Sven Kasser

Belated career update: after 4 years of reasonably productive PhDing with @kevinlala.bsky.social, I have now started a postdoc at UC Davis with Brenna Henn, working on KhoeSan popgen, historical subsistence transitions, and - of course - potential gene-culture coevolutionary relationships.

Probably a tired pun, but this talk is really *screaming* to be titled “Of maize and men”

I wrote a thing! Credit where credit is due - the impetus for this paper came from many conversations I had as a baby first year grad student at CES 2022 (@culturalevolsoc.bsky.social). I hope it might serve as a useful way of thinking about the many modes of interaction in dual inheritance theory.

Happy to share a PhD opportunity in my new lab at the University of Zurich! Application deadline: June 30. Do not hesitate to contact me for any questions!

Happy to announce that my temporary thesis-writing mania has sprung the long awaited sequel to my conference presentation "Of Rice and Men":

A worse offender in this regard I think is “cultural genomics” which, in my reading, is just dual inheritance theory (but also not in particularly broad use)

Rohan is right I think - I came across sociogenomics when I first started working on my PhD and optimistically set a Google scholar alert for the key word, but I don’t think they are as interested in evolutionary timescales as they are in bringing behaviour genetics into the sociological mainstream.

I’ve always thought EvoBio has this strange, bordering on unhealthy obsession with / cult of personality around Charles Darwin.

Anyway, on an unrelated note, I tufted his tree of life drawing today because I didn’t know what else to make

Would love to be added please - still one of my favourite phd experiences

A cartoon of a Trojan horse at the gates, with the horse appearing to be "advantages effects early in life", while hiding "deleterious effects late in life in its belly". Selection and antagonistic pleiotropy are also listed.

Here's my favorite from this semester - a meme about why we grow old and die.

A lovely preprint, that really resonates with some of my own thoughts on how we use/have adapted the “coevolution” concept in the gene-culture interaction literature

Don’t ask “when is it coevolution?” — ask “how?” This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 2 of this Preprint.

NEW in preprint form: Don't ask "when is it coevolution?" — ask "how?"

In which I pick apart the way I've understood the very definition of my field of study, and try to come up with something better.

EASTBIO: Bateman’s principles and human reproductive strategies: a biosocial approach at University of St Andrews on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - EASTBIO: Bateman’s principles and human reproductive strategies: a biosocial approach at University of St Andrews, listed on FindAPhD.com

🚨 PhD project: 4-year PhD project on human reproduction, mating strategies and gender roles. Funding is via BBSRC EastBio (i.e. funding not attached to specific project). Please get in touch with me (UK/international).

Deadline for nominated applicant: 17 Jan 2025

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Happy to be here - Twatter truly seems like an increasingly hopeless place to be an ECR.

I should maybe (re-)introduce myself: Hi! My name is Sven, a PhD student at St Andrews w/ Kevin Lala, exploring empirically how being a cultural species shapes the genetic (and cultural!) evolution of human populations - by profoundly affecting not only selection, but migration, demography, etc.

Agreed. Almost crazy to think that Marc (and collaborators ofc - singling him out here as he’s on the paper) has been banging that particular drum for the better part of the last 50 years now.

Would appreciate being added to this as well - thank you!

One of my principal joys and frustrations as a disciplinary tweener is that I will spend one day regaling my office mates with unsolicited fun facts about the anthropology of cheese making, only to spend 10 hours the next day spiralling as I try and fail to merge two vcf files.