Rebecca Sear

@rebeccasear.bsky.social

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Director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution, Brunel University London. President of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association

https://www.rebeccasear.org/

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Rebecca Sear

Applications now open for the @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social Advancing Cultural Evolution Early Career Research Grants, deadline 27 Sep 2024, award of up to $3000 culturalevolutionsociety.org/news-and-eve...

ACE Early Career Research Grants now open - Cultural Evolution Societyculturalevolutionsociety.org

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Rebecca Sear

📢 New pre-print on methodological development of mHealth tool for #infantfeeding data collection 📢 osf.io/preprints/ps... funding from @britishacademy.bsky.social and Wellcome Trust Developed and written with Best Beginnings, @drsarahmyers.bsky.social @rebeccasear.bsky.social and Emily Emmott

OSFosf.io

“Overall, the goal of this work is to challenge the scientific community, particularly the publication companies, to evaluate how assumptions of innate biologic disadvantage have clouded assessments of racial disparities in disease beyond the topics that are more stereotypical of race science”

Frontiers | Race science without racists: how bigoted paradigms persist in allergy researchwww.frontiersin.org In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the massacre in Buffalo, the editorial boards of the prominent scientific publication companies formally apolog...

“Human beings are members of a whole, in creation of one essence and soul. If one member is afflicted with pain, other members uneasy will remain. If you have no sympathy for human pain, the name of human you cannot retain” council.science/blog/world-p...

World Population Day: Sustainable population growth for a sustainable future requires understanding, comprehensive planning and collaboration - International Science Councilcouncil.science In this blog, Prof. Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi, a council member of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), explores how global demographic changes necessitate inves...

Happy World Population Day www.un.org/development/...

World Population Prospects 2024 | Population Divisionwww.un.org

“If we do not acknowledge, embrace, and teach the history of genetics, we are not serving the public understanding of genetics at all. Eugenics education should be embedded in our teaching, from high school onwards” www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Eugenics and the misuse of Mendelwww.sciencedirect.com Highlighting the Distinguished Speakers Symposium on “The Future of Human Genetics and Genomics,” this collection of articles is based on presentation…

Nestle’s marketing of infant formula in lower and middle income countries resulted in “about 212,000 excess deaths per year at the peak of the Nestlé controversy in 1981” www.nber.org/papers/w24452

Mortality from Nestlé’s Marketing of Infant Formula in Low and Middle-Income Countrieswww.nber.org Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

This week’s visitor to CCE was Feryl Badiani, who gave a talk about her work in two Hindu populations in India, which questioned some of the theoretical framing around big gods/small gods. A great talk, as evidenced here by one attentive listener at least 😊

Today CCE is being treated to an excellent talk on 'why people still pray to Krishna and not Zeus' 🙏 by Feral Badiani based on research in Baroda and Kolhapur 🇮🇳

The class gap in academia: “First-generation college graduates are 13% less likely to end up tenured at an R1, and are on average tenured at institutions ranked 9% lower, than their PhD classmates with a parent with a (non-PhD) graduate degree… networks likely play a role”

annastansbury.github.io

“Today the small nuclear family dominates across much of the world. Following World War II this prevailing family form was associated with modernity – the product of a post-industrial society. But just how modern is the modern nuclear family?” www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog/

The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Cambridge Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ageswww.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk

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Rebecca Sear

These conversations will keep on being had when issues remain and we look away I really nice blog post on the topic from a evolutionary psychologist and therapist www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/darw...

The evo behav sciences seem doomed to repeat the same conversations over again. From 2000: “Can we blame the field of ev psych for Kevin MacDonald? Intellectually speaking, no. But it’s the job of a scholarly association not just to foster discussion but also police the boundaries of its discipline”

Evolutionary Psychology's Anti-Semiteslate.com What scares people about the trial going on in London over whether Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt libeled Holocaust denier David Irving by calling...

Combating the Misuse of Evolutionary Psychology Researchwww.psychologytoday.com Evolutionary psychology findings have been misunderstood and misused, sometimes by extremist groups. Here's what researchers and readers can do to promote more accurate interpretation.

Reply to

Jeremy Koster

No disagreement from me on cultural differences being relevant 😊

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Rebecca Sear

I’ve got a book out soon, grandiosely entitled “Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species.” What’s my book all about, you ask? A thread 🧵👇 www.amazon.com/Disbelief-Or...

Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species: Gervais Ph.D, Will M.: 9781633889248: Amazon.com: Bookswww.amazon.com Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species [Gervais Ph.D, Will M.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species

“we resolve the question of whether there is a trend for brain mass to increase through time. We find a trend in only 3 mammalian orders, which is strongest in primates, setting the stage for the uniquely rapid directional increase ultimately producing the computational powers of the human brain”

Co-evolutionary dynamics of mammalian brain and body size - Nature Ecology & Evolutionwww.nature.com Analysis of mammalian brain and body mass reveals a curvilinear relationship contrary to assumptions of log-linear power laws. As mammals grow larger, increases in brain mass compared to body mass dim...

