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howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · 20d

@royalsociety.org MUST strip Musk of his fellowship to retain credibility. He has brought the society into disrepute in the gravest manner. Calling on all FRSs, please act swiftly

howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Aug 26

New paper: Human dexterity and brains evolved hand in hand www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Human dexterity and brains evolved hand in hand - Communications Biology

Thumbs and brains coevolved in primates. Across living and extinct species, longer thumbs predict bigger brains, highlighting the neural cost of dexterity.

www.nature.com

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Durham University @durham.ac.uk · Aug 26

A new study co-authored by @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social gives new insight into how human hands & minds evolved together. The research is published in Communications Biology & was led by Dr Joanna Baker of @uniofreading.bsky.social. Read more:👉 bit.ly/4myXT4c

#DUresearch #DUinspire

Primate thumbs and brains evolved together, new study finds - Durham University

bit.ly

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howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Aug 16

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Pathway to Independence – an interview with Max Farnworth

Max Farnworth completed his PhD in Gregor Bucher's lab at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he explored how heterochrony shapes the evolution and development of insect brains. He then joined...

journals.biologists.com

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Stephen Montgomery @ebablab.bsky.social · Jul 16

Delighted to see this work out in PNAS. The idea that got me into butterflies, started on it in 2011 but took the intellectual energy of @benitoexplains.bsky.social, and the support of a great team, to develop it and put it all together.

Thanks to #NERC @ukri.org for funding 🙏🏻

Benito Wainwright @benitoexplains.bsky.social · Jul 16

So very excited for the magnum opus of my #PhD to finally be out in @pnas.org. 🎉🎉 We demosntrate that mutualistic co-mimicking tropical butterflies not only converge in light microhabitat but, as a consequence, have also converged in visual system morphology! 1/n😀
www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

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howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Jul 16

Humans may not have a uniquely specialised memory for sequences - it may be more to do with how tasks are culturally scaffolded and what they “mean” to participants. New paper

Rachel Kendal @rachkendal.bsky.social · Jul 16

New comparative paper on sequence cognition led by the wonderful @missdaffodil.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Humans may not have a uniquely enhanced sequence memory: sequence discrimination is facilitated by causal–logical framing in humans and chimpanzees | Royal Society Open Science

Humans have been suggested to possess uniquely enhanced memory for sequences, based on sequence discrimination learning (SDL) tasks involving arbitrarily ordered sequences with no functional connection to outcomes. Such tasks underestimate animals’ SDL as ...

royalsocietypublishing.org

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howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Jul 11

Interesting new study demonstrates "cerebellar connectivity to higher-order networks at birth, which generally strengthen with age, emphasizing the cerebellum’s early role in cognitive processing beyond sensory and motor functions" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Functional development of the human cerebellum from birth to age five - Nature Communications

Using over 1,000 early childhood fMRI scans, the authors mapped cerebellocortical connectivity, revealing early integration with higher-order networks and age-related refinement, gradients, asymmetry,...

www.nature.com

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Cedric Boeckx @cedricboeckx.bsky.social · Jun 29

Interesting new @medrxivpreprint.bsky.social study, bearing on the interpretation of GWAS results:  “Common and rare genetic variants show network convergence for a majority of human traits” 🧪🧬
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Common and rare genetic variants show network convergence for a majority of human traits

While both common and rare variants contribute to the genetic etiology of complex traits, whether their impacts manifest through the same effector genes and molecular mechanisms is not well understood...

www.medrxiv.org

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Elli Leadbeater @ellileadbeater.bsky.social · Jun 26

Selection Shapes Diverse Animal Minds: our special issue of @royalsocietypublishing.org Phil Trans B on the diverse evolutionary processes underlying cognitive evolution is out today. Thanks to all our contributors! royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1929

royalsocietypublishing.org

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howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Jun 26

Embodied cognitive evolution and the limits of convergence - Louise Barrett and me on comparative psychology eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

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howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Jun 24

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Constructing language: a framework for explaining acquisition

Explaining how children build a language system is a central goal of research in language acquisition, with broad implications for language evolution, adult language processing, and artificial intelli...

www.cell.com

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howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Jun 22

Trump on embodied cognition (via ChatGPT)

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Stephen Montgomery @ebablab.bsky.social · Jun 22

Quite happy to see the website we made for #Darwin’s 200th birthday is alive and well once more, and more extensive than i remembered! darwin200.christs.cam.ac.uk

Home | Darwin

darwin200.christs.cam.ac.uk

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Stephen Montgomery @ebablab.bsky.social · Jun 18

One week left to apply!

Stephen Montgomery @ebablab.bsky.social · Jun 4

🚨Anyone want a job?🚨
We have two #postdocs up for grabs! 🧪
- cell developmental biology/#evodevo/#neuroevodevo
- bioinformatics and molecular biology
Both working on brain evolution in Heliconiini butterflies
Details below! Please repost 🙏 1/n

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Cedric Boeckx @cedricboeckx.bsky.social · Jun 16

Interesting Science Advances
study probing the genetics of
human brain geometry (beyond volume), using data from @ukbiobank.bsky.social 🧪🧠🧬

Beyond volume: Unraveling the genetics of human brain geometry

Multivariate association study reveals a genetic basis of brain shape beyond volume and relations to neurodegenerative diseases.

www.science.org

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howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Jun 10

I think “mechanistic” is being used in different senses here

howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Jun 10

On brain size? I thought the point being addressed here is what is the allometric relationship between brain and body size?

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howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Jun 10

We did account for model complexity in our model testing. A quadratic model fit the data significantly better )not just better). The size dependency in the parameters from linear models is a very striking feature . This is all explained in the paper and SI

howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Jun 9

Plotting regressions without regard to phylogeny - as in the older literature - is the more general issue.

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howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Jun 9

To me, the concept of a ‘system’ implies selection. That’s how the appearance of design happens and why we can talk about function. But in practice it’s very complicated with lots of genes and lots of aspects of the phenotype - so agree with your point, ‘targets’ are hard to specify

howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Jun 9

Suspect Steve’s point is that our paper (he cites above) reveals nonlinear scaling even in log-log space, and doesn’t support the conclusions of the paoer Mauricio cited, nor specifically a power law of 0.75

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howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Jun 9

Precisely

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howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Jun 9

Or selection on neural systems has consequences for brain size - brain size as an outcome rather than a target of selection

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howbrainsevolve.bsky.social @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social · Jun 9

They are all loosely connected but in multifarious, complicated nonlinear ways not captured by simple correlations

Reposted

katja heuer @k4tj4.bsky.social · May 23

Thrilled for the upcoming TIBBE online talks &discussions with the amazing @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social & Susan Healy around how do we better connect brain structure, function & behaviours? Next Wednesday, May 28, 2pm UTC, 4pm Paris 🧠🐒🦜Join us www.crowdcast.io/c/linking-br...
@compcogsoc.bsky.social

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