Rachel Kendal

Animal cultures matter for conservation, but also to animals - Learning & Behavior A growing acceptance that many nonhuman animal communities have distinct cultures – group-variable patterns of behavior and information sustained over time by social learning – is beginning to reshape...

"Animal cultures matter first and foremost because they matter to the animals themselves."

If you enjoyed our recent episode on the value of animal cultures, you may be interested in this new paper by @simonfitzpatrick.bsky.social & @kristinandrews.bsky.social!
link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Registration Registrations for the conference and the pre-conference workshop are now OPEN! Register for the conference (26-27/02): Culture Conference 2026 – Registration form Register for the worksh…

The Culture Conference 2026 is already starting next week! 🥳

If you plan to attend in-person, please register ‼️before Sunday 22/02‼️
We are almost full, so don’t wait 😊

Online registration will remain open 💻

See you next week in Utrecht 🌇

To register:👇
culture-conference.com/registration/

The “I” in egalitarianism: Hadza hunter-gatherers averse to inequality primarily when personally unfavorable Abstract. Many economists contend that humans have strong, universal, other-regarding equality preferences with deep evolutionary roots. Indeed, many hunte

📢 New Paper 🚨

Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life.

In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus.

bit.ly/4kvLOwA

🚨New Paper on Bonobo and Chimpanzee tool flexibility. As so often performance is leveraged by the captivity effect yet the two species differ in explorative behavior and how readily they switch between tool types. For more 👇🏼 royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article... @rachelaharrison.bsky.social

If you run application processes for any kind of opportunities please check out our toolkit for enhancing EDI and do let us know of any improvements needed

Children's Embodiment of Non‐Human Virtual Hand Forms Adults are known to identify their own body through a combination of multisensory cues and top-down expectations regarding its form, while children may possess a more flexible body representation. H.....

doi.org/10.1111/desc...

A white beluga surfacing in greenish-brown waters. Overlaid is the title of a new review published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology: Beluga Societies: the social and cultural lives of an enigmatic odontocete.

Our new review of beluga sociality and culture just dropped at Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology! Some of our key conclusions summarized 🧵
doi.org/10.1007/s002...
@marine-valeria.bsky.social @dmennill.bsky.social @raincoast.org

The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution Abstract. The societal effects of children’s learning in cultural evolution have been underexplored. Here, we investigate using agent-based models how a pr

"The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution" with @ndersen.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @felixthehauskat.bsky.social out in Proc B

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

STbayes: An R package for creating, fitting and understanding Bayesian models of social transmission A critical consequence of joining social groups is the possibility of social transmission of information related to novel behaviours or resources. Network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA) has emerg...

🎉🍾 very excited to see this out before 2025 ends doi.org/10.1111/2041... with Will Hoppitt in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social. This paper is an overview of our new R package STbayes, a user-friendly toolkit for performing Bayesian NBDA analyses. @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

Fantastic 👏👏👏👏

In this blog post, Guest Editor @rachkendal.bsky.social discusses their #PhilTransB issue, 'Transforming cultural evolution research and its application to global futures': royalsociety.org/blog/2025/12...

The 21st Century Resurgence of Eugenics YouTube video by The British Academy

1/ In a recent @britishacademy.bsky.social video @rebeccasear.bsky.social from @brunelpsy.bsky.social takes a clear-eyed look at the 21st‑century rise of eugenics - an ideology that should have been left behind, yet is now re‑emerging in a number of troubling ways ⚠️🧬 🧪

Watch the full talk here 🎥👇

A transdisciplinary approach to growing an applied science of cultural evolution for a sustainable future Abstract. Addressing sustainability challenges requires an integrative approach that bridges scientific research with practical application. The field of c

Academics talk a lot about sustainability, but not always in ways practitioners can use. We spent 3 days with NGOs, businesses & community organizers to understand what actually works. New paper in Phil Trans B: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

#AcademicSky #ScienceCommunication 🧪

Niche Construction: How Life Contributes to Its Own Evolution How niche construction theory extends evolutionary theory beyond natural selection to a more general theory about the coevolution of organisms with their e

Gentle reminder that John Odling-Smee, who is now in his 90s (!) published his big update on #NicheConstruction last year.

