Rebecca Sear

@rebeccasear.bsky.social

11K followers 3.7K following 2.8K posts

Director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution, Brunel University London @brunelcce.bsky.social. President of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association @ehbea.bsky.social

https://www.rebeccasear.org/

Videos

Rebecca Sear, is a British anthropologist and academic, who specialises in evolutionary anthropology, demography and human behavioural ecology. Since 2024, she has been director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London. She previously taught at the London School of Economics, Durham University and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. .. more

Psychology 45%

Sociology 15%

Posts Replies Media Videos

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 22d

In case it's relevant: as I'm in the UK, I can't access direct messages without providing more information to a social media platform than I'm comfortable with (a likely pointless gesture, given how much they already know about me 🤷‍♀️). Contactable the old-fashioned way

Reposted by Lesley A. Hall

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 7h

The logical endpoint of the “censorship” moral panic

Paul Brand @paulbrand.bsky.social · 10h

Preventing the sharing of sexualised images of children is “censorship” according to Elon Musk.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Musk says X outcry is 'excuse for censorship'

The government is urging Ofcom to use all its powers – up to and including an effective ban – against X.

www.bbc.co.uk

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 7h

4 problems revealed in gender equality programs: excluding knowledge from Global South, assuming violence is intrinsic characteristic of GS culture, depoliticising poverty by labelling work as inherently liberating, universalizing human rights discourses emphasising neoliberal ideas of personhood

A decolonial feminist perspective on gender equality programming in the Global South

The feminisms emerging from postcolonial regions of the Global South have critiqued gender equality initiatives that adapt to, rather than dismantle, racist, capitalist, and patriarchal systems. They ...

journals.plos.org

Reposted by Rebecca Sear

Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 8h

'Indonesia temporarily blocked Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot on Saturday due to the risk of AI-generated pornographic content, becoming the first country to deny access to the AI tool.' 1/2

Indonesia blocks Musk’s Grok chatbot due to risk of pornographic content

Move comes after governments and regulators from Europe to Asia have condemned the AI tool and some have opened inquiries into sexualised content

www.theguardian.com

Reposted by Shannon Vallor, Will Jennings, Steve Peers , and 2 more Shannon Vallor, Will Jennings, Steve Peers, Rebecca Sear, Claire L. Adida

Paul Brand @paulbrand.bsky.social · 10h

Preventing the sharing of sexualised images of children is “censorship” according to Elon Musk.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Musk says X outcry is 'excuse for censorship'

The government is urging Ofcom to use all its powers – up to and including an effective ban – against X.

www.bbc.co.uk

Reposted by Rebecca Sear, Trevor A. Branch, Ben Kaden

Katharine Hayhoe @katharinehayhoe.com · 22h

New analysis: 0.25% of 2025 Bluesky posts contained citations to research...while only 0.000006% of X/Twitter posts did.

In raw numbers, X still has 2x the research-based posts that Bluesky does (though they are harder to find): but it took Twitter 10 years to get there vs just 2 years for Bluesky

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 2d

THREAD

The first full year of tracking research on @bsky.app

Hi, we are Altmetric, and we track how research is communicated across the web.

We now have one full calendar year of Bluesky research data and thought we'd have a looksie.

My name is Jeff meme with Altmetric replaced. Channing Tatum with his clothes on.

Reposted by Lesley A. Hall, Rebecca Sear, Rebecca Williams

$profrachelgan.bsky.social$

Prof Rachel Oliver @profrachelgan.bsky.social · 23h

What would a fellow have to do, to be in contravention of the @royalsociety.org Code of Conduct if Musk's behaviour *doesn't* constitute "acting in a personal or professional capacity in such a manner as is likely to bring the
Society into disrepute"?
royalsociety.org/-/media/abou...

Reposted by Rebecca Sear

Dr Emily Emmott @ehemmott.bsky.social · 1d

Early view of our Special Issue on the Anthropology of Adolescence at the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is now available!

Take a look at our introduction here, which also provides summaries of all the papers in the special issue:

doi.org/10.1111/1467...

doi.org

Reposted by Rebecca Sear

Ruth Mace @ruthmace.bsky.social · 1d

UCL Evolutionary Anthropology seminars starting up again for the new term every Tuesday pm. Anthropology Dept. 14 Taviton St. DFL 3.30-5pm followed by 🍷. All welcome.
www.ucl.ac.uk/social-histo...

