Raymond Hames (@rayhames.bsky.social)

@robsica Thanks, Rob.

@HamesRaymond Great resource: rdalexander.commons.gc.cuny.edu

RD Alexander's critique of a talk by Frans de Waal: "Thus, why not stop implying net-cost altruism when it cannot or is not being demonstrated, except as accident, and evidently cannot evolve. A more useful and less misleading term is easy. I use 'high-risk social beneficence.'"

@robsica Great minds...

😸"Margot and I had just written the book Sex, Evolution, and Behavior and it landed on Dick's desk and I was told by one of his students later that Alexander's reaction to it was allegedly who the hell are these people and how did they get a hold of my course notes"

🔪"you better know a bit about Darwinism and have thought a bit about the relevance of past selection to whatever the hell you're interested in" youtube.com/watch?v=ufjRoV…

@robsica About time!

Yeah, why younger philosophers should ignore their elders' animadversions against evo psych and swot up on Santa Barbara & Paris Schools, so their philosophizing and moralizing is informed by an accurate and deep (i.e. adaptationist) grasp of human nature.

@logarithmic_h One of the most interesting things about evolution I have read in a long, long time! I always suspected that carrying all that useless crap around was problematic.

Ancestral flowers get downsized genomes, allowing smaller cells, greater efficiency/adaptability. General principle?: small genomes –> smaller cells -> high metabolism (birds), greater neuron density (brainy vertebrates). Link in Reply

@robsica Yep, don't want it to be true.

@HurrdatSports Impressive!

According to the Chadron State College president, they sold out 1600 tickets in 160 minutes for Nebraska volleyball’s spring match in Chadron on April 25. This was the line an hour before tickets went on sale yesterday. 😳

@briwood1 Still waiting for ours to show as well as Bullock's. Nice shot by the way.

First Hooded Oriel of the year. I love it when this bird show up.

2/ nytimes.com/2026/03/24/opi…

1/ One of the reasons Dems lost: ...It was a mistake to insist that any concern about youth medical transition is transphobic. To habitually take the bait on marginal issues like trans-inclusive sport... To deny that cis women can reasonably desire sex-segregated spaces, etc.

@sampratt99 The scale in the study is on speech or reading. So, for me, reading the news or listening to it is emotionally damaging so long as the Trumpster clouds both media.

🚨 New paper in Personality and Individual Differences! We introduce the Words Can Harm Scale (WCHS): a 10-item measure of the belief that speech can cause lasting psychological harm. Who believes that words can harm, and what does this belief predict?🧵 ⬇️

@HSB_Lab I should have added a question mark the citation.

@HSB_Lab And not The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism | The Quarterly Review of Biology: Vol 46, No 1

The paper that started it all.

@HSB_Lab So utterly strange aside from being a neologism.

New rule to judge the health of a discipline. If more than 2% of abstracts in field specific journals involve making up words, your field is in trouble.

@SoCal_Johan @cremieuxrecueil Please link the study or source. Thanks.

@cremieuxrecueil Meh it's probably just the same as the United States with gay men getting married less in general Lesbians get married relatively quickly, buy a Subaru and a dog, before getting divorced for a whole host of reasons (completely anecdotal experience)

Apparently the most stable marriage arrangement in the Netherlands is between two men. The least stable is between two women.

@robsica OK, so change to "may be tentative".

"One of the most dangerous beliefs about science is that all scientific findings are tentative and very likely to be overturned in the future... the provisionality thesis is false" amazon.com/Heart-Science-…

@MichaelESmith @RetractionWatch I am thinking of something more specific such as requiring authors do what copy editors and others once did. This would be tied to corporate incentives to reduce costs by slashing employees.

@HamesRaymond @RetractionWatch For the explanation, I'd blame what Doctorow calls "enshitification."

“The Academic Publishing System’s Most Pointless Bottleneck.” academeblog.org/2026/03/13/the…

@CostelloWilliam Clavicular seems to have significant asymmetry.

Who do you think is more physically attractive? Clavicular or this K Pop star Are you male or female?

@jessesingal No doubt true, but after watching Nebraska for 40 years as a professor the shot we made before was historic and so gratifying. @330sportsreport/video/7619913900603018527" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">tiktok.com/@330sportsrepo…

if that had been me? i woulda hit it instead of missing it