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Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

Twain called it

An excerpt from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Then the king made another speech about his dear dead brother,
and invited everyone in the room to come to the funeral. Suddenly, a
man laughed right in his face. Everyone turned to see who had dared
to laugh at such a sad time.
“Why, Dr. Robinson,” said Abner Shackleford, “you’ve been away
and haven’t met this man. This is Harvey Wilks.”
The king smiled and extended his hand to shake the hand of the
doctor.
“Keep your hands to yourself,” said the doctor. “You’re no Englishman.
Your voice sounds nothing like an Englishman. You say that
you’re Peter Wilks’s brother! Never! You’ve been lying.”
The crowd around the doctor tried to quiet him and tried to
explain to him how Harvey had proved in many ways that he was Peter
Wilks’s brother—how he knew everyone’s name in town and even
knew the names of the dogs. They begged the doctor not to hurt the
girls’ feelings, but the doctor wouldn’t listen to them. Peter Wilks’s three nieces began to cry and begged the doctor to stop.

“I was your father’s friend, and I’m your friend,” the doctor said to
them. “I warn you as a friend, and an honest one who wants to protect
you and keep you out of harm and trouble, to turn your backs on
these two liars and have nothing to do with them. This man has given
you a lot of names and facts which he learned somewhere, and you’re
eager to believe that this proves that he is your uncle. Mary Jane Wilks,
you know me for your friend, send these two liars away. I beg you to do
this. Will you?”
Mary Jane looked into the doctor’s eyes and said, “Here’s your
answer.” She picked up the bag of gold dollars and put it into the king’s
hands and said to the king, “Take this 6,000 dollars and put it into a
bank or a business for my sisters and me. I trust you.”
She then put her arms around the king and her sisters did the
same. The king held up his head and smiled proudly.

January 7, 2026 at 1:29 AM

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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 🧪 🧵

Menopause evolution preprint @menopause-preprint.edhagen.net · 3d

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: 🧵

Post-reproductive lifespans of humans, African great apes and other primates, and toothed whales. Values represent the life expectancy from the end of the fertile period as a proportion of life expectancy from the beginning of the fertile period. Human and nonhuman primate values are from Wood et al. (2023), except for the largest gorilla value, which is from Smit & Robbins (2025). Toothed whale values are from Ellis, Franks, Nattrass, Currie, et al. (2018). Chart shows that these values are high for humans and toothed whales, and low for primates

January 6, 2026 at 3:12 PM

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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.

Richard Dysart, who played Leland McKenzie on LA Law

December 29, 2025 at 7:59 PM

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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

Richard B. Lee with five Ju/'hoansi women and several kids in a local village

December 18, 2025 at 11:44 PM

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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. 🧪

Ed Hagen @edhagen.net · Sep 19

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

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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...

Speciation by sexual selection: 20 years of progress. Twenty years ago, a seminal paper summarized the role of sexual selection in speciation as the coordinated evolution of (male) courtship signals and (female) preferences leading to prezygotic (behavioral) isolation between divergent lineages. Here, we discuss areas of progress that inspire an updated perspective. First, research has identified multiple mechanisms of sexual selection, in addition to female mate choice, that drive the origin and maintenance of species. Second, reviews and empirical data now conclude that sexual selection alone will rarely lead to reproductive isolation without ecological divergence, and we discuss the assumptions and possible exceptions underlying that conclusion. Finally, we consider the variable ways in which sexual selection contributes to divergence according to the spatial, temporal, social, ecological, and genomic context of speciation.

December 3, 2025 at 11:46 PM

Reposted by Ed Hagen

Siobhán Cully 🇺🇸 🐱🥼🤓🩼

@siobhancully.bsky.social

@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

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

Outlier appropriately named 🧪

Scatterplot showing kcals per kg for game animals of different sizes. The Edible dormouse has exceptionally high caloric value for its size.

December 1, 2025 at 4:22 AM

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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

Herzog and the Jungle
One of my favorite clips comes from Werner Herzog’s Burden of Dreams, where he reflects on the chaos of the jungle while filming Fitzcarraldo.

“Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of harmony — the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder… We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and lack of order. There is no real harmony as we conceive it… But I love it against my better judgment.”
There’s an incredible tension in Herzog — this rational man trying to find order in chaos. He loves the creativity, even though it terrifies him.

Blue Sky is like that: a simulacrum of Twitter, designed to be approachable and understandable — an amazing achievement. But the jungle is more interesting.

AT Protocol could be the jungle — if we let it. Its flexibility and culture of openness can be fertile ground for new experimentation.

We’re already seeing it: not just existing mediums like events, portable moderation tools, or communities-as-mediums, but weird stuff — experiments that stretch the imagination of what “social” can be.

November 27, 2025 at 9:04 PM

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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....

The paper is open access. Click on the link for the full text

November 25, 2025 at 4:50 PM

Reposted by Ed Hagen

UM_EHAP

@umehap.bsky.social

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

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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

Lee: What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources. Table 6 Primary Subsistence Source by Latitude. The table shows that less than 50 degrees from the equator, most hunter-gatherer societies rely mainly on gathering plant foods.

November 21, 2025 at 12:58 AM

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

"Racial hereditarian research remains unjustified and harmful: A reply to Woodley et al. (2025a, b)" 🧪

Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · Nov 12

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

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

I think this might be the first observed instance of lethal coalition aggression in bonobos, albeit within-group rather than between-group 🧪 #BioAnth

Tay (Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró) @biotay.bsky.social · Nov 8

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

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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...

Al empiricism: the only game in town? Abstract
I offer an epistemic argument against the dominance of empiricism and empiricist-inspired methods in contemporary machine learning (ML) research. I first establish, as many ML researchers and philosophers of ML claim, that standard methods for constructing deep learning networks are best thought of as a kind of empiricism about cognitive architecture. I then argue that, even given the resounding success of contemporary ML models, there are few (if any) strong reasons to interpret their success as ruling out competing nativist approaches to cognitive architecture, especially given the extreme resource capture that empiricist methods have undergone in ML research. If we care about research goals like modeling human cognition or building genuinely rational machines, I argue we have good reason to support a robust competing artificial intelligence (AI) nativist tradition. I show how this argument applies to two recent defenses of Al empiricism in the philosophical literature: Buckner (2023)'s book-length defense of moderate Al empiricism, and Long (2024)'s dilemma argument against Al nativism.

November 5, 2025 at 9:18 PM

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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? 🧪

Daniel J Nicholson @djnicholson.bsky.social · Oct 10

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

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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.

A 5 lb CO2 tank, regulator, and PET soda bottle hose and adapter.

October 6, 2025 at 1:35 PM

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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

Simon Fisher @profsimonfisher.bsky.social · Oct 4

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
🗣️🧬🧪

Image shows the first two printed pages of the paper “A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder” by Cecilia Lai and colleagues, published in Nature in 2001 (volume 413, pages 519-523). The abstract reads as follows:
Individuals affected with developmental disorders of speech and language have substantial difficulty acquiring expressive and/or receptive language in the absence of any profound sensory or neurological impairment and despite adequate intelligence and opportunity. Although studies of twins consistently indicate that a significant genetic component is involved, most families segregating speech and language deficits show complex patterns of inheritance, and a gene that predisposes individuals to such disorders has not been identified. We have studied a unique three-generation pedigree, KE, in which a severe speech and language disorder is transmitted as an autosomal-dominant monogenic trait. Our previous work mapped the locus responsible, SPCH1, to a 5.6-cM interval of region 7q31 on chromosome 7. We also identified an unrelated individual, CS, in whom speech and language impairment is associated with a chromosomal translocation involving the SPCH1 interval. Here we show that the gene FOXP2, which encodes a putative transcription factor containing a polyglutamine tract and a forkhead DNA-binding domain, is directly disrupted by the translocation breakpoint in CS. In addition, we identify a point mutation in affected members of the KE family that alters an invariant amino-acid residue in the forkhead domain. Our findings suggest that FOXP2 is involved in the developmental process that culminates in speech and language.

October 4, 2025 at 3:02 PM

Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

"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