for his work on philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, has died. John Searle wrote extensively consciousness and the mind, intentionality, and speech act th...

Philosopher of mind John Searle has left the building
dailynous.com/2025/09/28/j...

He was best known for his Chinese Room Argument on artificial intelligence and wide-ranging work on the mind and consciousness

Ode to the original language model, or:
Give me literally Anything* instead of Large Language Models (LLMs)
*(no predictive coding either!)

By Lady Byronadrea LLMartin 1/n

The phylogenetic position of the Yunxian cranium elucidates the origin of Homo longi and the Denisovans Diverse forms of Homo coexisted during the Middle Pleistocene. Whether these fossil humans represent different species or clades is debated. The ~1-million-year-old Yunxian 2 fossil from China is impo...

At points of our evolutionary history multiple Homo lineages coexisted. Insights into these depend mainly on rare fossil crania, damaged & deformed by age. Removing such distortions, new reconstructions of a 1-million-yr-old cranium from China suggest a surprising mix of primitive & derived traits:🧪

Musical rhythm abilities and risk for developmental speech-language problems and disorders: epidemiological and polygenic associations - Nature Communications Impaired musical rhythm abilities and developmental speech-language related disorders are biologically and clinically intertwined. Here, the authors explore the correlation between the two traits, finding evidence of epidemiological associations and genetic overlap.

New paper alert! Systematic epidemiological analyses of up to 39,000 people illuminate biological/clinical links between impaired musical rhythm abilities & disorders affecting speech-language development. International collaboration led by @drsrishtin.bsky.social, out in @natcomms.nature.com. 👇🧪

Within-family heritability estimates for behavioural and disease phenotypes from 500,000 sibling pairs of diverse ancestries Quantification of the direct effect of genetic variation on human behavioural traits is important for understanding between-individual variation in socio-economic and health outcomes but estimates of ...

Massive sibling regression study finds that human traits are largely environmentally driven (average heritability = 0.3)

Pure bloodlines? Ancestral homelands? DNA science says no. — Harvard Gazette Geneticist explains recent analyses made possible by tech advances show human history to be one of mixing, movement, displacement.

“The big perspective change from ancient DNA study is that people living today are almost never the descendants of the people in the same place thousands of years before”

news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Pan-UK Biobank genome-wide association analyses enhance discovery and resolution of ancestry-enriched effects - Nature Genetics Genome-wide analyses for 7,266 traits leveraging data from several genetic ancestry groups in UK Biobank identify new associations and enhance resources for interpreting risk variants across diverse p...

A project many years in the process, we’re pleased to present our work on multi-ancestry meta-analysis across a boatload of traits in the UK Biobank: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Taps side of head… can’t get bored if I never truly specialize!

I've only read the abstract and I already know this paper is so very correct 👀

Cerebellar growth is associated with domain-specific cerebral maturation and socio-linguistic behavioral outcomes The cerebellum's involvement in cognitive functions is increasingly recognized, yet its developmental contribution to cognition remains poorly understood. The cerebellum undergoes rapid development in...

Another social cerebellar dream team effort: Cerebellar growth is associated with domain-specific cerebral maturation and socio-linguistic behavioural outcomes - thanks Katerina Manoli and co for wonderful work! Thanks also to @imprsconi.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New @maxplanck.de study: We looked for left-right differences of gene expression and cell-type abundances in the brains of MICE 🐭using Xenium @10xgenomics.bsky.social. Possible clues to how functional brain asymmetry is supported !! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Short thread below ⬇️

Key insights (2):
➡️ Key language connectivity genes include EPHA3, PLCE1 and INPP5A
➡️ Brain traits relate to language-related polygenic scores
➡️ We observe genetic enrichment for evolutionary relevant loci
➡️ Exome provides additional insight into brain connectivity

Key insights (1):
➡️ Gene mapping is associative in nature
➡️ Neuroimaging is an informative intermediate for language
➡️ Different brain traits both yield different genetics and converge

𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐝𝐨 𝐰𝐞 𝐠𝐨 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞?

I loved presenting today results from my #PhD at the #Sociogenomics Seminar at the University of Tartu.

Thanks to @ukuvainik.bsky.social for the invite!

Find me at poster 9 tomorrow at the #GeneForum

#language #neuroscience

Key insights⬇️

A Love Letter to Social Science Genetics Some people call social science genetics a minefield. Others call it dangerous, even irresponsible. I call it the most promising field in life sciences.

Some people call it a minefield. Others call it dangerous, even irresponsible. I call it the most promising field in life sciences.

My love letter to social science genetics: communities.springernature.com/posts/a-love...

Remember this? In the 1990s, a popular view of nanotechnology claimed that molecular gears like this, made of diamondoid carbon, were going to be the components of molecular-scale assemblers and nanobots. But that vision hasn't come to pass. My article in Aeon explores why.
aeon.co/essays/no-su...

