Simon J. Greenhill
@simongreenhill
I study how languages and cultures evolve. Primarily with phylogenies and other assorted computational methods. Based at @Biology_UoA. Never met a language phylogeny or a cultural phylogeny I didn't like. #phylolinguistics
New Zealand Prime Minister Luxon on funding science research. #NZpol
Cultural bias in AI models? spot the GPTs Fascinating paper by Tao et al: academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
The New Zealand Prime Minister's view of science: www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...
Frontiers of cuisine: persistence and substitution in the evolution of porridges in south Central Africa doi.org/10.3389/fear...
Human migration has surged since 2000 — these maps reveal where people are going www.nature.com/articles/d41...
keep playing those games, chumps. dronexl.co/2026/06/09/p...
Looking to buy a new battery pack for an upcoming trip. I'm wondering what the hell type of flights this guy is catching where they have a Newton's cradle on tray table.
Large language models pass a standard three-party Turing test. "GPT-4.5-PERSONA was judged to be human significantly more often than real people were, across both populations". www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Who gets to be beautiful, and who decides? The cultural evolution of beauty standards www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
LOL love this workaround for hallucinated citations just spotted in Claude:
Advances in Bamboo Science has an impact factor of 3.7. Who knew?
Archaneology -- where all the new archaeological findings are.
South American languages showing their words for 'language'.
Phonological distances for linguistic typology and the origin of Indo-European languages a "... significant correlation between phonological distance and geographic proximity" arxiv.org/abs/2604.11565
I didn't know that Peer Review meant ALIEN Peer review, but that definitely explains some reviews I've had.
Interesting: Statistical structure and the evolution of languages royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...
Amazing how google translate embedded into Youtube is breaking down the impassible walls between languages. #language
Cool: One test, many tongues: Surveying language proficiency across the globe www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Amazing photo on @Science Advances cover today: 12,000 year old clay bead from Jordan showing the fingerprints of the kid who made it. www.science.org/toc/sciadv/1...