Prof. Gillian Brown

What Infant Research can--and Cannot--Tell us About Human Universals: https://osf.io/urebt

Open Call for Expressions of Interest in Max Planck Directorships: Expressions of interest can be submitted until 31 October 2025.

Director at Max Planck - a unique position! The Open Call for Expressions of Interest in Max Planck Directorships is open now and can be submitted by the 31st of October 2025. ➡️ mpg.de/directors - Please share the Open Call among potential candidates.

New book: "Darwin’s Savages: Science, Race and the Conquest of Patagonia" by Matthew Carr ~ www.hurstpublishers.com/book/darwins...

#histsci #HPS

"Behavior drives morphological change during human evolution"

Our new article is out in @science.org today

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thermal Refuges as Extended Phenotypes: Lodge Construction by Bush Karoo Rats Animal architecture has received considerable attention as an extended phenotype that buffers organisms against environmental harshness. However, few studies have described animal architecture in a re...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Here we first quantified and described bush Karoo rat lodges as an example of animal architecture, then compared conditions inside versus outside the architecture, before experimentally testing for its function.

Pair-Living Emerged Early in Placental Mammals It is widely assumed that the first placental mammals were solitary. This assumption has been used as the default in previous comparative studies, but has never been tested independently. Here, we com...

Our results revise prevailing theories of mammalian social evolution, revealing that pair-living emerged early, shifting the focus of mammalian social evolution from the origins of pair-living to the origins of group-living.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our *new paper* explores how flexibility in social categories like gender and race can undermine unfair norms. If we can't read an identity, we can't use it to underpin discrimination. We show even a little confusion can be powerful, and advocate identity play
philsci-archive.pitt.edu/26062/

Cynthia Miller-Idriss' Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism will be out in Sept: bit.ly/4oilqIc

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

From the abstract:

“When seeing classrooms with stereotypically masculine (vs. neutral) objects, women perceived less safety, which predicted less engagement, interest, and intentions to recruit others.“

Developments in Attachment Research Abstract. Developments in Attachment Research explores the contributions of several research groups in developmental science that have shaped the study of

Robbie Duschinsky has written an #openaccess book on #attachment research in developmental psychology. How it started, how it changed, and how differently labs measure it. Overall thesis: attachment theory is not one unified paradigm. Check out this work of deep expertise.

Gender equity in academia and research This Collection invites research examining the intersection of gender identity and the academic research environment.

New Collection and Call for Papers:

www.nature.com/collections/...

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

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...

Thrilled that our paper on the mechanisms underlying social learning strategies is out! First big paper from my @erc.europa.eu & @kawresearch.bsky.social funded group. More to come! I'm currently looking to recruit two post docs, get in touch if you find this line of research interesting.

Frontiers | The behavioural ecology of hominin locomotion: what can we learn from landscapes of fear and primate terrestriality? A defining feature of the hominin clade is bipedality, often parcelled together with terrestriality. However, there is increasing evidence of locomotor diver...

Hammond et al 2025. 'The behavioural ecology of hominin locomotion' 👌 www.frontiersin.org/journals/eco...

🧵1/
🚨 New article out!
How robust is the psychology of social class?
Together with Nicolas Sommet and ‪@frederiqueautin.bsky.social‬, we conducted large-scale replications of 35 hypotheses across four countries.
Published in Nature Human Behaviour:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What would imaginary ancestors do? Thought experiments and intuitive plausibility in human cognitive evolution - Biology & Philosophy The reconstruction of the evolutionary history of human cognition is a complex, interdisciplinary science. Human evolutionary theorists generally use a wide variety of evidential sources to construct ...

Sometimes when we’re trying to explain the evolution of human cognition we rely on intuitive judgements about how our ancestors thought that our current cognition might not be well-suited to make, or so argues Margaret Farrell in this cool new paper… link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Check out our recent review 'Power and Limitations of Inferring Genetic Ancestry'- what do we even mean by the term 'genetic ancestry' and what do commonly-used methods actually tell us?

Reward is enough for social learning Adaptive behaviour relies on selective social learning, yet the mechanisms underlying this capacity remain debated. A new account demonstrates that key strategies can emerge through reward-based learning of social features, explaining the widely observed flexibility of social learning and illuminating the cognitive basis of cultural evolution.

Online Now: Reward is enough for social learning

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

In this new article on scientific racism (coauthored with @kevinlala.bsky.social, @kztwyman.bsky.social and Marcus Feldman), we present five impediments to countering racist pseudoscience and suggest strategies for containing its spread.

#ehbea #philsci #histsci #ishpssb2025 🧪

tinyurl.com/4ptyt6w2

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

Well-timed for #ishpssb2025 👇 these authors are among the few academics actively trying to tackle the scourge of scientific racism. Would be great to see more historians and philosophers of science engage with this problem

Excited to see 1st of the Evoluionary Human Sciences special issue on scientific racism come out! @kevinlala.bsky.social @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social @kztwyman.bsky.social & Marcus Feldman discuss impediments to countering racist pseudoscience & present 5 solutions www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Introductory slide to the talk.

Excellent talk by Cora Stuhrmann @monoclemind.bsky.social on the history of the term 'biological determinism' within the human sociobiology debates.

S J Gould, who coined the term, eventually wrote The Mismeasure of Man as a critique of biological determinism.

@ishpssb2025.bsky.social #ishpssb2025

Interesting talk by Siobhan Mc Manus @ishpssb2025.bsky.social on sex eliminativism and the question of whether 'sex' is a useful concept.

The speaker argues that the most ambitious eliminativist arguments face obstacles; not useful to eliminate sex for all questions.

siobhanfmcmanus.academia.edu

Slide including cover image of The Killer Instinct.

Great talk by Rose Gatfield-Jeffries @ishpssb2025.bsky.social on the history of studies of female dominance hierarchies.

What was the early work on female hierarchies, and how were they viewed by human sociobiologists and feminist critics of sociobiology?

#ishpssb2025 #histbio #philbio

An enactive-developmental systems framing of cognizing systems - Biology & Philosophy Organisms live not as discrete entities on which an independent environment acts, but as members of a reproductive lineage in an ongoing series of interactions between that lineage and a dynamic ecolo...

Maybe this one by the speaker?

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

Slide summarising points of talk.

Nice talk by Amanda Corris @ishpssb2025.bsky.social on affordances in ecological psychology.

The speaker highlighted "the active role the organism plays in shaping its own developmental and... evolutionary trajectories though its cognitive behaviour."

#ishpssb2025 #philbio