Multivariate genome-wide association analysis of dyslexia and quantitative reading skill improves gene discovery - Translational Psychiatry Translational Psychiatry - Multivariate genome-wide association analysis of dyslexia and quantitative reading skill improves gene discovery

Multivariate genome-wide association analysis of dyslexia and quantitative reading skill improves gene discovery. New paper by Hayley S. Mountford & al. With Else Eising, @profsimonfisher.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1038/s41398-025-03514-0

A comic of a Zipfian distribution where the curve looks like a dinosaur with head, body & tail

Thanks to the presentation by @anthe.sevenants.net at #SLE2025 today I now know of the Zipfian dinosaur 🦕 and shall henceforth use it in all my stats classes 🤩

Steve Furber powerpoint slide showing picture of Ada Lovelace and a quote: "I have my hopes, and very distinct ones too, of one day getting cerebral phenomena such that I can put them into mathematical equations--in short, a law or laws for the mutual actions of the molecules of brain. .... I hope to bequeath to the generations a calculus of the nervous system."

incredible Ada Lovelace quote highlighted in a talk by Steve Furber. She spells out the dream of computational neuroscience, 2 centuries ago. The sheer ambition 🤩

"I find the type of thinking and writing involved in public-facing science communication joyful. It replenishes my awe and wonder. My value function is deeply driven by curiosity, both in the weeds (where individual scientific projects reside) and at a high level."

#scicomm #joy

For the EU, this should be a very urgent matter of national security. All EU member states should build on Denmark's wise strategy to phase out Microsoft products

Notes from Beethoven’s genome Wesseldijk et al. compare the genomic information collected from Ludwig van Beethoven with population-based datasets used to quantify musical achievement.

If someone you know buys into claims about "genetic optimization" of embryos using polygenic scores of cognition, just send them our 2024 paper on Beethoven & musicality. We wrote it to help communicate limits of individual-level genetic predictions & complexity of links between DNA & behaviour. 🧪👇

@davidpoeppel.bsky.social points out the elephant in the conference: whichever direction of the planet we look, things are bad.

Einstein, chomsky and arendt point out to us that silence is not neutral

👏 #CCN2025

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

Wonder. When the first encounter with some object surprises us, and we judge it to be new, or very different from what we knew in the past or what we supposed it was going to be, this makes us wonder and be astonished at it. And since this can happen before we know it in the least whether this object is suitable to us or not, i tseems to me that Wonder is the first of all the passions. It has no opposite, because if the object presented has nothing in it that surprises us, we are not in the least moved by it and regard it without passion.

How delightful! When Descartes was mulling over emotions (which he called passions), which did he list first? Not anger, fear, rage, euphoria, or sadness. Nope. "Wonder".

Today, many researchers refer to what he describes here as "prediction error" (triggering "astonishment")

II.-WHAT IS AN EMOTION? By Professor WILLIAM JAMES. THE physiologists who, during the past few years, have been so industriously exploring the functions of the -brain, have limited their attempts at explanation to its cognitive and volitional performances. Dividing the brain into sen- sorial and motor centres, they have found their division to be exactly paralleled by the analysis made by empirical psychology, of the perceptive and volitional parts of the mind into their simplest elements. But the aesthetic sphere of the mind, its longings, its pleasures and pains, and its emotions, have been so ignored in all these researches that one is tempted to suppose that if either Dr. Ferrier or Dr. Munk were asked for a theory in brain-terms of the latter mental facts, they might both reply, either that they had as yet bestowed no thought upon the subject, or that they had found it so difficult to make distinct hypotheses, that the matter lay for them among the problems of the future, only to be taken up after the simpler ones of the present should have been definitively solved.

Wow! William James said it back in 1884. Now that 140 years have passed since his call, perhaps it's time for our physiology friends "Dr. Ferrier" and "Dr. Munk" to stop ignoring "emotion" as a "problem of the future" 😊.

emotion.wisc.edu/wp-content/u...

Openness to Risk in Motherhood and "Motherhood" Some Thoughts Related to Polygenic Embryo Screening

I wrote about my recent experiences taking care of my 3-year-old, Sheila Heti's "Motherhood", and the discourse around polygenic embryo selection: kathrynpaigeharden.substack.com/p/openness-t...

„Bijzonder fascinerend. Niet door seksuele ruilhandel, zoals eerder wel gedacht werd, maar door steun van de alfamannetjes en steun hing weer af van de sociale relatie tussen hen.” Mariska Kret

@hendrikspiering.bsky.social @nrcwetenschap.bsky.social #ethologie
www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/...

Whole-genome sequencing of 490,640 UK Biobank participants - Nature A study reports whole-genome sequences for 490,640 participants from the UK Biobank and combines these data with phenotypic data to provide new insights into the relationship between human variation a...

In another milestone for human genetics, the world's largest set of whole-genome DNA sequences now encompasses data from nearly half a million people, described in this new @nature.com paper from @ukbiobank.bsky.social: 🧪👇

Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species

1
To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...