Rebecca Sear

Oops, there women go, not ruining science again 👇 Almost as if the claim that women are ruining science because evolution made us incapable of it is political activism, not science 🤷‍♀️

‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished

“[the term] civilisation is propaganda by rulers. When you look at the first empires, you don’t see civilised conduct, you see war, patriarchy & human sacrifice. This was backsliding from the egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies which shared widely & survived for hundreds of thousands of years”

Teaching more demography (and anthropology and history) would also help. There’s no evidence that effective polygyny has increased since the 1960s, but even if it had, polygyny does not necessarily lock large numbers of men out of the marriage market

bsky.app/profile/hgga...

I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump | Rashid Khalidi The university’s draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible

"Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an anti-university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a place of fear and loathing..." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Fertility trends, inequality, and economic growth doodles Some visualizations on one of the oldest questions in social science.

Saturday #dataviz from me: Fertility trends, inequality, and economic growth doodles.

A professor had a $2.4m grant to study Black maternal health. Then Trump was elected Jaime Slaughter-Acey said it was ‘heartbreaking’ to discover her study on Black maternal health was cancelled after the Trump administration’s NIH cuts

*The NIH-grant cancellation in late March followed the release of data from the CDC revealing that Black women were the only race or ethnic group who didn’t experience a decline in deaths from pregnancy related causes in 2023."

Whenever I hear of a new company which offers to select embryos for high IQ, I think of the title of Jeanette Winterson’s book “Why be happy when you could be normal?”. IQ fetishism is very odd. Anyway, in a shock twist, the company is associated with a whole bunch of far-right-adjacent ex-academics

A bold, patriotic-themed flyer for “31 Days of Action” by Stand Up for Science. The top half features red diagonal banners with white text reading “31 Days of Action” and the Stand Up for Science logo beneath it. The background includes blue ink splatters, red and white stars, and distressed textures evoking protest art. The right side prominently displays the Statue of Liberty in grayscale, holding her torch high. At the bottom, there is a red QR code and a blue banner with the URL: “standupforscience.net/31-DAYS-OF-ACTION”. The overall design conveys urgency, activism, and American iconography.

📣 ANNOUNCEMENT: 31 Days of Action – All August!

Funding cuts. Banned words. Fired public servants.

Trump & his cronies are dismantling America’s greatest experiment - our democracy - & with it, science.

Between now & Sept 30th we decide: Are we a democracy… or an oligarchy?

(1/4)

Unmasked: the man behind one of the fastest growing far-right YouTube channels Chris Booth’s channel – rife with neo-Nazi ideology, antisemitism and racism – garnered 2.3m views and likely thousands of dollars from YouTube in about two months

New: I identified Johnathan Christopher (Chris) Booth as the man behind the openly neo-Nazi Shameless Sperg YouTube channel. He had gained 52,000 followers in just two months; YouTube shut the channel down after we contacted them for comment www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Text from an FAQ in Okbay et al 20222: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z a similar same statement is made in an FAQ in 2025: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.14.653986v1.supplementary-material Text reads: "The results of SSGAC studies have sometimes been used by online platforms, including some companies, to predict individual outcomes. We recognize that returning individual genomic “results” can be a fun way to engage people in research and other projects and to feed or stoke their interest in genomics. But it is important that participants/users understand that these individual results are not meaningful predictions and should be regarded essentially as entertainment. Failure to make this point clear risks sowing confusion and undermining trust in genetics research"

It is depressing, but all too predictable, how swiftly we’ve gone from the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium offering reassurances about the uses of behavioural polygenic scores to one of their lead authors marketing embryo selection for IQ

Six Months Later: What Their Response on ME/CFS Tells Us About the Cochrane Collaboration - Absolutely Maybe Six months ago, I wrote a post called “When journal, scientific society, and community values clash.” I recounted the tale of the…

Six months later: What their response on ME/CFS tells us about the Cochrane Collaboration.

New post at Absolutely Maybe .... 1/2

absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2025/07/31/s...

#MECFS

Life expectancy losses in the Gaza Strip during the period October, 2023, to September, 2024 Our approach to estimating life expectancy losses in this study is conservative as it ignores the indirect effect of the war on mortality. Even ignoring this indirect effect, results show that the ong...

According to a study published in The Lancet, life expectancy at birth in Gaza declined by almost 35 years between October 2023 and September 2024, before the current phase of acute famine. A harrowing result of the genocide. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

"THE POST-ASSAULT PERIOD AND REPORTING WAS PROBABLY AS BAD, IF NOT WORSE THAN THE ASSAULT ITSELF": SURVIVOR-INFORMED APPROACHES TO POST ASSAULT SUPPORT By Rubab All, Thiluksha Shanmuganathan, Andrea Groenendijk-Deveau, Nelli Ferenczi, Lora Adair Brunel University London

Last up in the session are Rubab All and Thiluksha Shanmuganathan, talking about their work with survivors of sexual assault and survivors’ experiences of reporting their assault @brunelcce.bsky.social

