Prof. Gillian Brown
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gillianrbrown1.bsky.social
Prof. Gillian Brown
@gillianrbrown1.bsky.social
3.9K followers 1.6K following 320 posts
Professor of psychology; University of St Andrews, UK; gender/sex, evolution, culture; she/her. 🌈

New edition: 'Sense & Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour' (https://tinyurl.com/yfv2kc27)

Lab: https://gillianbrown.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk
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gillianrbrown1.bsky.social
Prof. Gillian Brown @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social · Aug 8
🚨 New, short article by myself, Clark Barrett and @kevinlala.bsky.social on the legacy of Wilson's 'Sociobiology: The New Synthesis', which was published 50 years ago.

@science.org #ehbea #histbiol #evobio #psyscisky

Revisiting the human sociobiology debate |Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Revisiting the human sociobiology debate
What have we learned 50 years on?
www.science.org
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
jbeehner.bsky.social
Not all sexual swellings signal fertility. Some signal strategy. In our new Current Biology paper, we show how gelada females “fake it” during male takeovers—and why it works.
authors.elsevier.com/a/1m7%7E93QW...
November 19, 2025 at 4:16 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
genderscilab.bsky.social
Hot off the press! See our new paper: “Three maxims for countering sex essentialism in scientific research” in the journal Biology of Sex Differences. We show how sex essentialism distorts research & propose 3 ways to avoid making these mistakes. (1/12) rdcu.be/eNcRM
Three maxims for countering sex essentialism in scientific research
rdcu.be
November 19, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
alexeimaklakov.bsky.social
1/6 In a new preprint we ask a question:

Why do males and females so often age and die at different rates?

We argue that sex-specific mutation accumulation may be the most parsimonious evolutionary explanation for sex-biased ageing:

ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
Sex-specific mutation accumulation: A parsimonious explanation for sex differences in lifespan and ageing
ecoevorxiv.org
November 19, 2025 at 12:08 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
dstibbardhawkes.bsky.social
📣 New BBS preprint out now! 📣

"Models casting egalitarian societies as crucibles of equality perpetuate the factually uninformed notion that foragers are somehow more noble. Critiques portray egalitarianism as romantic fantasy. Neither characterization is wholly justified."

doi.org/10.1017/S014...
Egalitarianism is not Equality: Moving from outcome to process in the study of human political organisation | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Egalitarianism is not Equality: Moving from outcome to process in the study of human political organisation
doi.org
November 18, 2025 at 8:05 AM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
andygardner.bsky.social
New paper: "A formal theory of group-level adaptation for obligate eusociality", with Kalyani Twyman (@kztwyman.bsky.social) #OpenAccess

academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

#Image #GoogleGemini @jevbio.bsky.social #OA
AI image generated using Google's Gemini.
November 18, 2025 at 10:35 AM
gillianrbrown1.bsky.social
Shuster et al (2025) on the gendering of plant reproduction processes: "The durability of gender stereotypes in describing plant reproduction reflects deeper tensions in the communication of information by the scientific community." 🧪

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
Plant Sex: A Cultural Analysis of the Gendering of Plant Reproduction Processes | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society: Vol 50, No 3
Abstract Scholarship from feminist science, knowledge, and technology (FSTS) studies consistently demonstrates how the production of knowledge about biological processes depends upon gender stereotype...
www.journals.uchicago.edu
November 18, 2025 at 8:56 AM
gillianrbrown1.bsky.social
Nice article by @dingdingpeng.the100.ci and @boryslaw.bsky.social: 'violations of measurement invariance imply that there are potentially interesting differences in the measurement process between the groups, which could warrant explanations in their own right.' www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Rethinking measurement invariance causally
Measurement invariance is often touted as a necessary statistical prerequisite for group comparisons. Typically, when there is evidence against measur…
www.sciencedirect.com
November 17, 2025 at 10:27 AM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
elife.bsky.social
For most of us, our physical and mental abilities decline as we age.

Scientists are examining tool use, a technically challenging activity, to learn how ageing affects our close relatives, chimpanzees, something we know very little about.
buff.ly/Tzuw7q2
November 9, 2025 at 11:01 AM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
davidwlawson.bsky.social
🚨 🐍 Our new paper on the consequences men face when countering patriarchal norms in rural Tanzania 🐍.🚨

We carried out focus groups and detailed interviews with a whopping 172 women and men about their perceptions of men who support women's empowerment... 📝 1/5
“A snake with no teeth”: Urbanization shifts perceptions of men who support women’s empowerment in Northwestern Tanzania
Achieving gender equality requires the support of all genders, but efforts to engage men in women’s empowerment initiatives have been fraught with res…
www.sciencedirect.com
November 14, 2025 at 6:45 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
wileyprof.bsky.social
Our special issue on Evolutionary Functions of Consciousness, coedited with Tecumseh Fitch and Adina Roskies, now online royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

