A new Perspective by Friedrich Götz, Davide Luca, Douglas Kenrick's Stone Age Brain et al proposes a unifying Geographical–Psychological Interactionist Framework, aiming to inspire concrete & testable hypotheses. nature.com/articles/s4156…

Amazing how the expression of the eyes seems to change as the mouth changes.

Beyond The Evolution vs Learning Fallacy. I've long argued that this false dichotomy gets in the way of understanding language, cognition, and human nature. In a new article in American Psychologist, Laith Al-Shawaf ليث الشواف carefully examines & refutes the fallacy, with examples.

Neanderthals might've been more capable, social, and inventive cooks than previously thought. As it turns out, they were doing animal processing at scale in northern Europe some 125,000 years ago. That's some 70-80,000 years before Homo sapiens got to the area🧵

"It appears early life got trapped in a minima of metabolic efficiency. Meaning they can’t run their brains for a full day-night cycle. So they just… turn themselves off. Their consciousness dies. Then they reboot with the same memories in the morning." theintrinsicperspective.com/p/they-die-eve…

Indeed…

Elias Acevedo Dan Williams I was going to write a blog post on this and then I discovered that Kurzban already wrote it: Two problems with “self-deception”: No “self” and no “deception: cambridge.org/core/journals/…

"Our theory of mind system explains behavior with teleological concepts: desires, purposes, strategies, goal-seeking, and intentions. When the topic is human behavior, it is difficult to *not* think this way."

Terrific paper by Shari Liu and colleagues Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions science.org/doi/epdf/10.11…

Allergy promoting microbes prevented by breast milk antigens

"students with stronger verbal abilities, and who are more curious, open-minded, and intellectually rigorous, are more likely to study philosophy. Nonetheless, after accounting for such baseline differences, philosophy majors outperform all other majors on tests of verbal and

Out today! nature.com/articles/s4156…

AI shows ingroup bias towards AI content! If we deploy LLMs in decision-making roles (e.g., purchasing goods, selecting academic submissions) they will favor LLM agents over ordinary humans pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

These changes in personality are pretty shocking

This is one of the reasons that universities and military bases tend to help shift politics left or right (respectively). It's not just that people sort, but that people also tend too conform with their peers. So if you are initially an outlier relative to your community, you

This week, Drugs, Delusions, and Depression with Ed Hagen A wild ride! podbean.com/eas/pb-7srpz-1… podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/evo… youtu.be/fWawIyNAjTc

This is a great way to visualize the effect of divorce on children's success as adults🧵 Children whose parents went through a divorce while they were aged 0-5 ranked about 2.4 percentile points lower in the income distribution when they were 25 years old.

"Because women have smaller circles of closer friends than men do, they expect more from their friends. Their friends are meant to take their side in any conflicts that emerge and are not meant to oppose them in any meaningful way."

This week, we discuss the evolution of cooperation with Pat Barclay. youtu.be/-cHqagwF1yY?si… podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/evo… podbean.com/eas/pb-f5gtf-1…

“I have nothing against diversity, equity, and inclusion. But as Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire: it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”