Olivier Morin

Modelling the emergence of open-ended technological evolution Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively improve technologies in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually exp...

🚨🚨 New preprint 📜 with Mathieu Charbonneau (@matcharbonneau.bsky.social‬): Modelling the emergence of open-ended technological evolution (arxiv.org/abs/2508.04828). Feedback welcomed! #Evolution #Technology #Culture #OpenEnded #TechnologicalEvolution #CulturalEvolution 🧵: 1/29

I'd join the class action if I were US-based.

From ancient Greece to the Arabic golden age, scholars have been driven by their curiosity to investigate astronomy, history, philosophy, and sundry other disciplines. Is there a structure to that curiosity? Are astronomers as likely to also be historians or to also be philosophers?

Adding AI watermark to latest paper...

We just played Hitster at a family gathering and it was a perfect example of what they found. Teams compete to guess when hit songs came out. Even though this was my extended family and we don't meet often, teams needed only two rounds before deciding whose hunches commanded respect.

one of my favorite science stories got debunked...

We often have to judge who is knowledgeable—precisely when we are not. Can humans really do that? Our new paper in Psychological Science shows that, surprisingly, we can. drive.google.com/file/d/1b15E...

Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) - Daily Nous Alasdair MacIntyre, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and Duke University, well-known for his work on moral and political philosophy, has died. Professor MacIntyre wrote...

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has died.

Actualités: Les ours en peluche ont-ils évolué culturellement pour devenir plus mignons ? Quand un projet étudiant débouche sur une publication. | DEC Département d'études cognitives Recherche: Une étude menée sous forme de projet collectif impliquant des étudiantes et des étudiants du Master de sciences cognitives de PSL a débouché sur la publication d’un article dans Journal of ...

PUBLICATION I 🐻 Les ours en peluche ont-ils évolué culturellement pour devenir plus mignons ? Un projet étudiant @psl-univ.bsky.social @normalesup.bsky.social explore l'impact de la perception de la mignonnerie sur l'évolution des artefacts culturels et débouche sur une publication 👉 bit.ly/3YUZnw5

Extremely difficult to read document in cursive script. Actually this is a charter of lady Clotilde, Paris AN/K//2/10, from 673

My therapist: Don’t worry, Merovingian cursive is not real, it can’t hurt you

Merovingian cursive:

How are humans able to make sense of time? Not with special biology but with “time tools”—ideas, practices, and artifacts that render time more concrete.

My new paper explores this vast, varied toolkit—one that makes use of knots, nuts, hands, flowers, mountains, shadows, and much more.

(link 👇)

$500 million is… less than 1.25% of the NIH’s 2024 budget.

When I say there is no capacity to absorb the shock, I mean it.

"Literary Fiction Indicates Early Modernization in
China Prior to Western Influence"
sociologicalscience.com/download/vol...

A harrowing tale

"What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at midday, and three feet in the evening?"

This riddle is thousands of years old, but why does it stick with us?

In our new paper, we argue that the feeling of insight might explain the lasting success of some cultural products: tinyurl.com/4j756h9a

Sick of being taken advantage of by OTHER PACKAGES?!

Use python package {tariff} to show those packages WHO IS BOSS.

Make Reinventing The Wheel Great Again!

pypi.org/project/tari...

15 positions in AI at Paris Sciences et Lettres, computational social science and ethics very much included. I believe these are four-year "fellow" positions requiring some teaching during that term. #MLSky recrutement.psl.eu/en/pnp8wd2rbs

Extensive compositionality in the vocal system of bonobos Compositionality, the capacity to combine meaningful elements into larger meaningful structures, is a hallmark of human language. Compositionality can be trivial (the combination’s meaning is the sum ...

🚨New in @science.org🚨
With Simon Townsend (@nccrlanguage.bsky.social) and Martin Surbeck, we have investigated whether wild bonobos can combine calls in complex combinations, similar to how humans combine words into sentences 🧪
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#ScienceResearch #AnimalCommunication

On the subject of, you know, all *this* I came across a poem about the end of the world crammed into the flyleaf of a 10th century manuscript. Wanna hear it?

Of course you do. Buckle up.

Listen, earth. Listen, edge of the great sea.

La 24ᵉédition du Forum des Sciences Cognitives aura lieu le 29 mars 2025 à l'@normalesup.bsky.social @psl-univ.bsky.social ! Le thème 👉 Cognition, Art et Créativité. Le forum sera suivi d'une soirée festive ! Programme et inscription sur fsc2025.heysummit.com. Venez découvrir les #SciencesCog !

Great PhD opportunity in the team I recently joined here in Marseille: exciting ERC-funded project on thought without language (🐝 & 🐒), amazing people, and the Mediterranean weather isn’t bad either! 😉☀️

Canada joins Horizon Europe programme Canada is joining the growing group of non-EU countries who have associated to the EU's research and innovation programme, Horizon Europe, and will work jointly on large-scale projects tackling our bi...

Canada joins Horizon Europe programme

Evidence for word order harmony between abstract categories in silent gesture Cross-category harmony is the tendency for languages to use consistent orders of heads and dependents across different types of phrases. For example, …

Very proud of this new paper w/ Cliodhna Hughes & Jenny Culbertson. We show people generalise silent gesture orders from the verb phrase to the prepositional phrase harmonically. This was Cliodhna’s undergraduate disseration (!) An extraordinary achievement. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Ingénieur de recherches en sciences humaines et sociales computationnelles Project context and objectives:

The CultureLab at PSL, Paris, is recruiting a research engineer in #dh, computational social sciences and cultural evolution.
We're looking for skills in data science, machine learning and programming.
4 years position.
euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/323661

Three AI-powered steps to faster, smarter peer review Tired of spending countless hours on peer reviews? An AI-assisted workflow could help.

Let's talk about this Nature piece in more detail.

I've rarely read something so anti-scientific anywhere short of the National Review.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Philippe de Gaulle — Wikipédia

un point de donnée intéressant (pas un hasard bien sûr) fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp...

ailsntua/Chordonomicon · Datasets at Hugging Face We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Here the Chordonomicon, a dataset of 666,000 songs with chord progressions, release date, genre, Spotify ID. I wonder if the number of songs is by chance. huggingface.co/datasets/ail...

Scholarship Under Autocracy We Have Been Here Before

I wrote this for my US friends and colleagues, but also for all of us. Lessons from the past. open.substack.com/pub/verakemp...

Bit of a belated post, but hopefully still new exciting news for some! We are delighted to announce that the next Cultural Evolution Society Conference will be in Rabat, Morocco, provisionally 11-13 May 2026, at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University.

culturalevolutionsociety.org/news-and-eve...