courtneybhilton.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

I'm a big fan of this paper on the shape of rose petals. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

submitted 4 hours ago • 1 comment

Calling all #rstats friends in Australia/Oceania! Exciting news! Fonti Kar (@fontikar.bsky.social) and I are forming a "C Study Group for R Contributors" in 2025. It's like getting skills to help build the Millennium Falcon of programming languages! 1/n

submitted 7 hours ago • 1 comment

Once again, Australian election results prove how awful choropleth maps are for data visualisation. "Land doesn't vote, people do." #rstats code to reproduce animation here: github.com/emitanaka/oz...

submitted 1 day ago • 9 comments

Thank you, Australia.

submitted 2 days ago • 170 comments

Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each apparently determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing. 🧬🧵🧪 1/n

submitted 3 days ago • 54 comments

This is a '10 common mistakes' document that I give to students submitting a thesis / written assignment. Any majors ones that I've missed?!

submitted 4 days ago • 2 comments

Are dance & infant-directed song human universals? Like many people, I've long thought so. But in a new paper in Current Biology, Kim Hill & I report that the Northern Aché (Paraguay) lacked both behaviors, likely losing them after cultural collapse. Open-access link: www.cell.com/current-biol...

submitted 6 days ago • 2 comments

GreatAdaptations: Female bonobos team up to boss males around. One more awesome piece of data to add to the enduring mystery of why bonobos and chimps are so different. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

... batman

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

Correction to our @currentbiology.bsky.social paper. In short: same overall conclusion, but an error in the code (my bad 😅) resulted in the language-specific estimates in Figure 4 being biased. Details and code to reproduce the error in the notice. Thanks to Sarah Creel for discovering the error!

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Finally online! (For the moment still behind a paywall, but see also doi.org/10.31234/osf...) doi.org/10.1093/oxfo...

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

🚨🚨 I’m looking for a postdoctoral fellow to join my lab at Harvard's Psychology Department starting Fall 2025 🚨📣 Please share widely and spread the word to interested candidates! 🧵 🗓 Application review begins April 30 Apply here: rb.gy/k7q9kf (1/2)

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

Thanks to Evan Kidd, @mcxfrank.bsky.social & @asifamajid.bsky.social (Eds) for organizing the awesome Open Encyc. of Cog. Sci. and entrusting me with/ the honor of penning the entry on "Language" (in < 3500 words, so do see other entries for much, MUCH more!) oecs.mit.edu/pub/ho9e9c80...

submitted 13 days ago • 3 comments

Working from home be like:

submitted 13 days ago • 2 comments

I am hiring a new Lab Manager to help run the NYU Center for Conflict & Cooperation. We start reviewing apps on MAY 1st and it pays over $58,000. Please share with anyone who might be interested! Please apply here: apply.interfolio.com/166620 See more details below:

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

Recorded some nice thunderstorm sounds last night here in Auckland. ⛈️

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

Our new paper is out. We point out that large brained (and often smart) mammals and birds have evolved very different distribution of neurons numbers in the brain. This means that similar cognitive abilities have evolved in very different brains. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

submitted 17 days ago • 15 comments

"We highlight correlates of the evolution of craniofacial and vocal tract features in the hominin lineage and outline a timeline by which our ancestors became ‘pre-adapted’ for the evolution of fully modern human speech." Open Access link; led by Axel Ekström: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

I’m an autistic person and was shortlisted for Best American Food Writing a few years ago. I’m dating somebody wonderful. My mom is autistic and a super successful lawyer. My dad was autistic and wrote one of the most cited sales and marketing articles of the 20th century.

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Super excited to submit a big sabbatical project this year: "Continuous developmental changes in word recognition support language learning across early childhood": osf.io/preprints/ps...

submitted 20 days ago • 1 comment

Great article on current state of ADHD research, much of it consistent w/ the evo mismatch hyp & also w/ work by @realadamhunt.bsky.social One thing I didn't know: kids who consistently take stimulant medication for ADHD are about 1 inch shorter than those who don't🧪 www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/m...

submitted 21 days ago • 4 comments

This new great ape genome paper is thick and fascinating (and essential reading for us evo-anths I guess). But reminded of this timeless cartoon (right) from Soonish by the incomparable @weinersmith.bsky.social @zachweinersmith.bsky.social (link to open access paper www.nature.com/articles/s41...)

submitted 21 days ago • 1 comment

🎵 Why do some people enjoy #music more than others? New findings published in @naturecomms.bsky.social show that our capacity to enjoy music is partly inherited, with 54% of music enjoyment variability linked to #DNA differences: doi.org/10.1038/s414... @mpi-nl.bsky.social @ki.se #BehaviorGenetics