Title slide Brunel University London "I HAVE BEEN BULLIED FOR HAVING DARK SKIN": EXPLORING COLORISM AND ITS EFFECT ON AFRICAN WOMEN By Ssanyu Kayser IAAR Conference, 2025

Skin-Tone Bias *I am confident about my dark-skin now but growing up a lot of people joked about it saying l'm 'darker than midnight' so I felt unloved." "Whenever I was with anyone darker, they would assume I had thoughts of being better than them based on my skin color, there would be certain comments whenever a man would choose me even when ! wouldn't choose him. I felt bad that they associated me with those kind of women who think they were more superior because of their skin color." "If I was in my predominantly non black friendship group i was perceived as fierce, loud and a strong leader. Whereas in my predominantly black friendship group my sensitivity and emotional intelligence was highlighted as a characteristic of mine. Sometimes I felt boxed in by the views of not being recognised as a full dynamic human being.*

Next up in the session is Ssanyu Kayser, presenting her MSc thesis research on the impact of colourism - preference for lighter skin tones - on African women, also using social media @brunelcce.bsky.social

Photo of Stan introducing Hannah’s talk at the start of the session

The session is chaired by @brunelcce.bsky.social ‘s Stan Gaines, also conference organiser 😊

Title slide: Gender and Red Pill Discourse on TikTok Hannah Mays and Dr. Nelli Ferenczi Brunel University London

Themes • Rejection of Modernity - individuals soek to reesteblish treditional gender norms and reject contemporary Western idoas, such as egalitarianism (?) and in particular, feminism. • Embrace masculinity - the idea that modern men are weak, due to feminism (e.g., emotionality, lack of physical strength), and men should seek to rejoct this and embrace treditional conceptions of masculinity. • Modern women - a term referring to contemporary women, most of whom are assumed to be feminista. Women who do not fulfil traditional gonder roles, or conform to physical standards of femininity, are soen as lessor then "traditional women". • The role and expectations of men - how men should be physically, socially, and emotionally both in and outside of (heterosaxual) relationahips. These roles are propagated by both male and femato content creators. Conceptions of different typos of malas which have hierarchical structure - notably, alpha, sigma, and bete.

Hannah Mays from @brunelcce.bsky.social presenting some fascinating work on red pill content on TikTok at the International Association for Relationship Research mini-conference in London this afternoon.

Photo of magazine cover. The image is a digital art picture of a woman's face, with cutaway like a house inside her mind referring to headline story "Sharpen Your Memory".

Photo of first pages in story called "The Other Humans". Image is people in silhouette walking along a ridge. They have spears.

🏺🧪🦣
New piece I wrote for BBC Science Focus is out, on the increasingly complex but ever more interesting story of early Homo sapiens' origins & dispersal, and the other kinds of humans we encountered.

We're thrilled to announce upcoming ACE Teaching Innovation Awards, made possible by Eric & Peggy Peterson.

This aims to empower teachers through access to course materials in the CES Teaching Library. Selected applicants will also be able to consult with winners of the ACE Course Design Awards.

Metascience Is More Important Now Than Ever Opinion | A growing research field known as ‘the science of science’ will be essential for navigating an uncertain future.

New work for @undark.org. I discuss the increasing relevance of "metascience" in a changing world.

"Metascience is not without its critics. For one, some suggest that metascience could benefit from some humility, as it is not the first field to ask these questions."

undark.org/2025/07/31/o...

Michael Roth is pitch-perfect:

"The White House has determined how students should be disciplined at a private university. This is massive overreach. This is an assault on the independence of civil society in America. And conservatives, liberals, moderates, they should all be concerned..."

Indirect genetic effects among neighbors promote cooperation and accelerate adaptation in a small-scale human society Social effects on fertility promote population growth and the evolution of flexible cooperation in a small-scale human society.

I'm very excited to share the central paper from my PhD out now in Science Advances. We investigated how social effects among neighbors shape the evolution of reproductive cooperation and the pace of adaptive population growth among the Indigenous Tsimane of Bolivia.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

“people don’t stop believing falsehoods just because the evidence suggests they are wrong”.

This. Which is why we need to distinguish three fronts:
- fight against bad science.
- fight against co-opting scientific institutions.
- fight against political misuse of bad science.

Not by Selection Alone: Expanding the Scope of Gene‐Culture Coevolution Gene-culture coevolution (GCC)—an ambitious synthesis of biological and social sciences is often used to explain the evolution of key human traits. Despite the framework's broad conceptual appeal how...

"we propose a “broad” approach that formally incorporates drift and migration alongside natural selection. Through case studies of skin pigmentation evolution and gift-exchange networks, we demonstrate how cultural factors shape both adaptive and neutral genetic variation and population structure"

Higher blood lipid levels after the transition to menopause in two forager-horticulturalist populations AbstractBackground. Reproduction affects health and longevity among females across the life course. While significant focus has been devoted to the role of

Higher blood lipid levels after the transition to menopause in two forager-horticulturalist populations

academic.oup.com/emph/advance...

