Johan Lind

Skärmdump om text som säger att bygget av ett nytt teknikhus vid Pålsundet har nu stoppats, med länk till palsundet.com

Lite lokalare nyhet om #pålsundet
palsundet.com

James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who died Thursday at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers.

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death.

Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written."

Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating.
🧪🧬🧫

Skogar som kalhöggs på 1950-talet är fort­farande art­fattigare Även 65-85 år gamla produktionsskogar har betydligt sämre förutsättningar för rödlistade arter och naturvårdsarter än vad naturreservat har.

En ny studie visar att inga av de undersökta svenska skogarna som kalhuggits sedan 1950-talet har återhämtat sig helt när det gäller biologisk mångfald, över 70 år senare.
www.natursidan.se/nyheter/skog...

The missing heritability question is now (mostly) answered Not with a bang but with a whimper

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

Just saw this, Wisdom's back, again! 🥳

There are so many (conflicting) hypotheses out there.

"Hence, the CEH currently provides a theoretical framework that risks confusing, rather than informing, inferences about the evolution of human external eye appearance and its selective drivers." (CEH=cooperative eye hypothesis)

Vinnarbilderna i svensk tävling för unga natur­fotografer Det har skapats ett nytt nätverk för unga naturfotografer i Sverige för att inspirera varandra och hitta andra med samma intresse. Nyligen har de också arrangerat sin första tävling – här är de fem bä...

Det har skapats ett nytt nätverk för unga naturfotografer i Sverige för att inspirera varandra och hitta andra med samma intresse. Nyligen har de också arrangerat sin första tävling – här är de fem bäst placerade bilderna:
www.natursidan.se/nyheter/vinn...

Don't just take my word for it ... @stephanielking.bsky.social and Denise Herzing provide insightful comments in this piece: www.sciencenews.org/article/ai-n...

This research is about how sequences of stimuli can be recognized and remembered. It is often confused with learning of behavior, e.g. motor sequence learning (which of course is important in its own right). However, it's hard to reply seriously to an account called Alfred Nobel, are you a troll?

"sequence-struggle hypothesis" 😅

2) And unfortunately they didn't test why performance was low, 3) and if systematic variation adhered to the model proposed in our first sequence paper.
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10....
At the same time, the Reindl et al. paper was creative and ambitious, looking forward to more tests! 8/8

For this reason, we wrote this comment, published yesterday. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
We reason that 1) their data supports rather than rejects the sequence hypothesis, as monkeys and chimps did not perform with any precision in these sequential tasks. 7/n

No squirrel monkeys (n=23), no capuchins (n=24) entered the test phase, task too difficult. 10 chimps failed, 3 completed tests of 300 trials, no chimp learned the task. One chimp reached criterion after 324 trials. Humans did well (humans perform well on sequential tasks, that's the point). 6/n

As suggested by the title, they doubt the generality of this said hypothesis "Humans may not havea uniquely enhancedsequence memory: sequence discrimination is facilitated by causal–logical framing inhumans and chimpanzees". But, what do their results look like?? 5/n

Screenshot of Reindl et al.'s study on sequence memory.

Few tests have been made of this hypothesis (that only humans can in general represent sequential information faithfully), and then a creative new study came out, with impressive sample sizes:
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... 4/n

Book cover of our book The Human Evolutionary Transition: From Animal Intelligence to Culture.

We presented this, and related ideas, in this book from 2023.
press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Screenshot of paper with title, author names, and not all of the abstrac.

We also presented a model that successfully accounts for how non-human animals represent sequential information:
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Importantly, this model better explains sequence discrimination experiments than do ideas from rule learning, artificial grammar, etc.

A sequence bottleneck for animal intelligence and language? We discuss recent findings suggesting that non-human animals lack memory for stimulus sequences, and therefore do not represent the order of stimuli f…

Sometimes scientific papers surprise you. Info on new papers will appear below :)

We have identified that non-hum animals struggle with remembering and using sequential information, in general. (See e.g. this TiCS paper and references therein: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...) 1/n

Screenshot showing removal of 2nd place winner in Birds in flight category.

Oops, something fishy with the silver medal-winning photo of barn swallows, reward was removed last week. This photo from the competition Bird Photographer of the Year has disappeared from many sites, but has remained on this site (so far):

www.forbes.com/sites/cecili... #bpoty #photography

Modesty and candour: the Darwin-Wallace friendship To mark the 200th anniversary of Wallace’s birth, an article exploring the friendship between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.

07-Nov: On this day in 1913, Alfred Russel Wallace died. Wallace famously came up with a near-identical explanation for how evolution occurs independently of Charles Darwin. You can read about their friendship here: friendsofdarwin.com/articles/dar... #histsci

Is the psychology replication crisis (at last) catching up with animal cognition?

"Our results indicate low statistical power and inflated effect sizes in both primary studies and meta-analyses."

Preprint here:

ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Just submitted a book ms! An edited volume, edited together with super scientist @annajonand.bsky.social. Now I'm going #birding for the rest of the weekend <3
#submissionfriday

Another great PhD opportunity: An ERC-funded project on “Children as agents of cultural evolution,” lead by @sheinalew.bsky.social at Durham University. Come do fieldwork with Mayan groups in Belize with her, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, and I! One of three, 3-year PhD positions starting Fall 2026.

We highlighted the problem that arbitrarily chosen statistical models provides a heaven for cherry picking here journals.plos.org/plosone/arti.... Down propagation of "slicing errors" makes it all worse :o #brainevolution?

Postdoctoral researcher in molecular ecology - Uppsala University Postdoctoral researcher in molecular ecology, Department of Ecology and Genetics, Uppsala University

📢 We have an open position for a postdoc to join my lab. It's a great position @animecol-uu.bsky.social, fully salaried for 2.5 years with all benefits.

www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

The project is about transmission patterns of bacteria and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in aquatic insects. 🧬🦠 (1/3)

Same opinion here! Academics no longer engage in critical thinking, and their views are anything but intellectual. I'm old already, though and grumpy, especially about this.

Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.

Fun bet on scientific prediction :)

Take-home message resonates well with ideas in #culturalevolution and #developmentalpsychology, mental skills take time to learn, need social input, & they don't mature spontaneously. Challenging to pinpoint their genetics.

www.theatlantic.com/science/2025...

Vi hittade en artikel på F&F:s webb som satte myror i huvudet på oss. Vad ÄR detta, undrade vi. Den verkar inte ha tryckts i tidningen utan bara varit på webben.

Det visar sig vara vinnaren i en tävling för skolelever, att skriva om en vetenskaplig expedition, "utan verklighetens begränsningar" 😁

Hi Bluesky, I need your help. Please share broadly:

We have an EXCELLENT job opening. We are looking for a non-Brazilian visiting scholar who specializes in Genomics applied to animal evolution, biogeography, and/or biodiversity. This is a one-year contract that can be extended for up to 4 years.

Learned use of an innate sound-meaning association in birds - Nature Ecology & Evolution Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.

This is an awe-inspiring and fascinating study that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. However, the overall framing in terms of "innate versus learned” is unnecessary. The innate versus acquired dichotomy is outdated and has been for a long time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...