Publications

Here you’ll find a list of my publications. You can also visit my Google Scholar page. If a paper isn’t available, feel free to email me for a PDF!

Basava, Kiran, Theiss Bendixen, Alexander Leonhard, Nicole Lauren George, Zoé Vanhersecke, Joshua Omotosho, Jennifer Mather, and Michael Muthukrishna. “Ecological Not Social Factors Explain Brain Size in Cephalopods.” iScience (2026). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2026.116324.

Basava, Kiran. “Social Complexity Is Not Strongly Predictive of Indiscriminate Killing of Wartime Enemies in a Cross-Cultural Sample.” Evolutionary Human Sciences (2026). https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2025.10033.

Alam, Md Nafis Ul, Kiran Basava, Ani Chitransh, H. M. Abdul Fattah, Hector D. Garcia-Verdugo, Shih-Hsuan Lo, Tanisha Lohchab, et al. “Machine Learning in Biological Research: Key Algorithms, Applications, and Future Directions.” BMC Biology (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-025-02424-3.

Basava, Kiran, Md Nafis Ul Alam, Liam Roberts, Kristen Martinet, Paige Cherry, Héctor García-Verdugo, and Cristian Román-Palacios. “Mapping Nonhuman Cultures with the Animal Culture Database.” Scientific Data (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-05315-y.

Basava, Kiran, and Cristian Román‐Palacios. “A Web App for the Animal Culture Database and a Template for Deploying Comparative Trait Databases With Shiny.” Ecology and Evolution (2025). https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.71913.

Basava, Kiran, Theiss Bendixen, Alexander Leonhard Birk Sørensen, Nicole George, Zoé Vanhersecke, Joshua Omotosho, Jennifer Mather, and Michael Muthukrishna. “A Phylogeny of Extant Coleoid Cephalopods with Brain Data.” Preprint, bioRxiv (2024). https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.29.591691.

Basava, Kiran, Pieter François, and Harvey Whitehouse. “The Benefits and Challenges of Linked Datasets for Cliodynamics and Comparative Anthropology.” Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution (2023). https://doi.org/10.21237/C7CLIO14162506.

Basava, Kiran, Hanzhi Zhang, and Ruth Mace. “A Phylogenetic Analysis of Revolution and Afterlife Beliefs.” Nature Human Behaviour (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-01013-4.

Turchin, Peter, Daniel Hoyer, James Bennett, Kiran Basava, Enrico Cioni, Kevin Feeney, Pieter Francois, et al. “The Equinox2020 Seshat Data Release.” Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution (2020). https://doi.org/10.21237/C7CLIO11148620.