James Winters

🚨🚨 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

Join us. www.tse-fr.eu/iast-researc...

Had an amazing time with Dave & David!

The 2027 European Human Behaviour & Evolution Association Conference is coming to Zurich Mar 30 - Apr 2! 🇨🇭 Abstract submission opens Nov 1, registration Jan 8. Please share and follow us to stay up to date with all things #EHBEA2027 www.ehbea2027.com @ehbea.bsky.social @uzh-ch.bsky.social

Which Pokémon does a compression algorithm think are most similar? bzip pairs Gengar with Haunter, Magikarp with Gyarados and Pikachu with Jolteon. 13 different Pokémon get paired with Marowak- it's a very average sprite..

The phonological crystalline entity is back, this time in typst, and parameterized, so you can mess with the angles if you want: typst.app/project/rP23...

My paper on the Varieties of Cultural Selection is now in press at @biologicaltheory.bsky.social. It's also about 30% longer than the original draft, with additions and clarifications inspired by the excellent comments I received from reviewers and colleagues. Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/so...

This week, we talk to @oliviermorin.bsky.social about the psychology of cultural evolution. youtu.be/minH1eiJrLM?... epthepod.podbean.com/e/olivier-mo... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

This is INCREDIBLE. A point and click on cracking the genetic code. Based on @matthewcobb.bsky.social’s superlative account. Scicomm FTW

How is the manosphere spreading misogyny on TikTok? 📱 @brunelpsy.bsky.social PhD researcher Hannah Mays is speaking at the first event in The Room, a new public feminist conversation series co-organised by CCEs @loraadair.bsky.social 📅 27 Oct, 6pm @ Bush Theatre, London Free tickets! 🎟️

🚨Excited to share our new paper in Science Advances! We reconstruct communication networks across Mesopotamia during the rise of the world's first cities (3900-3000 BCE) and ask how large-scale connectivity emerged before modern states. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Out today in Cognition (@cognitionjournal.bsky.social)! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Dolls are incredibly widespread but not universal cross-culturally. In addition to functioning as toys, dolls are commonly used for supernatural purposes to punish enemies, heal or protect, increase fertility, or embody spirits. New paper in EHB www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I wrote about the recent symposium on Greg Clark's forthcoming book on genetics and social mobility. Clark uses large-scale lineage data to argue that social status in England can be entirely explained by genetic transmission. 🧵

Neanderthals were talented hunters AND home decorators. Evidence from a Spanish rock shelter includes new tool types and evidence for windbreaks and other domestic arrangements. “Now we can start to imagine the spaces they were living in,” says archaeologist @annemiekemilks.bsky.social. @science.org

webrarian is a new R package. It turns a folder of R scripts and data into a static website where R runs in the visitor's browser, with no compute server and nothing to install. blog.thecoatlessprofessor.com/posts/introd... #rstats #webr #webassembly

👉 The Social Tinkering paper with Nick Chater is now out in an issue of BBS. We highlight the importance of bottom-up and socially-oriented factors in cultural evolution 1/4 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

“Huh?” “I meant...” “What?” 💬 When interacting with each other, we often fix errors or mishearings through communicative repair, which restores progressivity. Our ✨ new paper ✨ asks: what do chimpanzees do when an initial gestural request does not land during an interaction? 🧵 1/4 bit.ly/4rSQosE

"Eugenics making a comeback? @rebeccasear.bsky.social from @brunelpsy.bsky.social would like a word 🎤 Her “The Return of Eugenics” talk at the British Science Festival got people talking 💬 Brilliant to see so much audience engagement, with people queuing to keep chatting to Rebecca 🙌

Today marks the 25th anniversary (😯) of our publication on discovery of FOXP2. To commemorate, I’ll repost a few prior threads about the gene. Here’s my explainer of how we tracked down FOXP2 & implicated it in speech/language deficits, in the days before completion of the human genome project.🗣️🧬🧪👇

This paper sets my personal record for the largest number of co-authors: 33! It explores why people like certain stories and story elements, and was lead by @edgardubourg.bsky.social . Check it out!

One week left to apply!

We often say that humans struggle to produce random sequences… but what if that's not the whole story? In a new paper, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, @samiyousif.bsky.social & I show that context matters (a lot!). When playing strategic games, humans can produce near-random behavior osf.io/preprints/ps...

Proud to present our latest work "Tracking human foragers and their prey reveals adaptive predator-prey dynamics", now hosted on BioRxiv! 🧵 doi.org/10.64898/202... @ralfkurvers.bsky.social @scioi.bsky.social @arc-mpib.bsky.social @alexschakowski.bsky.social @dominikdeffner.bsky.social

How did we humans become what we are? Why did we diverge from other primates and develop our culture? What role does copying (imitation) play in that process, and how do we compare to great apes today? My interview with @ctennie.bsky.social explores these questions and more. Please check it out!

