Ed Hagen
banner
edhagen.net
Ed Hagen
@edhagen.net
Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University. Faculty page: https://anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/people/hagen/

Views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer or other organizations I'm affiliated with.
Twain called it
January 7, 2026 at 1:29 AM
1. My new preprint has its own bluesky account. Why? The problems facing social media & scientific publishing are similar: both are dominated by powerful oligopolies. The @atproto.com tech underlying bluesky that aims to solve the social media prob might also help solve the scientific pub prob 🧪 🧵
1. Preprint: Menopause averted a midlife energetic crisis with help from older children and parents: A simulation study. zenodo.org/records/1814...

Menopause is rare, known to occur only in humans and toothed whales: 🧵
January 6, 2026 at 3:12 PM
PSA: If you use a Mac and haven't yet upgraded to Tahoe (macOS 26), consider doing some research on the new user interface first. I really regret upgrading. Here is one critical take: eclecticlight.co/2025/12/28/l...
Last Year on My Mac: Look back in disbelief
If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to th…
eclecticlight.co
December 29, 2025 at 8:59 PM
Noticed this guy seated next to us at a restaurant in Mexico City when LA Law was going strong. When he realized I recognized him he crumpled up his napkin and threw it at me with a smile.
December 29, 2025 at 7:59 PM
Richard Lee, author of the ethnography The Dobe !Kung (Ju/'hoansi), a staple of Anthro 101 courses, w/ Ju/'hoansi women & their kids in 2013.

Lee's research on this south African hunter-gatherer population profoundly shaped our perceptions of human evolution. 🧪

Source: hdl.handle.net/1807/76329
December 18, 2025 at 11:44 PM
This dataset, which claims to provide a single IQ value for each country, is in the news again. Here's a thread on my dive into the data a couple of years ago. I didn't have to look far to find major problems. My #rstats code is linked at the end. 🧪
1. An overview of the Lynn-Becker National IQ data set (NIQD), beloved by race science, by an evolutionary anthropologist/psychologist (me, who knowns nothing about IQ research). This🧵also looks at two of its South African source studies. With R code. 🧪
December 7, 2025 at 11:36 PM
Anisogamy (the binary sex concept) helps explain variation within-species, but, interacting with ecology, it also helps explain speciation itself: 🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
December 3, 2025 at 11:46 PM
Reposted by Ed Hagen
@anthrofuentes.bsky.social and I are working on a letter regarding the archiving of #NSF #DDRIGs in the #SBE Directorate and impacts on our fields. What did you/your students discover as a result of a DDRIG award? What other impacts resulted from the award? Post here or DM. Please repost for viz.
December 3, 2025 at 4:51 PM
Outlier appropriately named 🧪
December 1, 2025 at 4:22 AM
Twitter's original lead (for a time, only) developer @blaine.bsky.social discussing @bsky.app, & more crucially, the @atproto.com on which it runs atprotocommunity.leaflet.pub/3m6mw6rogyk2t

One chaotic possibility for #AcademicSky? One day our papers could be published here, on OUR personal servers
November 27, 2025 at 9:04 PM
Still citing Trivers (1972) on parental investment? There's been a ton of empirical and theoretical work since then. Kokko and Jennions overheard a couple of goby fish chatting about some of the complexities 🧪 #BioAnth 🧵 1/2 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
November 25, 2025 at 4:50 PM
Reposted by Ed Hagen
Want to recognize someone who has gone above and beyond in communicating and countering misinformation about human evolutionary science? Nominate them for the EHAP 2026 Evolution in the Public Eye award! Nominations are now open (until Jan 31) at: sites.lsa.umich.edu/ehap/evoluti...
EPE Award – Evolution and Human Adaptation Program
sites.lsa.umich.edu
November 25, 2025 at 2:36 PM
Perhaps the most influential table in hunter-gatherer studies, published in Lee's chapter in the famous 1968 edited volume by Lee and DeVore titled, ironically, Man the Hunter 🧪 #BioAnth
November 21, 2025 at 12:58 AM
"Racial hereditarian research remains unjustified and harmful: A reply to Woodley et al. (2025a, b)" 🧪
Today is the day! Our reply to the two concurrent critiques (from the same set of authors) is now published in the journal Intelligence 🧵 1/
November 12, 2025 at 6:32 PM
I think this might be the first observed instance of lethal coalition aggression in bonobos, albeit within-group rather than between-group 🧪 #BioAnth
1/2 Lethal violence in bonobos

On February 18, five females fatally beat a male at the LuiKotale Bonobo Project (Congo). The authors believe this may have been due to a minor attack on a baby two days earlier. The details are horrific.

