Professor specializing in bird social behavior. Interested in developmental systems thought, ontogenetic niches, organismal agency, and ייִדיש. PI: Animal Social Interaction lab kohnlab.wordpress.com
Neural correlates of seed-eating in songbirds royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... Our new paper showing that songbirds that dehusk seeds with the beak and tongue have an enlarged trigeminal nucleus in the brainstem, particularly the part where the tongue is represented.
Happy to share this 'capstone' project from my time as a postdoc @umich.edu, where we show that hierarchically nested bursts of body-shape evolution may underlie much of perching-bird diversification over ~50 million years. Free access link here: rdcu.be/fuxB1
Rates of passerine body plan evolution in time and spaceNature Ecology & Evolution - A reconstruction of the evolutionary history of passerine body plans over the past ~50 Myr shows rare bursts of phenotypic innovation near the origin of major...rdcu.be
The WISDOM OF CROWDS emerges in flocks of thousands of migrating songbirds! Excited to share our work published by @aaas.org in Science Advances! doi.org/10.1126/scia...
The wisdom of crowds emerges in flocks of thousands of migrating songbirdsLarger flocks of migrating songbirds orient more accurately toward their population’s migratory direction than smaller flocks.doi.org
I just learned Peter Schuster passed away. A great colleague from @sfiscience.bsky.social , one of the smartest people I ever met. He made fundamental contributions to the maths of evolution and origins of life. A great inspiration for all. @josepsardanyes.bsky.social www.santafe.edu/people/profi...
very nice read! I've been thinking about innovation vs. copying a lot lately - motivated by my finding that increasing learning rates in zebra finches led to learning novel syllable variants. And listening to the catbirds in my yard makes me wish I could get them into the lab eh:
Song development by grey catbirdsWhat are the relative roles of imitation, improvisation and invention in the development of large song repertoires in species of the songbird family M…www.sciencedirect.comBird song has been central to the nature-versus-nurture debate. In my latest piece, I argue that new ideas from developmental science, combined with classic studies on the social shaping of song, point toward a way beyond the innate-versus-learned dichotomy. gregorykohn.substack.com/p/templates-...
Templates in Tension: the dialectic of flexibility and structure in birdsongFlexibilitygregorykohn.substack.com
A thorough documenting of the statistical shenanigans in the embryo selection company Herasight’s claims about genetic IQ prediction. The paper was published in a new Intelligence journal against the reviewers’ protest that the proprietary prediction model was not disclosed and so was unverifiable
Herasight: Latent Promises, Observed FailuresMany make the mistake of rejecting Herasight on ethical grounds, but doing so gives them too much credit.open.substack.com
We are delighted to invite you to the interdisciplinary workshop of @animalinvention.bsky.social on Agency between Biology and Philosophy. It will take place at UCL and online on 22-23 September. All info and registration details can be found here: www.animalinventiveness.com/post/interna...
If we lose the capacity to know anything then they can sell us anything.
Alex WildI get angry when people talk about "declining trust in science" as though there weren't a coordinated effort by billionaire criminals to smear science as a way to decrease regulations, spread propaganda, and enrich themselves. Scientists are being scapegoated and we should not play along.
Would be interested in your take on Aaron’s work. I’ve been interested in investment dynamics in social democracies. Outside immediate basic services it still seems constrained by markets. Socialized and democratic investment seems more probable now then they it was the past. www.aaronbenanav.com
Aaron Benanavwww.aaronbenanav.com
