Who are you?
I'm a postdoctoral researcher with the CoOL Group in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. I am developing computational models of cultural evolution to answer questions about linguistic diversity among the Oceanic languages.
Previously I was a postdoctoral researcher at the LOGOS group at the University of Barcelona, and at the Surrey Morphology Group. I received my PhD in philosophy of biology from the Australian National University in December 2020.
In addition to computational modelling, I answer questions like
- in what sense do biological signals carry information? and
- how are naturally evolved systems like designed systems? and
- what is the role of selection in cultural evolution?
I won't publish, referee, or do editorial work for Elsevier journals and I am in good company. I have a general .
What have you written?
forthcoming The Price Equation since Price: An accessible account and a generalization to categorical variables
2024 Evoke: A Python package for evolutionary signalling games [with Manolo Martínez]
2024 Quantifying information in structural representations
2024 Teleosemantics, structural resemblance and predictive processing [with Ross Pain]
2024 Constituency and convergence in the Americas -- Results and discussion [with Sandra Auderset, Adam J. R. Tallman and 17 others]
2023 The relevance of communication theory for theories of representation
2023 Joint Evolution of Traits for Social Learning [with Cameron Rouse Turner and 3 others]
2022 Teleosemantics and the free energy principle [with Ross Pain]
2022 Free energy: a user's guide [with Ross Pain and Michael Kirchhoff]
2022 Teleosemantics and the hard problem of content [with Ross Pain]
2020 CHIELD: The Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database [with Seán Roberts and 25 others]
2020 Consequences of a functional account of information
2018 Attribution of information in animal interaction
2018 [Review of] Studying Animal Languages without Translation by Zhanna Reznikova [with Jessica Pfeifer]
Any guest editing?
With Ross Pain and Michael Kirchhoff I guest edited the Topical Collection The Free Energy Principle: From Biology to Cognition in Biology & Philosophy. Our goal was to illuminate the relevance of Karl Friston's free energy principle for explanations in biology and cognitive science. There are twelve articles in total, including our introduction to the collection.What was your PhD about?
The manuscript is available at the Australian National University repository and here.
Any conferences and workshops?
June 2025 Modelling language diversification in Vanuatu and Fiji
May 2025 Information in animal signals
May 2024 Relational explanation in causal models
Mar 2024 The relevance of communication theory for theories of representation
March 2023 Degrees of proper function
March 2023 Categorical variables and the strength of selection [talk + poster]
Oct 2022 Free Energy: A User's Guide
Sep 2022 The role of communication theory in theories of representation
Sep 2022 Cognition and the stability of complex evolving morphology [with Erich Round and 4 others]
Nov 2019 The mechanics of representation: teleosemantics meets the free energy principle [with Ross Pain]
May 2019 We should get rid of the distinction between Shannon information and semantic information
Dec 2018 Prediction and Uncertainty [with Ross Pain]
Sept 2018 Applied cultural evolution: Studying language change with evolutionary methods
June 2018 Communication and selection
Feb 2018 Unitrackers in artificial and natural cognition
How about a CV?
Here you go!Have you done any philosophy outreach?
In 2024 with Daniel Gregory I wrote Might text-davinci-003 have inner speech? We asked whether a conversational agent from the same family as ChatGPT could have something like an inner monologue, and what methods can be used to figure out the answer. It was published in a journal called Think, which is in the process of transitioning from a traditional journal to a philosophy outreach publication. The article is open access and a copy of the published version is here.
In 2023 I wrote a popular science/philosophy of biology essay called Major Transitions: A Record of Reorganization of Individuality in the Colonial Organisms of Earth for Life Beyond Us, an anthology published by the European Astrobiology Institute. I discuss how the major evolutionary transitions inform speculation about alien life forms.
In 2022 I co-wrote an article in The Conversation with Ross Pain and Michael Kirchhoff about the free energy principle. It's pitched as a very gentle presentation of the topic, so that readers who want to know more can dig into our guest-edited Topical Collection, starting with our introduction.
In 2019 at ANU I filmed a bunch of interviews with a bunch of smart people on the subject of ethics in artificial intelligence. A few of them are collected in this YouTube playlist.
Why does this site look retro yet elegant?
Because it was built using the theme Would have been cool in the 80s for the website creation tool Hugo. Other nifty tools include Nutshell and MathJax.What do you look like?
here I am on the right with Hedvig