“By embedding simplistic and gendered assumptions about mothers’ love for their children, epigenetics research perpetuates the tendency to consider mothers especially blameworthy where they are perceived as failing to sufficiently care for or love their children”

Constructing maternal responsibility: narratives of “motherly love” and maternal blame in epigenetics researchwww.tandfonline.com Research in epigenetics is demonstrating the importance of maternal care towards offspring early in life for long-term health and behavioral outcomes. Although most of this research has been conduc...

Reply to

Jeremy Koster

Maybe differences are to do with the age of couples? Estelle just looked at young adults, where marriages with children might have been shotgun marriages, so maybe not well suited

“The rise in infant mortality in Texas shows that in states with strict abortion bans, forcing people to carry non-viable pregnancies to term codifies cruelty and unnecessary pain” www.scientificamerican.com/article/anti...

Antiabortion Heartbeat Bills Cause Immense Sufferingwww.scientificamerican.com The rise in infant mortality in Texas shows that in states with strict abortion bans, forcing people to carry non-viable pregnancies to term codifies cruelty and unnecessary pain

Divorce among young adults in Malawi: “Having children was associated with increased likelihood of divorce for men & women, however for men there was no association between children & subsequent outcomes, while for women children were associated with lower chances of remarriage & attending school”

OSFosf.io

“On average, maternal grandmothers saw their grandchildren 173.8 days/year, while paternal grandmothers saw their grandchildren 87.5 days/year (p < 0.001)” onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Variation in grandmaternal investment in Ukraineonlinelibrary.wiley.com The American Journal of Human Biology publishes reports of original research, theoretical articles and timely reviews, and brief communications in human biology.

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Rebecca Sear

Great to see the BSA making a statement on the crisis at Goldsmiths and across the HE sector: es.britsoc.co.uk/addressing-t...

Addressing the Crisis in UK Higher Education: Sociology at Goldsmiths and Elsewhere - Everyday Society - The British Sociological Associationes.britsoc.co.uk Statement by the President and Past Presidents of the British Sociological Association Recent reports have indicated that around 40% of higher education institutions are in serious financial difficult...

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Prof Lynda Boothroyd

Wonder what the field would have looked like if HBES had split…

Reply to

Prof Lynda Boothroyd

I thought that bylaw was in there from the beginning? This video suggests HBES founders took a “platform everyone regardless of politics” stance from the start. Nesse says Rushton was on the programme of the first conference but didnt attend because of student protests www.hbes.com/on-the-origi...

On the Origin of the Evolution Revolution - HBESwww.hbes.com

Evolutionary Psychology's Anti-Semiteslate.com What scares people about the trial going on in London over whether Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt libeled Holocaust denier David Irving by calling...

At the risk of belabouring the point, the reason we can’t ever learn from our mistakes is that there is a small minority who actively want to make sure we don’t, and a larger majority who seem happy to believe that minority should be given the freedom to mess with our discipline

UK election: scientists welcome Labour’s landslide win 🤞🤞 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

UK election: scientists welcome Labour’s landslide winwww.nature.com Struggling universities should be near the top of the new government’s agenda, say researchers. Struggling universities should be near the top of the new government’s agenda, say researchers.

“Nausea & vomiting in pregnancy in contemporary post-industrialised populations may be more severe due to environmental mismatch, and the current symptomology of NVP in such populations should not be viewed as a typical experience of pregnancy” academic.oup.com/emph/advance...

Re-examining the adaptive function of nausea and vomiting in pregnancyacademic.oup.com Abstract. Nausea and vomiting in pregnancy (NVP) has been proposed to have a prophylactic function. In this commentary, I re-examine NVP from an evolutiona

“This is the reality at the coalface of the AI revolution: people working under oppressive surveillance at furious intensity just to keep their jobs and support their families”

Meet Mercy and Anita – the African workers driving the AI revolution, for just over a dollar an hourwww.theguardian.com Social media content and AI training data are processed in outsource centres in the global south, where long hours, low pay and exposure to disturbing material are the norm

“Less than 5% of the publications were marked as retracted in every resource through which they were available”

‘A threat to the integrity of scientific publishing’: How often are retracted papers marked that way?retractionwatch.com Caitlin Bakker How well do databases flag retracted articles? There has been a lot of interest recently in the quality of retraction notices and notifications, including new guidelines from the Nat…

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Rebecca Sear

Here's a pre-print of my as-yet unreviewed chapter on 'Religion, Ritual, and Spiritual Beliefs' intended for publication in a UG/highschool level textbook on cultural evolution. osf.io/txpj2

OSFosf.io

“Providing support for a life history trade-off between somatic maintenance and reproduction, we found a positive relationship between clutch size and cancer prevalence across birds…no association with body mass, lifespan, incubation length, or sexual dimorphism” academic.oup.com/emph/advance...

Life history traits and cancer prevalence in birdsacademic.oup.com AbstractBackground and objectives. Cancer is a disease that affects nearly all multicellular life, including the broad and diverse taxa of Aves. While litt