Contributions by (1) Irina Mikhalevich; (2) Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg; (3) Nicholas Humphrey; (cont'd)
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1939
royalsocietypublishing.org
November 13, 2025 at 11:10 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
dsquintana.bsky.social
Our paper on improving statistical reporting in psychology is now online 🎉

As a part of this paper, we also created the Transparent Statistical Reporting in Psychology checklist, which researchers can use to improve their statistical reporting practices

www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Transparent and comprehensive statistical reporting is critical for ensuring the credibility, reproducibility, and interpretability of psychological research. This paper offers a structured set of guidelines for reporting statistical analyses in quantitative psychology, emphasizing clarity at both the planning and results stages. Drawing on established recommendations and emerging best practices, we outline key decisions related to hypothesis formulation, sample size justification, preregistration, outlier and missing data handling, statistical model specification, and the interpretation of inferential outcomes. We address considerations across frequentist and Bayesian frameworks and fixed as well as sequential research designs, including guidance on effect size reporting, equivalence testing, and the appropriate treatment of null results. To facilitate implementation of these recommendations, we provide the Transparent Statistical Reporting in Psychology (TSRP) Checklist that researchers can use to systematically evaluate and improve their statistical reporting practices (https://osf.io/t2zpq/). In addition, we provide a curated list of freely available tools, packages, and functions that researchers can use to implement transparent reporting practices in their own analyses to bridge the gap between theory and practice. To illustrate the practical application of these principles, we provide a side-by-side comparison of insufficient versus best-practice reporting using a hypothetical cognitive psychology study. By adopting transparent reporting standards, researchers can improve the robustness of individual studies and facilitate cumulative scientific progress through more reliable meta-analyses and research syntheses.
November 14, 2025 at 8:43 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
markrubin.bsky.social
"p-Excuses"

E.g., p = .056 is “marginally significant” or “close to being significant”

🔹 Most p-excuses are used in psychology.

🔹 The least p-excuses are used in health.

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/me...

#MetaSci #AcademicSky 🧪
Researchers face incentives to write up their empirical findings in a way that maximizes publication success. We analyze the language of journal articles and its association with statistical significance to explore questionable research practices at the stage of writing up articles, using 140,606 articles from health, biology, psychology, economics, and multidisciplinary journals over 32 years. For most disciplines, a higher share of non-significant main findings is associated with more hedging and negative striking words, fewer positive striking words, and fewer superlatives. We neither find evidence that authors upsell ambiguous results using sensational language nor that ambiguous results are written up less readably. Contrarily, articles with a higher share of statistically significant main findings are written up more sensationally. We find that emphasis on (marginal) statistical significance increases with the share of non-significant main findings, reflecting a dichotomized interpretation of p-values based on arbitrary thresholds. Particularly, p-excuses give the impression of statistical significance when the finding is actually not significant, consistent with the notion of 'spin'. This study provides empirical insights that might help researchers to self-reflect on writing up empirical findings. More training and fewer incentives to sell findings using sensational language and spin can help to improve academic writing.
November 14, 2025 at 3:43 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
rcgd-isr.bsky.social
A set of experiments looks at the effects of witnessing gender bias in an academic setting, and how they compare to those of witnessing generic rudeness. The negative impacts were greater in the first case, for both men and women. Denise Sekaquaptewa coauthors:

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Effects of witnessing subtle gender bias versus rudeness on interpersonal outcomes among women and men - Social Psychology of Education
Positive interpersonal peer relationships are noted to be beneficial for learning outcomes and persistence for college students, but these benefits can be hindered when peer interactions include subtl...
link.springer.com
November 14, 2025 at 12:52 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
rebeccasear.bsky.social
This paper clearly exposes the hereditarian project for the pseudoscience it is 👇 Also highlights how overtly political are those who promote the claim there are evolved racial differences in cognitive and behavioural traits, despite strong protestations to the contrary
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 7d
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 4:13 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
boothicus.bsky.social
This is out now:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Association between lactase persistence and height in the past (indicating people with the persistence allele were better nourished by drinking milk than those without it) provides a potential explanation for why it was under strong selection.
November 10, 2025 at 4:24 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
pnas.org
A comparative analysis across all major vertebrate classes finds that large brains evolved only in lineages capable of producing large offspring and maintaining high body temperatures. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/Tr8z50Xq2RQ
A photo of an adult cradling a baby, emphasizing its large head. Stock photo.
November 11, 2025 at 5:03 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
donmoyn.bsky.social
*Women receive substantially lower "potential" ratings despite receiving higher performance ratings
*Differences in potential ratings account for half of the gender promotion gap
*Women’s lower potential ratings do not reflect future performance: women subsequently outperform male colleagues
November 10, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
evolvedbiofilm.bsky.social
The evolutionary and ecological consequences of cooperation

