Ed Hagen
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edhagen.net
Ed Hagen
@edhagen.net
5.6K followers 2K following 970 posts
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.
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Reposted by Ed Hagen
humbehevosoc.bsky.social
⏰Last call!
Submissions for #HBES2026 close today.
If you’re planning to submit an abstract, now’s the moment

airess.fgses-um6p.ma/hbes2026

See you in Rabat!
Human Behavior and Evolution Society 2026 Conference | Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique - FGSES
airess.fgses-um6p.ma
January 16, 2026 at 3:22 PM
Reposted by Ed Hagen
4gravitons.bsky.social
Blatant self-promotion, or a new approach to academic publishing?
A Paper With a Bluesky Account
People make social media accounts for their pets. Why not a scientific paper? Anthropologist Ed Hagen made a Bluesky account for his recent preprint, "Menopause averted a midlife energetic crisis with help from older children and parents: A simulation study." The paper's topic itself is interesting (menopause is surprisingly rare among mammals, he has a plausible account as to why), but not really the kind of thing I cover here.
4gravitons.com
January 16, 2026 at 5:00 PM
Reposted by Ed Hagen
chive.pub
Chive is a decentralized eprint service built on AT Protocol.

Here's what it does and a bit on its design.
January 12, 2026 at 6:06 PM
edhagen.net
Teen daughter flying alone for the first time: "they had to drug test my candle"
January 11, 2026 at 10:19 PM
edhagen.net
More evidence that sex chromosomes, and not just sex hormones, contribute to phenotypic sex differences, sometimes working together, and sometimes in opposition, at least in mouse brains 🧪
January 11, 2026 at 8:44 PM
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
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-preprint.edhagen.net Menopause evolution preprint @menopause-preprint.edhagen.net · 11d
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
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
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
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
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. 🧪
edhagen.net 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
edhagen.net
"Racial hereditarian research remains unjustified and harmful: A reply to Woodley et al. (2025a, b)" 🧪
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social 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
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
biotay.bsky.social 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
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
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
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? 🧪
djnicholson.bsky.social 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
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
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