@simongreenhill
I study how languages and cultures evolve. Primarily with phylogenies and other assorted computational methods. Based at @Biology_UoA. Never met a language phylogeny or a cultural phylogeny I didn't like. #phylolinguistics
Tuli tehtyä
🌀historian suurin hyrrätutkimus🌀.
Ja näinkin arkisesta asiasta löytyy vuosituhansia jatkuneita perinteitä, mitä erikoisempia uskomuksia, ja vihjeitä siitä, miten muinaiset esivanhempamme aikaansa viettivät.
#minätutkin
Rumor has it that Nature is also considering charging authors 'evalution costs' to submit papers.
They must be hurting for money: they've only published 101 Open Access articles to date in 2026.
This means Springer-Nature has gobbled up $1,281,690.0 of science funding this year.
#openaccess
Nature is considering charging authors 'evalution costs' to submit papers?!
Just had an email asking me to submit a paper to new journal "Nature Anthropology".
Exciting -- is @nature.com moving more into the humanities? Nope, "Nature & Anthropology" www.sciepublish.com/journals/nat...
How long before Springer-Nature sues them?
How do scientific ideas in #AI actually evolve? Join me on March 19 in Paris. Details in the link below
tinyurl.com/2n3r9vb8
What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition?
In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture
can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect.
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
It's unclear if the Neanderthal larynx could produce speech. Image credit: mostafa meraji/Unsplash..com
Neanderthals And Denisovans Appear To Have Had The “Genetic Toolbox” For Language
Natural selection and language genes in humans 🏺🧪
Rob DeSalle, Ian Tattersall et al
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A hypothesis for how synaptic efficiency could be related to language acquisition in these lineages.
yes - the gloating and mockery is completely offbase. We all make mistakes and owning up to that is a good trait in a scientist.
(The mockery/gloating should be kept for fraud/malpractice)
yes - the gloating and mockery is completely offbase. We all make mistakes and owning up to that is a good trait in a scientist.
(The mockery/gloating should be kept for fraud/malpractice)
Interesting counterpoint to the arguments that LLMs capture linguistic complexity:
"..model behavior is mainly driven by the richness of linguistic resources rather than by sensitivity to grammatical complexity, (thus) resembles human (language) only superficially."
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Oh god why does chatGPT need this expertise?!? "Familiarity with emerging technology issues, particularly dual-use AI capabilities, including (Chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) and cybersecurity"
Humanity's Last Exam is a benchmark test of Large Language Models.
I'm fascinated by this fig in the HLE paper.
Surely the proportion of "human knowledge" that belongs to humanities/social sci is far more than 9%? Is math worth 4xbio/med?!
What would the real proportions be?
...it just tells you to cite 5 irrelevant papers by totally-not-Reviewer2
@pratikkatte.bsky.social and I just released Lorax 🌲, a tool for interactive exploration of biobank-scale ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs).
If you’ve ever wanted to scroll across the ancestries of thousands of genomes… this is for you.
Leipzig U and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) have an open faculty position (W2) in evolutionary population genetics! This position is tenured and comes with generous core funding. We are eager to welcome a new colleague! Deadline March 11.
www.uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetai...
"Air raids are not only wrong. They are loathsome and disgusting. If you had ever seen a child smashed by a bomb into something like a mixture of dirty rags and cat’s meat you would realize this fact as intensely as I do." - J.B.S. Haldane, 1938.
have you encountered the horizontal line that no force in the universe can delete yet? that's a fun one.
We're pleased to announce the call for the 2026 Richerson Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research, for a recent PhD dissertation that significantly contributes to the field of CE.
Recipients receive a $300 award, a 3-yr CES membership and CES conference registration.
forms.gle/p4MqcskCs2Yz...
The theory of epidemics with altruism | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧪
Lots of cool #linguistic datasets are being published in Cross Linguistic Data Format.
I've written an #Rstats package rcldf to analyse them (github.com/SimonGreenhi...). See the vignette:
cran.case.edu/web/packages...
Question: What functionality is missing, what is needed?
$300 Million in jet planes lost to a fuckup.
That’s 83 five year NIH R01 grants burned in minutes due to error, aka poor execution of this unnecessary war which serves only to make the world more dangerous.
A Swedish state-funded research funding agency, Formas, has started to approve applications based partially on random draws. Applications are grouped into high quality (gets funding), low quality (doesn't get funding) and a middle group where a lottery takes place 🎰.
formas.se/en/start-pag...
Dear #NZ politicians,
Please note the key element: “persistent long-term investment in fundamental research”.
Thank you.
And people wonder why NZ’s R&D spend is way lower than the rest of the OECD & our productivity is in the toilet. www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360...
Wow
Interesting: Multilingual Large Language Models do not comprehend all natural languages to equal degrees.
- English is not best performing language but was "systematically outperformed by several Romance languages"
arxiv.org/abs/2602.20065
Infant mortality increased following the Nazi expulsion of Jewish doctors, according to Helge Liebert and Beatrice Mäder in a new REStat paper!