Now published in @natcomms.nature.com! Using a 3D immersive-reality group experiment, we show how people integrate dynamically changing personal and social cues in realistic environments, resulting in either collective intelligence or maladaptive behavior! Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Join the DigiTS team in Tartu! PhD position in machine learning, LLMs & NLP annotation. A great team pushing the #digitalhumanities #computationalhumanities agenda in a thoughtful way. A wonderful place to live and work! Estonia is pleasant, organized, easy to join! digits.ut.ee/join-the-team/

Latest "ask a psychologist" podcast is out on the @Bruneluni psychology YouTube 📢 Today's star is Byron Creese whose research focuses on neuropsychiatric symptoms in dementia 🧠

Can self-interested, self-improving, self-replicating agents learn to cooperate? Our new paper, Tapes Together Strong, shows they can: when social behavior, computation, and reproduction share one energy budget, cooperation evolves from scratch. arxiv.org/abs/2609.10817 🧵

This is what I've been saying for years. That's also why I'm no more than lukewarm towards multiverse analyses on experimental data. If you're going to spend all that computational power, why not do it a priori so you can design the best experiment under well-articulated assumptions?

ACE Research Grant Alert 🚨! CES will give out two awards of up to $3000 each to support early career research projects in cultural evolution. The award is open to applicants worldwide, with an application deadline of October 9th 2026, 9:00 AM AoE. Applications: forms.gle/dsLdKQuNBH4W...

“Life history theory is often invoked to make universal predictions about phenotypic evolution. Eg it’s conventional wisdom that organisms should evolve later first reproduction if they have longer lifespans. We clarify that LHT does not provide such universal predictions about phenotypic diversity”

Our paper on the second plague pandemic is now finally published: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... We present 11 new Y. pestis genomes from around Europe and introduce a new approach to refine the dating of ancient genomes that helped us to contextualize 75 plague genomes of the Second Pandemic.

Seconded. In my experience, Royal Society Publishing is a rare publisher which is genuinely committed to publishing rigorous science. If you want to get involved in the editorial process, I highly recommend them too

While the Fields Medal celebrates the under-40s, the mathematician Joan Birman has, at the age of 99, solved a major open problem in representations of the Braid groups, a topic she has worked on for more than 60 years.

🚨New preprint with Fei Dai, @hanqizhou.bsky.social and @alisongopnik.bsky.social We extend empowerment (control over external states) by turning it inward. *Representational empowerment* asks which representations a learner should acquire and curate to solve future problems arxiv.org/abs/2609.02322

Are you interested in lexical competition, agent-based modelling, strong inference and Ukrainian? Then this paper, just published in @pnasnexus.org, is for you. With @oliviermorin.bsky.social and @sobchuk.bsky.social, we asked a simple question: why do some words become more common than others?

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...

Our new preprint explores how increasing interaction between humans and artificial agents and is reshaping creativity, from the perspective of cultural evolution! @katieeeeeeeeeee.bsky.social @manuelangladatort.bsky.social @camrobjones.bsky.social @gemschedel.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2609.02620

100 years of the "morph(eme)" – Bloomfield's foundational article came out in September 1926. dlc.hypotheses.org/4485

🚨 8 months after, this paper found its home at Science Advances. We came up with a generative brain network model based on game theory and found that the human brain is suboptimal both in terms of wiring cost and communication efficiency. Here's why: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here I draw a circle by hand. In a universe where it is the perfect circle- what does a sine wave look like? What is its value of pi?

I did not know this: eBay ran field experiments turning off paid search ads on google and there was zero measurable effect on sales. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.3...

Why do some goals spread across people and generations, while others emerge only transiently? We argue that human goals are both drivers and products of cultural evolution: our individual pursuits are shaped by our cultural environments, and the goals we pursue in turn reshape those environments.

Hahaha

A 2025 Science paper reported that bonobos combine calls to create new meanings. We analyzed its stats and then reanalysed the data. --> The claim did not hold up. Our paper (open access): doi.org/10.7717/peer... With @johanlind.bsky.social @annajonand.bsky.social

Spotted some #MathOfMario @clontz.org

We worry about homogenisation, but can AI also expand human culture? In a multi-generational experiment we demonstrate AI-induced cultural shifts. Machines lastingly shift human behavior, beyond their presence, just as AlphaGo did to Go. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@arthurpr4t.bsky.social has a new preprint with important results on a famous psychophysical law (Weber's law). It isn't, in fact, a law, because it can be broken. A more fundamental principle (efficient coding) shows when and why Weber's law holds true. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...