Bret Beheim

New preprint with Julian Garcia & @tobyhandfield.bsky.social 🧵 We tested 1,048,576 moral systems of indirect reciprocity, each pairing a strategy (how to act) with a social norm (how to judge others), across all prisoner's dilemmas, snowdrift games and stag hunts. arxiv.org/abs/2610.03832 1/6

A new preprint, co-authored with a great group of collaborators who joined us in Aarhus almost a year ago: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Happy Hangul Day! It's a Korean holiday honoring the best and easiest alphabet in the world! Everyone in Korea gets the day off work to contemplate it, but it only takes fifteen minutes to learn! So today, learn to read Korean in 15 minutes!

I'm happy to share that our digital edition of Carneiro’s cross-cultural dataset has been published in Scientific Data 🎉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New tutorial preprint about simulation-based inference! Shows how to fit a cultural evo model to baby name data using approx Bayesian computation, random forests, and deep learning. Wrote for @eslr.bsky.social but wanted to share with others in @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social! :) osf.io/preprints/so...

A destitute and rusted USS Abraham Lincoln docked at a port in eastern Thailand today, marking its first full stop since deployment nearly 300 days ago. The Lincoln has been supporting the U.S. war against Iran. Families of servicemembers voiced concerns over the mental health of their loved ones.

NA->0 conversion for missing data strikes again! (Interesting that Nature made us retract our paper for similar issues [ www.nature.com/articles/s41... ], but not this one… 🤔)

In 2023, @nature.com published 'Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time', receiving world-wide media attention. Our Matters Arising, published after a 32 month delay (more on that soon), shows that the reported decline can largely be attributed to dataset artefacts. 🧵

eclipse pasta strainer

Excellent. The firebenders will be vulnerable

a few shots of the #DH2026 venue - what a great conference, congrats to the local organizers

@peetertinits.bsky.social crushed it today with the Price-equation based decomposition plots of linguistic change in early modern Europe. #dh2026

@peetertinits.bsky.social at the last session of #DH2026 talking about using huge harmonized bibliographic datasets to study the diffusion of information and patterns of language adoption across Early Modern -> Modern Europe. V. cool!

@babeheim.bsky.social showing how Go opening strategies changed over time and what happened after AI joined the game @ #DH2026

@artjomshl.bsky.social and @tonyamart.bsky.social compare the evolutionary dynamics of poetry and lyrics over the last few centuries #dh2026

#booksky

hahahahaha

This morning in Biddeford, Maine, a 26-year-old man said goodbye to his wife and daughter and left for work. Moments later he was dead, shot in the head by ICE agents, the second man ICE has killed in six days. ICE is killing our neighbors. ICE cannot be reformed. Abolish ICE.

reading @apvelilla.bsky.social @psmaldino.bsky.social @babeheim.bsky.social paper and realizing this is the kind of thing I say to my kids when they hurt each other. maybe i need new word choices. doi.org/10.1037/rev0...

"We are in the fafocene now, good and proper" 😐

📣 I'm hiring! Two positions (PhD student & Postdoc) in my ERC project Macroevolution of European Literature. Let's study the cultural evolution of literature using massive data 📚📈 📍Frankfurt | Apply by August 15 Details: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo... Please repost to help spread the word!

A 5-year PDRA position in "Statistical Modelling in Archaeology" is available @cam-archaeology.bsky.social as part of the FORAGER project. Deadline: 21/8/2026 tinyurl.com/muhcjkfy www.forager-erc.eu

Remember xkcd 1132, xkcd.com/1132/? Prompted by some recent discussion over at www.patreon.com/betanalpha/p..., I ended up implementing frequentist and Bayesian analysis of the setup and writing up the subtle issue what I think the example really illustrates, www.patreon.com/betanalpha/p....

Somewhere in the Marshes

Cool new paper by @kenjiitao.bsky.social on universal patterns in the demographic transition www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

To help a student understand how to handle right-censored data, I built this survival (and recurrent-event) analysis explorer that demonstrates the approach and provides some basic derivations. Applications to compartmental models from epidemiology too. tpavlic.github.io/topic_visual...

Watch out, he's got a PhD! Congrats man!

This came across my IG feed and it's too good to not share here

Nature Efforts. A classic. Featuring “Epic Fail of 2010”

🚨 ACE Seminar We’re excited to host Dr. Patrick Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social in our upcoming ACE Seminar! 🗓 Tuesday, Jun 16, 2026 🕖 2:00 PM JST (UTC+9) 💻 Online via Zoom 🔗 To receive the Zoom link, please send a blank email to ace-seminar+subscribe@googlegroups.com

More @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social conference talks! @babeheim.bsky.social on norm psychology, and in particular escalator standing norms in Japan

it's crazy that I now have a real life mana bar and it's the codex weekly usage meter.

Cherry trees in Kyoto. Not a subtle signal.

I recently learned about the Great Giana Sisters, the German video game answer to the Super Mario Brothers. Absolutely epic box art

Not a secret anymore! I am extremely proud and happy to present you the EVApeCognition Dataset, out now in Scientific Data. Over the last 5 years we have assembled and standardized data from 150 studies on great ape cognition from the WKPRC in the Leipzig Zoo! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Absolutely incredible. NASA Astronaut Reid Wiseman, who commanded Artemis II, took this footage from the far side of the Moon with his iPhone. Watch with sound on.

New preprint with Rafael Leite, Sandro Reia and Paulo Campos Cumulative Cultural Evolution in Structured Populations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... In which we take an old model of cumulative cultural evolution of mine and see what happens if you add social networks

@babeheim.bsky.social, Waterhouse and I describe how widespread vocal mimicry is in corvids and what might drive its evolution. Evidence is presented in 39 corvid species (30%). Using modelling approaches, we show that mimicry is likely underestimated (9/15) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🧵 Very proud our special collection on vocal communication in corvids in Animal Cognition (@springernature.com) is now fully published! 🐦 Huge thanks to all collaborators and contributors who made this possible! (1/15) link.springer.com/collections/...

Excellent talk on machine-human interactions, cooperation and learning by @iyadrahwan.bsky.social, presented at @ehbea2026.bsky.social. #ehbea2026 #culturalevolution

Fantastic example of intellectual humility from @drsarahmyers at #ehbea2026, re-evaluating a previously published paper of her own using more robust methods. Advice to the audience: “be more reflective”

Great talk by @babeheim.bsky.social at @ehbea2026.bsky.social on the cultural evolution of strategies in the game Go, including the convergence of AI on established strategies. #ehbea2026

I'm a data scientist @ourworldindata.org and I need help from a botanist or someone local to Kyoto, Japan! 🌸 We present one of the world’s longest climate records: 1,200 years of peak cherry blossom dates in Kyoto. The researcher who maintained it, Prof. Yasuyuki Aono, sadly passed away last year.

I'm hiring! 📢 Fully funded 4-year PhD position in Language Evolution using Communication Games at @mpi-nl.bsky.social. Come work with me on how different social pressures shape the evolution of new communication systems in the lab! Deadline for application is May 18th! share.google/fGTKbFS4v4Gb...

In a sane world, he'd be removed from office for this

The horse op-ed is an instant classic. I can't tell you how much joy this piece gives me. It should be taught in every introductory writing class in no small part because the horse arguments are so compelling. "I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children."

Easy for Batman to say, he's a billionaire

Easter EP As AI agents get smarter, are we entering a golden age of hypercreativity? Or are we entering an age of homogenised culture where we all just recycle the same AI-generated ideas? @adigitaltanay.bsky.social & Jay explore this and much more with @babeheim.bsky.social youtu.be/coQnyaEw50s