Evolutionary Anthropology seminars

Exploring the evolutionary roots of human behaviour, biology, and culture through interdisciplinary research and debate.

www.ucl.ac.uk

Reposted by Lesley A. Hall

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 1d

Social constructed childbearing motivations and fertility intentions: "We propose socio-cognitive factors affect fertility intentions not directly but through the type of motivation they foster, whether intrinsic, extrinsic, or amotivated"

OSF

doi.org

Reposted by Diane Coyle, Steven French, Rebecca Sear

Anna Alexandrova @annaalexandrova.bsky.social · 1d

Our special issue with @martinkusch.bsky.social is finally complete and here’s at long last our introduction. I pitched the idea to him in 2019! Thank you for your patience and generosity, Martin. I am proud of this manifesto and hope colleagues will join us in rethinking this old debate #philsci

Reposted by Lesley A. Hall

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 1d

"we detail anthropology's role in the development of racial science and the subsequent placement of whiteness at the top of the world's global political and cultural systems of power...[and] examine the early critiques of anthropology's racializing practices by Black and Indigenous anthropologists"

White Supremacy and the Making of Anthropology

This review presents a historical and contemporary view of white supremacy as an entrenched global system based on presumed biological and cultural difference, related practices of racism, the valoriz...

www.annualreviews.org

Reposted by Lesley A. Hall, Graeme Warren

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 1d

"Older women in both communities report higher autonomy than younger women. Both BaYaka and Bandongo women make decisions on food sharing. However, BaYaka women report greater control over financial and healthcare decisions than Bandongo women, who often share decision-making with their husbands"

Women’s self-reported autonomy in household decision-making varies between BaYaka foragers and Bandongo farmers in the Congo Basin | Hunter Gatherer Research

Women’s decision-making power within households is a critical aspect of gender equality, influencing the well-being of household members and family dynamics. This study examines women’s perceived autonomy in household decision-making among BaYaka hunter-...

www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk

Reposted by Rebecca Sear

EHBEA 2026 @ehbea2026.bsky.social · 1d

🚨🚨Last reminder for abstract submission!🚨🚨
⏰ Abstract submission for #EHBEA2026 closes on 9 Jan (AOE effectively Saturday noon).
📌 Exception(!): papers part of a symposium (EvApecognition, AIvolution, etc.).
For details, check our website! 👉www.ehbea2026.com

Reposted by Rebecca Sear

Siobhán Cully 🇺🇸 🐱🥼🤓🩼 @siobhancully.bsky.social · 1d

Favorite article on how evolution and culture (sociocultural, not CET) aren't at odds with each other. Go!

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 1d

Abstract submission for the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association conference closes tomorrow, 9 January 👇

EHBEA 2026 @ehbea2026.bsky.social · 5d

⏳ONE WEEK LEFT⏳
We hope you’re rested and ready for an exciting new year!🚀 Don't forget: abstract submission for #EHBEA2026 closes THIS FRIDAY, 9 January—don’t miss your chance to present your work in Leiden, 14-17 April 2026!🌟
Submit now: ehbea2026.com
#EHBEA2026 #BehaviouralScience #AIvolution

Overview | EHBEA2026

The upcoming conference of the European Human Behaviour & Evolution Association will take place in Leiden, The Netherlands, 14th-17th of April 2026. EHBEA conferences bring together researchers applyi...

ehbea2026.com

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 2d

Interesting conversation

The Internet is Crack Podcast @theinternetiscrack.bsky.social · 7d

“No rules” isn’t freedom.

@j2bryson.bsky.social explains why anarchy doesn’t help AI or society. Markets and technology depend on public goods built over time.
From our conversation on what AI is and how regulation supports shared value.

Full episode → youtu.be/fJSrpfwFXRo

#AIethics

Reposted by Rebecca Sear, Alex Mesoudi

Cultural Evolution Society @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social · 2d

After a short hiatus, we are delighted that our student outreach initiative is back with a new episode from their interview series! Featuring former president Dr. Sarah Mathew, in it we explore how human warfare evolved, alongside her fascinating fieldwork in Kenya.

youtu.be/eUqEcxf5uBQ?...

