New paper out today! When baby zebra finches are tutored with manipulated songs with shuffled syllables, they transform them to be consistent with linguistic laws 🐥 Reanalysis of data from James and Sakata (2017) link.springer.com/article/10.1...
🎉🦜NEW PAPER ALERT 🦜🎉
Which social learning biases underly the acquisition of novel food in wild parrots ?
We (@lucymaplin.bsky.social, @bjjbarrett.bsky.social, @sonjawild.bsky.social, @drjohnmartin.bsky.social) presented >700 cockies with a novel, artificial food (🧵1/6)
Tonight in Boston! Moderating a panel of folks on the cutting edge of animal communication research for swissnex.org/boston/event...
Check out our (@sobchuk.bsky.social) special issue on the cultural evolution of the arts in Evolutionary Human Sciences, with papers from @mikekestemont.bsky.social @babeheim.bsky.social @svalver.bsky.social and more!
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Great essay about a different vision for creative AI by @joelsimon.bsky.social - "Beyond Slop" www.joelsimon.net/beyond-slop
New special issue on "Cultural evolution of the arts" led by @sobchuk.bsky.social and @masonyoungblood.bsky.social confirms my intuition that this field has taken off in the past two decades, with a particularly strong representation from music!
doi.org/10.1017/ehs....
New paper 🚨 "Cultural evolution – of the arts". Together with @masonyoungblood.bsky.social we wrote a short paper – half essay, half bibliometric analysis – aiming to describe this emerging research area (1/3) doi.org/10.1017/ehs....
Animal Cognition - Linguistic laws are increasingly used as markers of efficiency in non-human communication, but it remains unclear how rapidly these patterns can emerge. In this re-analysis of...
link.springer.com
swissnex.org
Connecting Switzerland, North America and the world in science, education, innovation and art.
Feeling very honored. CES has been my intellectual home since the first conference in 2016, and has played such a huge role in my career/life. I can’t wait for Rabat! :)
Mason Youngblood
Mason Youngblood
Mason Youngblood
Mason Youngblood
Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦
Pat Savage
@culturalevolsoc.bsky.social conference draft programme is up: airess.fgses-um6p.ma/CES2026
Psyched to see so much music! (at least 13 presentations on human music, plus more on bird/whale song etc.)
@sobchuk.bsky.social and I also wrote an intro outlining this emerging field—exciting to see just how much its expanded in the last decade, even exhibiting clusters corresponding to subfields (e.g., big data, cultural phylogenetics, film and literature, etc.)!
www.doi.org/10.1017/ehs....
Adopting novel food is vital to colonize novel environments, but what is the role of social learning? Study of urban #cockatoos by @clevercockierp.bsky.social shows them to rapidly adopt novel food via #SocialLearning, with juveniles showing conformist preferences @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4uq6NVq
Very cool paper here. I'm particularly intrigued by the finding that population size negatively predicts innovation since that has a nice resonance with some of our recent work (doi.org/10.1098/rstb...).
Pat Savage
Mason Youngblood
PLOS Biology
The Cultural Evolution Society is delighted to announce that Mason Youngblood (he/they) @masonyoungblood.bsky.social, Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook University, is the recipient of the 2026 CES New Investigator Award.
Congratulations Mason on this well-deserved award!!