(paper) www.cell.com/current-biol...
November 9, 2025 at 1:24 AM
In the long-running Nativism-Empiricism debate, have the impressive successes of AI based on blank slate-ish connectionist architectures dealt a knock-out blow for Empiricism? Is it game over for Nativism? @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social gently pushes back 🧪 philpapers.org/archive/KARA...
November 5, 2025 at 9:18 PM
Everything you wanted to know about adult sex ratios (ASR) but were afraid to ask 🧪 #bioanth: www.nature.com/articles/s42...
Adult sex ratios: causes of variation and implications for animal and human societies - Communications Biology
A detailed Review across animal and human societies provides insight on the causes and consequences of adult sex ratio skew.
www.nature.com
November 2, 2025 at 9:13 PM
If Schrödinger's classic 'What Is Life?' is important to you, grab this book (free for 1 more day?). It's short, and although it throws shade on the genetic program concept ('m still a fan), it provides lots of interesting context and a fair assessment of the impact of What is Life? 🧪
My little book on Schrödinger's famous classic 'What Is Life?' is out! Offering the most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of the book's origins, reception, impact, and legacy, it uncovers Schrödinger's motivations in writing it, and shows how it has shaped our current understanding of the cell
<i>What Is Life?</i> Revisited
Cambridge Core - Philosophy: General Interest - <i>What Is Life?</i> Revisited
www.cambridge.org
October 24, 2025 at 12:47 AM
Me, decoding CMC-encoded dates in a 1996 DHS survey #rstats 🧪

WTF, no household child was born in 1916 and no mother was born in 2063

Footnote on p. 195 of an old DHS report:

"The beginning of the year 2053 in the Nepali calendar roughly corresponds to 15th April 1996 in the Western calendar..."
October 18, 2025 at 1:51 PM
I'm starting to explore {simDAG}, a nifty #rstats package that has a nice API for specifying DAGs and then simulating data from them: robindenz1.github.io/simDAG/
Simulate Data from a DAG and Associated Node Information
Simulate complex data from a given directed acyclic graph and information about each individual node. Root nodes are simply sampled from the specified distribution. Child Nodes are simulated according...
robindenz1.github.io
October 13, 2025 at 4:14 PM
DIY soda maker. You need to buy 3 things:

1. A 5 lb CO2 tank. Mine cost $100 from a local beer-brewing supply store, which will swap empties for filled units for $20.

5 lb -> 100-150 liters -> $0.13-$0.20/liter vs. $1/liter for store-bought vs. $0.50/liter for sodastream.
October 6, 2025 at 1:35 PM
Great thread on the discovery that a rare mutation in FOXP2 disrupts language, with an appearance by Steve Pinker. Subsequent research showed that FOXP2, a transcription factor, is highly conserved, yet acquired 2 amino acid substitutions in the human lineage. 🧪 #BioAnth
Twenty-four years ago today, our paper “A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder” was published: www.nature.com/articles/350....
A personal thread about the ups & downs of the journey we took to get to that point....1/n
🗣️🧬🧪
October 4, 2025 at 3:02 PM
"Now I talk to the popular kids and they treat me like a normal person because their frontal lobes are finally catching up to my frontal lobes...."

- teen daughter
September 29, 2025 at 10:50 PM
TIL that the "Krebs" of Krebs and Davies was the son of "Krebs" of the Krebs cycle:
John Krebs on growing up with a famous father (and not naming his daughters Hans).
September 23, 2025 at 1:53 AM
Reposted by Ed Hagen
#HBES2026 abstract submissions are live! More exciting details to come soon.

Arrive early for @ces2026.bsky.social

@humbehevosoc.bsky.social
We’re delighted to share that the 37th annual Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference (HBES2026) website is now live!

#HBES2026
September 22, 2025 at 3:46 PM