Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛

@rmcelreath.bsky.social

Anthropologist - Bayesian modeling - science reform - cat and cooking content too - Director @ MPI for evolutionary anthropology https://www.eva.mpg.de/ecology/staff/richard-mcelreath/

@rmcelreath.bsky.social

Lichtfest is a Leipzig tradition commemorating the 1989 demonstrations that eventually lead to the fall of the Wall. It mainly involves walking in the rain trying to keep a candle lit womp womp

@rmcelreath.bsky.social

I haven't taught a survey course in human evolution in the last decade, but starting next week (!!) I will try again. I plan to record the lectures. But the lab practicals can't be shared online, unfortunately. Currently deciding how much math I can/should make the students do

Week Date Lecture Reading Practical Study Questions 1 Oct 14 Natural selection Chapter 1 Darwin's theory 1:1,3,5 2 21 Modern synthesis and pop-gen Chapter 3 Basic pop-gen 3:1,2,3 3 28 Speciation Chapter 4 Phylogenetics 4:2,3,8 4 Nov 4 Primate diversity Chapter 5 Primate anatomy 5:1,5,8 5 11 Primate reproduction Chapter 6 Mating and parenting 6:2,7,9 6 25 Primate socioecology Chapter 7 Cooperation 7:1,3,9 7 Dec 2 Primate behavior and cognition Chapter 8 Brains and life history 8:4,5,8 8 9 Hominin fossil record Chapters 9,10 Hominin anatomy 9:7; 10:6,10 9 16 Tools and Homo Chapter 11 Hominin tech 1 11:1,4,5 10 Jan 6 Out of Africa Chapter 12 Neanderthals etc 12:1,7,12 11 13 Origins of modern behavior Chapter 13 Hominin tech 2 13:1,8,10 12 20 Human diversity and adaptation Chapter 14 Genetic diversity 14:5,8,10 13 27 Cultural evolution and technology Chapter 15 Human behavior 15:1,7,9 14 Feb 3 Cooperation and social organization Chapter 16 [none]
@rmcelreath.bsky.social

two small children on the train arguing back and forth about how the Luftballon sticks to the seat: it’s MAGIC, no SCIENCE, MAGIC, SCIENCE they laugh though as if they’re agreeing

@rmcelreath.bsky.social

Once again grateful that one can get TeX source from arXiv papers, so that I didn't have to typeset Ramanujan's mad formula for pi myself (just an intro slide in a talk I am giving tomorrow)

a slide showing Ramanujan's formula for pi: \frac{1}{\pi}=\frac{2\sqrt{2}}{9801}\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}\frac{26390n+1103}{\left(n!\right)^4}\cdot \frac{\left(4n\right)!}{396^{4n}}
@rmcelreath.bsky.social

It can be hard to define anthropology, because of the field's empirical and theoretical breadth. But an anthropologist is just someone who reads the headline below and yells SHERDS NOT SHARDS

@rmcelreath.bsky.social

Not the topic of the retracted paper, but it seems to claim that Neanderthals went extinct at the end of the Bronze Age, which is a marvelous idea for a new Christopher Nolan movie

Population Changes Neanderthal man had become extinct in Europe by c.1200 B.C., so the population figures for the succeeding centuries refer to Homo sapiens (Figure 7). The striking feature is the enormous growth in numbers since the end of World War II. According to the UN, this is expected to increase to 11–15 million people by the end of this century if nothing
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