Transmissions Episode 2 with Dr Sarah Matthew

YouTube video by Cultural Evolution Society

youtu.be

Reposted by Dorothy Bishop, Alexander Wuttke, Rebecca Sear , and 3 more Dorothy Bishop, Alexander Wuttke, Rebecca Sear, Andrew K Przybylski, Scott Clifford, Paul Nightingale

Darren Dahly @statsepi.bsky.social · 3d

A hope for 2026 is that this perspective piece with @wiringthebrain.bsky.social & @deevybee.bsky.social will serve as a template for others who are similarly frustrated with with exaggerated claims and double speak around so much of research. It's ok to point out that the emperor has no clothes!

Cell Press @cellpress.bsky.social · Nov 13

The link between the gut #microbiome and autism is not backed by science, researchers say.

Read the full opinion piece in @cp-neuron.bsky.social: spkl.io/63322AbxpA

@wiringthebrain.bsky.social, @statsepi.bsky.social, & @deevybee.bsky.social

First page of Opinion piece: "Conceptual and methodological flaws undermine claims of a link between the gut microbiome and autism"

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 3d

Early bird registration for the Evolutionary Demography Society conference closes on 31st January (this is the conference to go to if you want to understand life history research 😊)

Lise Aubry @aubrypopecolab.bsky.social · 23d

We are pleased to welcome you to the 11th International Conference of the Evolutionary Demography Society, to be held at Colorado State University from June 16–18, 2026.
For more information, please visit: evodemos11.weebly.com

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 3d

Competition for heritable wealth, not cultural group selection, drives the evolution of monogamy: "findings suggest monogamy arose repeatedly under similar socioecological conditions and cannot be fully explained by theories based primarily on Indo-European history"

www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

www.pnas.org

Reposted by Rebecca Sear

Marek Kohn @marekkohn.bsky.social · 3d

Striking illustration of how eugenicist criteria are being extended from 'quality of offspring' to the quest for personal fulfilment. And thereby broadening their influence.

Reposted by Lesley A. Hall

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 3d

If you need any more reason to be anti-eugenics, read this unbearably bleak vision of dating agencies set up by eugenicists (spoiler: they do not result in love)

The application, which can take hours to complete, asks users for their height, ancestral background, SAT score and their feelings about entrepreneurs. They can chose from an exhaustive list of political affiliations (conservative or progressive, Zionist or anti-Zionist, neoliberal or neo-Nazi) and select their partner's "ideal" ethnicity. The system can assess their cheekbone prominence, jaw strength or body-fat percentage from a scanned photo, and analyze their application to estimate an IQ score.
Users who fail to make a match, or who bomb on a date, receive constructive feedback. "It wouldn't say, 'Lose 15 pounds," Mr. Myers said. "It would say that we know what type of person you are looking for, and the people you are looking for would be a match for you if you lost 15 pounds. So do with that information what you will."

Reposted by Rebecca Sear, Nathan P. Kalmoe

Neil Lewis, Jr. @neillewisjr.bsky.social · 3d

Bill Ackman, who pressured Harvard to fire Claudine Gay (ostensibly over plagiarism allegations), is...funding Francesca Gino's lawsuit against Harvard; Harvard fired Gino for *checks notes* committing research misconduct.

This man...

Reposted by Rebecca Sear, Dimitris Xygalatas

Aiyana Koka Willard @aiyanakoka.bsky.social · 3d

IACESR call for paper closes Feb 6th. Come join us to talk about the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion in Brno in July! iacesr.com/conferences/

Conferences - IACESR

We are delighted to announce that the 10th Biennial Meeting of the International Association for the Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion (IACESR) will be held at Masaryk University in Brno...

iacesr.com

Reposted by Timnit Gebru, Rebecca Sear

Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 3d

✨ Updated preprint ✨

Iris van Rooij & Olivia Guest (2026). Combining Psychology with Artificial Intelligence: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? PsyArXiv osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/aue4m_v2 @olivia.science

Our aim is to make these ideas accessible for a.o. psych students. Hope we succeeded 🙂

Figure 1
Illustration of why AI systems cannot realistically scale to human cognition within the foreseeable future: (b) Human cognitive capacities (such as reasoning, communication, problem solving, learning, concept formation, planning etc.) can handle unbounded situations across many domains, ranging from simple to complex. (a) Engineers create AI systems using machine learning from human data. (d) In an attempt to approximate human cognition a lot of data is consumed. (c) Making AI systems that approximate human cognition is intractable (van Rooij, Guest, et al., 2024), i.e., the required resources (e.g. time, data) grows prohibitively fast as input domains get more complex, leading to diminishing returns. (a) Any existing AI system is
created in limited time (hours, months or years, not millennia or eons). Therefore, existing AI systems cannot realistically have the domain-general cognitive capacities that humans have. [Made with elements from freepik.com.]

