I bet that AI reviewing manuscripts to check for technical issues will soon become routine in many fields... It will make it possible for the stats & data analysis to actually be redone to check for errors, which just isn't feasible by hand...

An internal version of Astra, OpenAIs next major model, solved ten major open math problems, for a total cost of $2,000 at Sol API rates. Truly impressive! openai.com/index/ten-ad...

PS I am still looking for someone to show me how to derive the population genetic model results using an inclusive fitness logic [equation 6 in the appendix, see below]. If anyone can I'm giving away a crate of good Belgian beer!

Really enjoyed the Mathematical Models in Ecology and Evolution (MMEE) meeting in Cork! If anyone missed my talk "Early-season helping yields increasing returns to scale at the onset of eusociality" (Tom Wenseleers, Viviana Di Pietro & Ricardo Caliari Oliviera), the PPT is here: lnkd.in/eGXBJRuq

Assembling it was great fun & the video with the instructions was very clear! The Raspberry Pi 4B has to be purchased separately, but that's also quite cheap! docs.sunfounder.com/projects/pid...

Just got my son a new toy - a Sunfounder robot dog kit! With voice & face recognition, inbuilt text to speech & LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek) so it can talk back to you & it even has Openclaw to be able to perform entirely new behaviours! Very impressive for just 150 euros!

Even more elegantly, Codex could also readily write OpenSCAD code to produce this bee comb design, including debossed letters for the different rows, in just 230 lines of code. STLs and code here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/58ags...

With minimal instruction & in just 13 mins, Codex wrote me a Python script to procedurally generate the STL of a piece of honeybee worker comb & I then had it 3D printed for just 8 euros by the great people at Fablab! Not allowed at KU Leuven, as it's agentic AI. But works great!

Link to a presentation I gave earlier this year at the Biology Research Day about "Working Smarter with AI: Coding, Analysis and Scientific Writing" on how to productively use LLMs as part of your research workflow : www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ta9k3...

Cool - first time I had a LLM produce correct code to calculate a Romanesco broccoli natural fractal mesh & display it in realtime in 3D in R using rgl... ChatGPT 5.4 Extended Thinking R code here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zrmqo...

First time that a vision model, GPT 5.4 Pro (Vision), now gets the best score on the Mensa Norway IQ Test - IQ 145, 33 / 35 questions correct, just by visually looking at the IQ test! Or IQ 130 (15/16 correct) in the offline test. Amazing how far we have come!

From the Epstein Files, the stated goals of Nowak's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics: "curing the world of cancer, infectious disease, selfishness, and inclusive fitness theory." www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

OpenAI just released Prism, prism.openai.com, an Overleaf replacement to collaboratively edit Latex documents. Any ChatGPT subscriber can use it & freely invite as many collaborators as you like. Below it typeset a ChatGPT generated paper for me. With inbuilt Zotero integration!

Merry Christmas to you all! As a nerdy Christmas card I had Google Gemini Canvas code a Christmas-themed Galton board, to entertain my stats students (it is 1000 lines of JavaScript code)! :-) gemini.google.com/share/15f33a...

A huge thank you to our secretary Conny Coeckelberghs and everyone from my team for the fantastic organisation - Viviana Di Pietro, Helena Mendes Ferreira, Anneline Mattens, @kdebeuckelaere.bsky.social and @anvandoren.bsky.social.

Congrats also to Dylan Thatcher and Alexis Gkantiragas for winning the prize for best student talks and to Cassandra Uthoff and Annie Joseph for the being awarded with the best poster prizes.

The @iussi-nwes.bsky.social that we organised this week in Leuven (18-19 December, www.iussi-nweurope.org/meetings) was a success! @rmash.bsky.social and @patrick-kennedy.bsky.social delivered fantastic keynote talks and there was a great set of contributed talks and posters.

Talk I gave about our recent Evolution Letters paper, in which we quantified the benefits of helping at the origin of eusociality using a combination of experiment & theory, at the @iussi-nwes.bsky.social winter meeting in Leuven this week! Powerpoint here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4w3hw...

Happy to see yet another article from our lab come out: "Deformed wing virus affects foraging success and foraging specialization of honeybee workers"! Check it out! Congrats to my coauthors @HelenaMFerreir2 Kristof Benaets Lina De Smet & Dirk de Graaf www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Or 👇https://www.researchgate.net/publication/397900195_Conflict_over_caste_fate_in_insect_societies Thanks to coauthors @HelenaMFerreir2 @dipietroviviana @cintiaoi.bsky.social @deniseaalves23 Judith Korb and Francis L.W. Ratnieks! This paper took 20 years to finish, but glad it finally materialised!

We also review: 🐜 "Miniature queens" in ants & bees that sneak past worker policing. 🪵 Succession wars in lower termites when the royal pair dies. 🧬 The "parliament of the genes" resolving intragenomic conflicts over caste determination.

In Melipona, up to ~20% of females selfishly develop as queens—far more than needed! The colony’s solution? Mass execution: workers slaughter the excess queens upon emergence. It is a true tragedy of the commons indeed: individual selfishness resulting in a cost to all! 💀🐝

The answer depends on who is in control. In honeybees, workers control who gets more and better food (royal jelly). Hence, they decide who becomes queen. But in Melipona stingless bees, larvae feed themselves in identical, sealed cells. The result? A battle over who gets to become the new queen!

Becoming a worker is altruistic, but becoming a queen or king offers direct fitness benefits. 👑 Theory predicts that individual larvae should often selfishly bias their development to become reproductives, even if it hurts the colony. A classic example of a tragedy of the commons. But do they?

Harmony in the hive? Think again! 🐝⚔️ Insect societies are famous for cooperation, but beneath the surface lies a brutal conflict over who gets to wear the crown! Our new review in Biological Reviews explores the evolutionary battleground caused by such caste fate conflict. 🧵

We show theoretically that this compounding effect is a key facilitator to evolve complex social life, thereby explaining a major evolutionary transition!

In our new study we were the first to experimentally simulate the origin of sociality! By controlling how many wasp 🐝daughters could help their mom, we found that early helpers don't just add to colony success—they multiply it!

Theoretical results show that the observed benefits of helping readily allow for the evolution of eusociality, although most readily so with alleles of large effect (penetrance parameter P=1, bottom row) & under single mating (me=1), when sib-sib relatedness is high.

Theoretically, we show that these nonlinearities arise from compounding effects of helping early on: workers produced early on help to produce more workers before dispersing sexuals are produced.

Very happy to see our new study on the evolution of eusociality come out in Evolution Letters! Our study is the first to experimentally manipulate the proportion of females that stay and help to simulate incipient sociality & assess fitness impact of helping. 🧵