-in American Naturalist by @stuwest.bsky.social, @annadewar.bsky.social, @ryosukeiritani.bsky.social, Laurence Belcher, and @asgriffin.bsky.social

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...
The evolutionary and ecological consequences of cooperation | The American Naturalist: Vol 0, No ja
www.journals.uchicago.edu
November 2, 2025 at 7:48 AM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
theramseylab.bsky.social
Defining non-human #ToolUse remains contested, complicating scientific generalization & inspiring the concept of “tooling.” Our new 📄 @philscijournal.bsky.social proposes a synthetic framework to advance research on 🔧 use & tooling 👇 www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #philsci #cogsci #evosky #HPbio
Screenshot of the first page of a Philosophy of Science journal article titled “Tool Use Beyond Humans” by Gianmaria Dani and Grant Ramsey, published by the Philosophy of Science Association. The authors are affiliated with the Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science at KU Leuven, Belgium. Abstract: The definition of tool use has long been debated, especially when applied beyond humans. Recent work argues that the phenomena included within tool use are so broad and varied that there is little hope of using the category for scientific generalizations, explanations, and predictions about the evolution, ecology, and psychology of tool users. One response to this argument has been the development of tooling as a replacement for tool use. In this article, we analyze the tool use and tooling frameworks. Identifying advantages and limitations in each, we offer a synthetic approach that suggests promising avenues for future research.
November 10, 2025 at 2:15 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
ecoevorxiv.bsky.social
"The statistical fragility of animal cognition findings: a meta-meta-analytic reappraisal"
doi.org/10.32942/X2Z...
Statistical performance of animal cognition meta-analyses at the primary-study and meta-analysis levels. (a) Statistical power: Median power to detect the (true or bias-corrected) meta-analytic effect size; darker red bars indicate lower power. (b) Type M error: Median exaggeration ratio between estimated and true effect sizes; darker blue indicates stronger overestimation (values > 20 shown as “20+”). (c) Type S error: Median probability of obtaining a significant effect in the wrong direction; darker yellow-green indicates higher Type S error. Violin plots above each panel summarise distributions across meta-analyses. Each point represents one meta-analysis (matching a row in the bar plots), and the horizontal line denotes the overall mean.
November 10, 2025 at 7:00 AM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
natureportfolio.nature.com
A paper in Nature Communications presents archaeology of the Namorotukunan site in Kenya’s Turkana Basin, and the study’s findings suggests continuity in tool-making practices over 300,000 years, with evidence of systematic selection of rock types. go.nature.com/3WJnBrK 🏺 🧪
This is figure 1, which is a map of Turkana Basin with the Namorotukunan Archeological Site and a timeline of currently known events in the Plio-Pleistocene.
November 8, 2025 at 8:49 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
evolletters.bsky.social
Gestation length both shapes and is shaped by other life history traits in terrestrial eutherian mammals
doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Now in @evolletters.bsky.social by Thodoris Danis et al.
Gestation length both shapes and is shaped by other life history traits in terrestrial eutherian mammals
Abstract. The length of gestation in eutherian mammals, which is key to their reproductive success, is closely connected to other life history traits, body
doi.org
November 5, 2025 at 6:47 PM
gillianrbrown1.bsky.social
📢 Here is my commentary about the pitfalls of taking an impoverished evolutionary approach to culture, which include 'the limitations of a unidirectional model of evolution' and 'the neglect of niche construction theory'. #ehbea #evolution #psychscisky 🧪

🧵 1/2

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
The pitfalls of an impoverished approach to culture: Commentary on Baumard and André
www.sciencedirect.com
November 5, 2025 at 1:00 PM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Evolutionary psychologists have long believed that men prefer physical traits in women which are cues to high potential fertility. A new review concludes: “current evidence base is too weak to support the claim that women’s feminine morphological traits are associated with reproductive potential”
A systematic review of the association between women’s morphological traits and fertility | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core
A systematic review of the association between women’s morphological traits and fertility
www.cambridge.org
November 5, 2025 at 9:02 AM
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
victorshiramizu.bsky.social
New preprint w/ @fbartos.bsky.social , Ben Jones, and @tvpollet.bsky.social .
Our reanalyses found *little* evidence that sexual orientation is associated with 2D:4D ratios after accounting for publication bias. 🧵1/7

osf.io/preprints/ps...
November 3, 2025 at 11:53 AM