Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Three blockbuster papers on ancient DNA just landed in Science Magazine: The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe, A genetic probe into the ancient and medieval history of Southern Europe and West Asia, and, Ancient DNA from Mesopotamia suggests distinct Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic migrations into Anatolia (ungated copies available at the Reich lab website). Why three papers in one issue of Science? The authors claim there was too much data to pack into one publication, which feels right to me. So what do these publications mean for human history and human evolution? Do we now know where the Indo-Europeans were originally from? Were the ancient Classical Greeks blonde? How did farming emerge in Anatolia? What is the relationship of Armenians to other Indo-European-speaking people? These papers tackle a staggering number of questions. On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib weighs in and guides us through what the papers mean for our understanding of human genetics and population history and where we go from here. This monologue complements the August 2022 episode where he surveys the great ancient human DNA Diasporas.  

Katherine Brodsky is today a freelance writer who in the early 2000’s was the founder and editor-in-chief of an online culture magazine that was registering 600,000 pageviews a month while herself still an undergrad. In this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib explores a life lived online, from the dot-com bubble to the social media era. Brodsky, whose Substack is Random Minds, is an observer of culture from a peripatetic vantage point, a Canadian working in the American film industry, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants watching her parents’ homeland ravaged by war, and a public relations professional who moonlights as a commentator and photographer. Though an early adopter of internet technology who became a “content creator” before that was even the phrase, Brodsky over the last few years has been hitting the shoals of social media culture as her classical free speech-oriented liberalism and journalistic devotion to a bare modicum of objectivity run up against the realities of 2020’s “moral clarity” where strident viewpoints are prized. Razib and Brodsky agree that Nicholas Carr’s 2010 book The Shallows already has the character of a Cassandra-like prophecy, as the internet has become a tool not for mental liberation but for enslavement to impulse and the mob. Brodsky outlines her polestar when observing and commenting on the culture, which emphasizes a level of detachment or sympathy for the “other” that is sorely lacking in much of mainstream 2020’s discourse.

This week takes The Unsupervised Learning podcast in a somewhat different direction. In response to a common listener request, Razib takes on his first “one-man-show,” digging into his stores of knowledge of the population genetics of ancient peoples and tribes, delving into the significance of abstrusely labeled clusters like “Ancient North Eurasian” (ANE) over 60 minutes. But as anyone following this substack will anticipate, first a caveat: in these heady days of endless ancient DNA discoveries and attendant revisions to long-standing convention: everything is provisional. Razib notes that his assertions are not written in stone, as new work from researchers like Laurent Excoffier adds fresh nuance and intriguing detail to the broader evolutionary picture every few months. This podcast takes a geographical approach, surveying Eurasian, African, Oceanian and New World populations over the last 20,000 years since the Last Glacial Maximum. Razib covers not just how populations interrelate and how they emerged, but he also touches on unique aspects of physical appearance, adaptations and natural history. Reading:   Spanish hunter-gatherer had blue eyes and dark skin Cheddar Man: Mesolithic Britain's blue-eyed boy Population genomics of Mesolithic Scandinavia: Investigating early postglacial migration routes and high-latitude adaptation Ancient human genome-wide data from a 3000-year interval in the Caucasus corresponds with eco-geographic regions The Formation of Human Populations in South and Central Asia Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans Mysterious East Asians vanished during the ice age. This group replaced them Earliest Americans Arrived in Waves, DNA Study Finds Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East Divided by DNA: The uneasy relationship between archaeology and ancient genomics Ancient DNA and deep population structure in sub-Saharan African foragers Ancient Admixture in Human History

The recent killing by Ayman al-Zawahiri, erstwhile leader of al-Qaeda, brought many Americans back to awareness of an era that has been fading, the decade of the “War on Terror” that dominated geopolitics after the 9/11 terrorism attack. The World Trade Center bombings galvanized Americans, setting the stage for our disastrous invasion of Iraq and American meddling in Muslim nations worldwide. But while 9/11 drove a closing of ranks against radicalism across much of the West, a small minority drew different lessons. A radical faction of European and American Muslims, converts and those raised in the faith, instead made common cause with al-Qaeda, and its later offshoot, ISIS. Jason Walters is one of those young men who reacted to 9/11 very differently from the rest of us. Raised in the Dutch Bible Belt by a Netherlands-born mother and an African American father, Walters was raised nominally Christian but later converted to Islam. Sixteen years old when 9/11 occurred, Walter’s faith moved in a radical direction, and in November of 2004 he was involved in a terror attack in The Hague. Imprisoned shortly after that, Walters emerged a free man in 2013, having shed his Muslim identity. In this episode, Walters joins Razib to discuss his cultural and racial background and how that might have fueled his radicalization. Though Walters avers that racial issues had little importance to him growing up, it is clear his mixed and cosmopolitan origins left him more attracted to an ideology that eventually alienated him from the rest of Dutch society. He talks about his discovery of Nietzsche, Plato and Heidegger in prison and how philosophy brought him out of Islam, giving him a new understanding of himself and his place in the universe. Razib and Walters also probe the importance of ‘system thinking’ and ‘rationality’ in the religious orientation of Salafist converts in the West.

