Delighted to see this work out in PNAS. The idea that got me into butterflies, started on it in 2011 but took the intellectual energy of @benitoexplains.bsky.social, and the support of a great team, to develop it and put it all together.

Thanks to #NERC @ukri.org for funding 🙏🏻

Humans may not have a uniquely specialised memory for sequences - it may be more to do with how tasks are culturally scaffolded and what they “mean” to participants. New paper

Functional development of the human cerebellum from birth to age five - Nature Communications Using over 1,000 early childhood fMRI scans, the authors mapped cerebellocortical connectivity, revealing early integration with higher-order networks and age-related refinement, gradients, asymmetry,...

Interesting new study demonstrates "cerebellar connectivity to higher-order networks at birth, which generally strengthen with age, emphasizing the cerebellum’s early role in cognitive processing beyond sensory and motor functions" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Common and rare genetic variants show network convergence for a majority of human traits While both common and rare variants contribute to the genetic etiology of complex traits, whether their impacts manifest through the same effector genes and molecular mechanisms is not well understood...

Interesting new @medrxivpreprint.bsky.social study, bearing on the interpretation of GWAS results: 
“Common and rare genetic variants show network convergence for a majority of human traits” 🧪🧬
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1929

Selection Shapes Diverse Animal Minds: our special issue of @royalsocietypublishing.org Phil Trans B on the diverse evolutionary processes underlying cognitive evolution is out today. Thanks to all our contributors! royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

Embodied cognitive evolution and the limits of convergence - Louise Barrett and me on comparative psychology eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Constructing language: a framework for explaining acquisition Explaining how children build a language system is a central goal of research in language acquisition, with broad implications for language evolution, adult language processing, and artificial intelli...

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Trump on embodied cognition (via ChatGPT)

Quite happy to see the website we made for #Darwin’s 200th birthday is alive and well once more, and more extensive than i remembered! darwin200.christs.cam.ac.uk

One week left to apply!

Beyond volume: Unraveling the genetics of human brain geometry Multivariate association study reveals a genetic basis of brain shape beyond volume and relations to neurodegenerative diseases.

Interesting Science Advances
study probing the genetics of
human brain geometry (beyond volume), using data from @ukbiobank.bsky.social 🧪🧠🧬

I think “mechanistic” is being used in different senses here

On brain size? I thought the point being addressed here is what is the allometric relationship between brain and body size?

We did account for model complexity in our model testing. A quadratic model fit the data significantly better )not just better). The size dependency in the parameters from linear models is a very striking feature . This is all explained in the paper and SI

Plotting regressions without regard to phylogeny - as in the older literature - is the more general issue.

To me, the concept of a ‘system’ implies selection. That’s how the appearance of design happens and why we can talk about function. But in practice it’s very complicated with lots of genes and lots of aspects of the phenotype - so agree with your point, ‘targets’ are hard to specify

Suspect Steve’s point is that our paper (he cites above) reveals nonlinear scaling even in log-log space, and doesn’t support the conclusions of the paoer Mauricio cited, nor specifically a power law of 0.75

Precisely

Or selection on neural systems has consequences for brain size - brain size as an outcome rather than a target of selection

They are all loosely connected but in multifarious, complicated nonlinear ways not captured by simple correlations

Thrilled for the upcoming TIBBE online talks &discussions with the amazing @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social & Susan Healy around how do we better connect brain structure, function & behaviours? Next Wednesday, May 28, 2pm UTC, 4pm Paris 🧠🐒🦜Join us www.crowdcast.io/c/linking-br...
@compcogsoc.bsky.social

“males invest more on locomotor control, flight stability and sky-compass navigation which may have evolved in response to sex-specific behaviours, like courtship display…females have larger mushroom bodies that strongly and positively covary with the optic lobes…”

Lovely work!

I made this slide during his first presidency. It illustrates how not to make evolutionary inferences from comparative data (dashed red line, although that could also be stock markets). Today more than ever it seems like an insult to chimpanzees

This year marks 360 years since the first edition
of #PhilosophicalTransactions, launching the world’s longest-running scientific journal. Join us as we take a 360° view of publishing, exploring its history, reflecting on its present impact, and imagining its future. royalsociety.org/journals/pub...