Abstract: While it seems sensible that human-centred artificial intelligence (AI) means centring “human behaviour and experience,” it cannot be any other way. AI, I argue, is usefully seen as a relationship between technology and humans where it appears that artifacts can perform, to a greater or lesser extent, human cognitive labour. This is evinced using examples that juxtapose technology with cognition, inter alia: abacus versus mental arithmetic; alarm clock versus knocker- upper; camera versus vision; and sweatshop versus tailor. Using novel definitions and analyses, sociotechnical relationships can be analysed into varying types of: displacement (harmful), enhancement (beneficial), and/or replacement (neutral) of human cognitive labour. Ultimately, all AI implicates human cognition; no mat- ter what. Obfuscation of cognition in the AI context — from clocks to artificial neural networks — results in distortion, in slowing critical engagement, pervert- ing cognitive science, and indeed in limiting our ability to truly centre humans and humanity in the engineering of AI systems. To even begin to de-fetishise AI, we must look the human-in-the-loop in the eyes. Keywords: artificial intelligence; cognitive science; sociotechnical relationship; cognitive labour; artificial neural network; technology; cognition; human-centred AI

💫 Just out! A tour de force by my colleague @olivia.science, new paper 📝:

What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean? 🧮 ⏰ 🧠

Keywords: AI; cognitive science; sociotechnical relationship; cognitive labour; ANN; technology; cognition; human-centred AI

Link to the paper on arXiv: lnkd.in/e9nHGkMK 1/n

The History of the Panmictic Population Concept and Its Legacy in Contemporary Population Genetics ABSTRACT The panmictic population concept is at the heart of population, evolutionary and conservation genetics. However, in nature, true panmictic populations are vanishingly rare. As an idea conce...

🚨 New paper klaxon! 🚨

The History of the Panmictic Population Concept and Its Legacy in Contemporary Population Genetics

Quite niche admittedly, one for the historians of evolutionary thought, and population geneticists.

doi.org/10.1111/ahg....

A wonderful thread on the purposes and value of anthropology by @judithbeyer.bsky.social

👇👇

How Critics of Racial Hereditarian Research (Mis)Categorize Empirical Studies: Commentary on Bird et al. (2024) Federico R. Leo ́n Graduate School, Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola According to Bird et al. (2024), racial hereditarian research (RHR) is scientific racism that should be curbed by the American Psychological Association. They presented an RHR bibliography in which I found eight works of Federico R. Leo ́n addressing cognitive performance. The eight studies were animated by a socioecological rather than RHR perspective and two of them explicitly contradicted the racial/hereditarian position. I conclude that Bird et al.’s design of the RHR bibliographic classification was erroneous and counterproductive to their own aims and should be modified. I also suggest alternative ways to strengthen anti-RHR positions.

The Moralistic Fallacy in a Selective Critique of Admixture Regression: Commentary on Bird et al. (2024) Gregory Connor1 and John G. R. Fuerst2 1 Dublin, Ireland 2 Department of Biotechnology, University of Maryland Bird et al. (2024) propose an effective ban on admixture regression research that uses cognitive test scores as the dependent variable. Their core argument is moral and political, but they also offer a scientific critique of the methodology. Many highly regarded admixture regression studies examining a wide range of medical and psychological traits fall within their scientific critique, despite a lack of moral or political salience. Rejecting the scientific legitimacy of admixture regression analysis if the dependent variable is politically sensitive but accepting it if the dependent variable is politically painless may entail the moralistic fallacy.

Applying Rigorous Standards Is Not a Ban or Censorship: A Reply to Leo ́n (2025) and Connor and Fuerst (2025) Kevin A. Bird1, John P. Jackson Jr.2, and Andrew S. Winston3 1 Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis 2 James Madison College, Michigan State University 3 Department of Psychology, University of Guelph In their commentaries on Bird et al. (2024), Leo ́n (2025) and Connor and Fuerst (2025) misrepresent our position as supporting censorship or bans on racial hereditarian research. We explicitly rejected censorship and bans, and we warned against labeling researchers as “racists.” Instead, we argued for the application of stringent scientific standards from relevant disciplines. Connor and Fuerst’s argument for using admixture regression to find a genetic basis for racial differences in test scores is rejected. Their focus on this specific method fails to address the scientific and ethical issues of racial hereditarian research that we raised in Bird et al. (2024).

Two critical comments on our American Psychologist paper "Confronting scientific racism in psychology: Lessons from evolutionary biology and genetics." (doi.org/10.1037/amp0...) were published recently along with our reply. 1/

Fears that falling birth rates in US could lead to population collapse are based on faulty assumptions While the changes in population structure that accompany low birth rates are real, the impact of these changes has been dramatically overstated.

My coauthors @lesja.bsky.social @karenguzzo.bsky.social & I have a new piece in @theconversation.com , which offers insights into why most demographers do NOT think there is a current fertility crisis and the panic about population decline is unwarranted.
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theconversation.com/fears-that-f...