Thank you Max!

One implication is that measures of relative brain size should be treated with extreme caution. The curvilinear pattern across species may, for example, explain why large bodied species have been though to be relatively small brained when using linear models to characterise and account for scaling

This has implications for how we interpret macroevolutionary patterns more generally, emphasising the need to account for intraspecific variation in order to understand variation across species

We then show that this pattern is a metaphenomenon arising from a pattern of diminishing allometry within species with increasing size

We were very surprised at how consistent this is across the tree of life

In our new paper, we find that this curve is universal (or very nearly, with a few minor exceptions) including not just homeothermic vertebrates, but also fish, amphibians, squamates and even insects

This has substantial implications for understanding the evolution of brain size

We previously found that the scaling of brain to body mass in mammals is not, as assumed for the past 100 years, log-linear. It is curved: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Macroevolutionary brain scaling is a microevolutionary metaphenomenon - full text of our new paper now available www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Picture of front cover of Theme Issue entitled "Transforming cultural evolution research and its application to global futures." The image on the front cover is of a Yao honey hunter in Mozambique holding retrieved honeycomb.

Today sees the publication of the Theme Issue featuring the CES Transformation Fund grant scheme. Enjoy! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...
@durhamdcerc.bsky.social @durhamanthropology.bsky.social @cultevolfunding.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

Yes! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Good luck! 🤞

@royalsociety.org MUST strip Musk of his fellowship to retain credibility. He has brought the society into disrepute in the gravest manner. Calling on all FRSs, please act swiftly

New paper: Human dexterity and brains evolved hand in hand www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Primate thumbs and brains evolved together, new study finds - Durham University

A new study co-authored by @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social gives new insight into how human hands & minds evolved together. The research is published in Communications Biology & was led by Dr Joanna Baker of @uniofreading.bsky.social. Read more:👉 bit.ly/4myXT4c

#DUresearch #DUinspire

Pathway to Independence – an interview with Max Farnworth Max Farnworth completed his PhD in Gregor Bucher's lab at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he explored how heterochrony shapes the evolution and development of insect brains. He then joined...

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Delighted to see this work out in PNAS. The idea that got me into butterflies, started on it in 2011 but took the intellectual energy of @benitoexplains.bsky.social, and the support of a great team, to develop it and put it all together.

Thanks to #NERC @ukri.org for funding 🙏🏻

Humans may not have a uniquely specialised memory for sequences - it may be more to do with how tasks are culturally scaffolded and what they “mean” to participants. New paper

Functional development of the human cerebellum from birth to age five - Nature Communications Using over 1,000 early childhood fMRI scans, the authors mapped cerebellocortical connectivity, revealing early integration with higher-order networks and age-related refinement, gradients, asymmetry,...

Interesting new study demonstrates "cerebellar connectivity to higher-order networks at birth, which generally strengthen with age, emphasizing the cerebellum’s early role in cognitive processing beyond sensory and motor functions" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Common and rare genetic variants show network convergence for a majority of human traits While both common and rare variants contribute to the genetic etiology of complex traits, whether their impacts manifest through the same effector genes and molecular mechanisms is not well understood...

Interesting new @medrxivpreprint.bsky.social study, bearing on the interpretation of GWAS results: 
“Common and rare genetic variants show network convergence for a majority of human traits” 🧪🧬
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1929

Selection Shapes Diverse Animal Minds: our special issue of @royalsocietypublishing.org Phil Trans B on the diverse evolutionary processes underlying cognitive evolution is out today. Thanks to all our contributors! royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

Embodied cognitive evolution and the limits of convergence - Louise Barrett and me on comparative psychology eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Constructing language: a framework for explaining acquisition Explaining how children build a language system is a central goal of research in language acquisition, with broad implications for language evolution, adult language processing, and artificial intelli...

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Trump on embodied cognition (via ChatGPT)

Quite happy to see the website we made for #Darwin’s 200th birthday is alive and well once more, and more extensive than i remembered! darwin200.christs.cam.ac.uk

One week left to apply!

Beyond volume: Unraveling the genetics of human brain geometry Multivariate association study reveals a genetic basis of brain shape beyond volume and relations to neurodegenerative diseases.

Interesting Science Advances
study probing the genetics of
human brain geometry (beyond volume), using data from @ukbiobank.bsky.social 🧪🧠🧬

I think “mechanistic” is being used in different senses here

On brain size? I thought the point being addressed here is what is the allometric relationship between brain and body size?

We did account for model complexity in our model testing. A quadratic model fit the data significantly better )not just better). The size dependency in the parameters from linear models is a very striking feature . This is all explained in the paper and SI