It's open access and can be downloaded here: direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

( #pleasecite )

New in Proceedings B, led by Jaspreet Singh: "Comparing expert assessments of research quality between the Global North and East Africa"

royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

We found that Kenyan assessors were more optimistic about the quality of 80 papers than were Global North assessors 1/

Excited to get this paper published! 🌟

We argue that men exaggerate patriarchal beliefs in an effort to signal conformity to others, which in turn fuels misperceptions about peers - making patriarchal norms resistant to change.

royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

I was honoured to create and run this grant scheme with a wonderful team behind me and an inspiring group of awardees. The theme issue includes many diverse studies in cultural evolution as well as metascience on the benefits of embedding EDI in research.

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

I am pleased to announce that from Jan 1 2026 I take over as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biological Theory. My first act, with the support of the editorial team, is to bring the journal to BlueSky from X.

Please follow us @biologicaltheory.bsky.social. We will be posting about all our articles.

Why do people endorse seemingly extraordinary beliefs such as in pseudoscience & supernatural entities?

Leading approaches stress cognitive biases (like agency detection) & social dynamics (like signaling). Eli Stark-Elster & I argue that experience matters too & put fwd a framework explaining how.

⏰ Reminder: 10 days left to submit your abstract for Culture Conference 2026!

🧠 Workshop details are now live! Join us for a hands-on day on cutting-edge tools for analysing social networks & social transmission (registration opens soon).

Find all details here: culture-conference.com/workshop/

Thanks @patrickesavage.bsky.social great to see the door stop being used in great teaching @durhamanthropology.bsky.social @durhamdcerc.bsky.social

Graph showing life expectancy trends in 23 higher income countries between 1980 and 2024. Life expectancy increased over time in all countries. In 1980, the US is in the middle of the pack, but their life expectancy gains were slower than that of other countries, and by around 2002, the US had the lowest life expectancy of all countries. Over the next 20 years, US life expectancy increasingly tracks away from the trajectories of other countries, as their life expectancy stalls while other countries life expectancy continues to climb

This graph never fails to be shocking: "The US has experienced the earliest and greatest slowdown in life expectancy improvements among higher-income countries, reported Eileen Crimmins. “We have horrible life expectancy—and it’s getting worse and worse”"

www.prb.org/resources/se...

Children’s preferences for features and designs of KN95-style respirators: A comparative study between Indonesia and Nepal This study explores children’s preferences for different designs of KN95-style respirators in two highly polluted cities: Kathmandu, Nepal and Bandung, Indonesia. It aims to understand which designs a...

First paper out in FACE-UP project on protecting children from urban air pollution www.growkudos.com/articles/10.... with Judith Covey and @clairehorwell.bsky.social. @durhamanthropology.bsky.social

Standing up for science is one way to push back against political attacks on the university sector 👇 Experts in biology and anthropology have put together this statement to counter misinformation about race. Please consider signing and sharing

We are delighted to announce that the CES2026 conference website is now live! We invite you to submit your presentation proposals using the link on the webpage, deadline November 16th:
airess.fgses-um6p.ma/ces2026

Cool stuff!

Transmission networks of long-term and short-term knowledge in a foraging society Abstract. Cultural transmission across generations is key to cumulative cultural evolution. While several mechanisms—such as vertical, horizontal, and obli

💙New paper!💙

How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society?

With @danielredhead.bsky.social
we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Apply now to study at Durham! Not only would you be working with Sheina or Lynda, both fantastic scholars, but you'd be part of a department with a thriving PGR community, and a member of DCERC!

Title of Project: Examining school-based body image interventions in Africa and/or Latin America Start Date: January, April or October 2026 Application Deadline: 20th October 2025 For more information including how to apply please see: PhD advert BIRES studentship

PhD post! 2 students sought to join the BIRES project, taking a body image intervention developed in Nicaragua and Colombia and examining how (and if!) It can be adapted in other LatAm and African youth.
Please share with your students.

#PsychSciSky
#Anthropology

www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...