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

For the new listeners, here’s a free tutorial I made for learning how to make simulation models of cultural evolution in R, on github: github.com/amesoudi/cul... and as a bookdown version with outputs: bookdown.org/amesoudi/ABM...

submitted 169 days ago • 1 comment

Our new review maps compelling evidence and offers new directions for music education and wellbeing research. #musiceducation #music #wellbeing #research journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

Proudly presenting the (for now) final version of "Why experiments work." To share the materials in a slightly more professional manner, I added a "Resources" page to my website: juliarohrer.com/resources/. That was long overdue anyway; now there's also a curated list of my papers and blog posts.

submitted 23 days ago • 6 comments

New paper on the obstetrical dilemma from @xliaoyi.bsky.social et al. using UK Biobank data: "Our observed genetic correlation between birth canal width & infant & adult head width provides support for the coevolution of the human brain & pelvis." 🧪 #BioAnth www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

New paper on misperceptions out in PNAS @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Why do people overestimate the size of politically relevant groups (immigrant, LGBTQ, Jewish) and quantities (% of budget spent on foreign aid, % of refugees that are criminals)?🧵👇

submitted 28 days ago • 12 comments

today we will all read imbens 2021 on statistical significance and p values, which is a strong contender for having the best opening paragraph of any stats paper pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

submitted 29 days ago • 27 comments

This is very cool that ODESZA did this. #severance open.spotify.com/album/7bNj7h...

submitted 30 days ago • 71 comments

"Findings suggest that compositionality [the capacity to combine meaningful elements into larger meaningful structures] is a prominent feature of the bonobo vocal system revealing stronger parallels with human language than previously thought." Fascinating work by @berthetmelissa.bsky.social et al.🧪

submitted 31 days ago • 1 comment

The cultural evolution of distortion in music (and other norms of mixed appeal). New paper (w Greg Bryant) on a weird social phenomenon, with a general model of how such phenomena evolve as ways to distinguish subcultures. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

submitted 31 days ago • 1 comment

I'm beyond excited to share our new paper in Nature! We sequenced the first ancient human autosomal genomes from the Central Sahara, two ~7,000-year-old individuals from Takarkori in Libya, revealing a long-isolated North African lineage: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Here's a short thread: (1/n)

submitted 32 days ago • 3 comments

Cory Booker after 24 hours of talking vs me after giving a 10 minute conference presentation

submitted 33 days ago • 0 comments

University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada has not 1, not 2, but THREE TT psychology positions! Indigenous and/or Black scholar, open area careers.uoguelph.ca/job/Guelph-A... Applied social and Open area teaching careers.uoguelph.ca/job/Guelph-A... Come join us!

submitted 35 days ago • 2 comments

Richard Lewontin was born OTD in 1929. In scientific research we devote “exquisite attention … to methodological problems that can be solved, while the pretense is made that the ones that cannot be solved are really nothing to worry about." 🌱🐋🦋🦫🧪#PhilSci #EvoBio #HistSTM

submitted 36 days ago • 2 comments

Reasoning Algorithms: Online workshop open to all, with a bunch of speakers from cognitive development, primate cognition, neuroscience, and computational modeling 🧪🧠 obssr.od.nih.gov/news-and-eve...

submitted 38 days ago • 0 comments

🚨New Paper Klaxon 🚨 Belief in Belief: Even Atheists in Secular Countries Show Intuitive Preferences Favoring Religious Belief. Now out at PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Here's a quick 🧵 on what we did and found!👇 1/ 11 🧪 #atheism #religion #culture #evolution

submitted 38 days ago • 5 comments

Excited to share a new Pew Research Center report I led on "religious switching" in 36 countries around the world! pewrsr.ch/4hK1ucL A few key takeaways below! 👇 1/n

submitted 39 days ago • 1 comment

More great PhD opportunities, this time with @felicitymeakins.bsky.social study.uq.edu.au/study-option...

submitted 38 days ago • 0 comments

THREAD The numbers are in. @bsky.app research sharing volumes vs X Formerly Twitter In March 2024, on most days, Bluesky hosts more posts linked to research published in 2025 than X. By quite a lot. Release the Kraken... #AcademicSky #HigherEd #Altmetrics 1/11

submitted 38 days ago • 19 comments

In every civilization, people end up sorted into levels of socio-economic status (SES). We explore the history, present, and future of scientific research on the complicated relationship between SES and DNA in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social💰🧬🎓 Link: rdcu.be/efacK Thread below 👇🏽

submitted 40 days ago • 6 comments

In a new preprint (doi.org/10.31234/osf...) a huge range of data+methods shows that people can evaluate what others know without first evaluating what they think/believe. Representations of knowledge seem to be an independent and conceptually primitive way of representing others' minds. 🧵 below!

submitted 39 days ago • 3 comments