Reposted by Ben H. Ansell, Brendan Nyhan, Tom Clark , and 8 more Ben H. Ansell, Brendan Nyhan, Tom Clark, Steve Peers, Andrew Scott, Rosemary A. Joyce, Rebecca Sear, Sanford F. Schram, David R. Miller, Scott A. Imberman, Julie Novkov

Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 4d

Curtis Yarvin has written a very long screed in defense of his post in which he said, “Hitler spoke the truth.”

A sampling of select portions is below and includes, in reference to Jewish people, the words:

“The only way to tell is the name and the nose.”

Curtis Yarvin
@curtis_yarvin
X.com
I get a lot of questions about this tweet.
Hitler was right that Anglo-American elites in the 1st half of the 20C were irrevocably hostile to German sovereignty, and defeat, diplomatic, political, military or economic, would lead to Weimar at best, Moscow at worst

Curtis Yarvin @curtis_yarvin • 5d
Germany got Hitler because there were too many subjects about which only
Hitler spoke the truth.
This made a lot of Germans regard Hit!...
6:30 AM • 1/6/26 • 18K Views

Curtis Yarvin
@curt.. • 56m
Hitler genuinely believed he was fighting a race war against an international Jewish conspiracy.
Not a trace of evidence of any insincerity.
When he bombed London his plan was to wake up Kipling's Saxons from their Jewish hypnosis. Of course he had never been to London

Curtis Yarvin
@curt... • 52m
The live players whose actions match the models of "realist" statesmen are Hitler's enemies.
If FDR or Stalin ever did anything that did not point in the direction of total world domination, I am unaware of it. Sure, their plans did not always work out. The first time

Curtis Yarvin
@curt... • 48m g
When we look at the Jews in FDR's circle, they are perfectly assimilated as WASPs and mostly of German aristocratic descent.
The only way to tell is the name and the nose.
•••
The Jews around Stalin are 100% Bolshevik and 100% terrified of him. They might as well be Latvians

Curtis Yarvin
@curt...• 45m
While there is never 0 ethnic solidarity, elite Western Jews consider ethnocentrism (for themselves) shameful and barbaric, and/or make elaborate excuses for it / jokes about it.
Not that they're not excited about black ethnocentrism or terrified of white ethnocentrism. They are

Curtis Yarvin
@curti... •21m g ...
It's not even untrue that on average, Jews are a little less American than WASPs, and maybe even neurologically divergent from the Albion's Seed populations, not just in IQ but also in personality traits. Genes are real.
But my brother in Christ, these are very subtle effects

Curtis Yarvin
@curti... • 16m
It wasn't Jews who first decided that there was some magic way to make all Somalis, Samoans, Sikhs and Senegalese into Americans.
Oh no. This is a 19th-century mainline Protestant missionary trope. Core Boston mindset.
"Imagine"

Reposted by Rebecca Sear

EHBEA 2026 @ehbea2026.bsky.social · 5d

Overview | EHBEA2026

ehbea2026.com

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 5d

The International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health will hold its annual meeting 28-31 July in Kiel, Germany. Abstract submission deadline 1 March isemph.org/page-18356

ISEMPH - 2026 in Kiel, Germany

isemph.org

Reposted by Lesley A. Hall, Clark Gray, David W. Lawson

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 5d

New paper, led by Estelle McLean, on the value of data from Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems. These data sources are particularly suitable for complex longitudinal analyses which require consideration of household and familial contexts, but their complexity may result in their under-use

Versatility, value and limitations of using health and demographic surveillance system data for secondary analyses: guidance for researchers, using examples from existing analyses - Journal of Populat...

Journal of Population Research - Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems (HDSS) are geographic open cohorts operating in countries with absent/incomplete vital registration. Data on demographic...

link.springer.com

Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Rebecca Sear

The Internet is Crack Podcast @theinternetiscrack.bsky.social · 7d

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