Despite the fundamental reality that the US exists thanks to a rebellion against the power of the British Crown in the 1700's, for the last century, the two dominant English-speaking powers have enjoyed a relatively positive geopolitical relationship. Whereas the US is younger, Britain has settled into the role of junior partner, as the daughter nation outstrips the parent in economic, military and cultural reach. And yet despite the commonalities between these two Anglo-Atlantic polities, there are also profound differences rooted in history. Chief among them, Britain, particularly England, has vastly more history than the US. The oldest church still in use in England, St. Martin’s, dates to the last quarter of the 6th century AD, whereas the oldest building still in use in the continental US dates to 1610 AD, Santa Fe, NM's Palace of the Governors.   In this podcast episode, Razib discusses the history and culture of England with Ed West, author of the Wrong Side of History, an eminently writerly Substack that is ideal for a connoisseur of all things ancient (or at least medieval) and English. West, the author of many books on English history, expands on the importance of figures like Alfred the Great, Athelstan, the forgotten first true king of all England, and the Magna Carta, the document that set the template for later English political history, and possibly set the course toward the liberal democracy that dominates the world today. West also argues that Britain today has lost much of its distinctiveness as it becomes swallowed by America's cultural and political currents. He also contends that Britain is now importing subcontinental Hindu-Muslim rivalries into the British political system, as Hindus and Sikhs vote Conservative, while Muslims are aligned with Labour.

Spectator sports are a massive cross-cultural phenomenon in the modern world, from cricket in India to football in Europe and American football in the US. In the middle of the 20th century, commentary on sports was generally found in newspapers that also reported results from the previous day’s games. By the end of the century, many sports television channels arose that provided new venues for commentary and analysis, and the vocation of “sports commentator” exploded beyond simply analyzing the scores. As professional sports leagues became culturally influential, the job of a sports journalist expanded to reporting on what occurred “outside the lines” of the playing field. On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Ethan Strauss, a writer who has covered sports and culture for the past decade, including penning the book The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty. More recently his writing is to be found at his Substack, House of Strauss, which is notable for offering a candid take on the cross-pollination between the broader culture and athletics, notably in the piece Nike's End of Men: Why Nike no longer wants us to Be Like Mike. The conversation takes some strange turns because Razib has consciously avoided following spectator sports since 2004 when he reflected on how much of his life was wrapped up in tracking his favorite teams. This was before the period that athletes became culturally influential and polarizing, as they transformed themselves into “social media influencers.” Rather than relying on reporters to engage in hagiography, Razib and Strauss discuss a figure like Lebron James, who can alter the tenor of cultural conversation simply through his Twitter account or his feigned reading in the locker room. They also tackle the stillborn globalization of sports, the NBA’s failures in China, and China’s failure to produce top-notch basketball talent in quantity (as well as India’s failure to punch at its weight in world-class athletics). 

About a month ago, during a COVID-19 wave, I saw a Substack post, How to Get Paxlovid Quickly, If You Get Covid - How to get the 89%-effective Covid cure called Paxlovid, despite government red tape, shared across various group chats. For non-Americans, the utility of such a post and the question of why the government couldn’t distribute this drug and communicate its utility might require some explanation. If you are an American, you probably don’t need an explanation. The post's author, Maxim Lott, is behind the Substack Maximum Truth, where, in his words, he “uses data to answer important questions that the shallow media ignore.” Lott is also the force behind Election Betting Odds. There are two kinds of punditry. There are the pundits who when posed questions reflect and then hold forth. Then, there are pundits who when confronted with a question search for data and analyze what they find to generate results and then produce an informed opinion. Lott is in the second category. In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib and Lott discuss “where we are” more than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of data. They reflect on their expectations in February 2020 and how things have panned out. They also discuss the politicization of COVID-19 and being caught in the middle of ideological arguments inadvertently, as attitudes toward issues like masks and border controls seem to chart flips in tribal valence in the blink of an eye. Finally, Razib and Lott also discuss the utility of instruments like betting markets to gauge the strength of opinions and judgments. This allows us to go into the future with more tools to understand the world with our heads rather than our hearts.

What if everything you learned about anthropology turned out to be wrong? Well, OK, maybe not everything, but some very important things. Today Razib talks to Manvir Singh about primitive communism and misconceptions about hunter-gatherers, what anthropology got wrong in the past and how it has continued to confuse us into the present. Singh is a scholar at The Institute of Advanced Study in Toulouse, as well as an artist and essayist. His academic interests lie in explaining why most human societies, from preliterate foragers to urbanites, develop cultural phenomena like “witchcraft, origin myths, property rights, sharing norms, lullabies, dance music, and gods.” This episode of Unsupervised Learning hinges on two essays by Singh, Primitive communism: Marx’s idea that societies were naturally egalitarian and communal before farming is widely influential and quite wrong and Beyond the !Kung: A grand research project created our origin myth that early human societies were all egalitarian, mobile and small-scale. Razib and Singh discuss the primitive communism of the Ache people of South America, how rare it is and its horrific consequences like obligate murder of orphans. Though the Ache do practice radical communism in the distribution of resources, they also follow the Biblical maxim “that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” And it turns out that they’re not a template, but one end of the extreme among contemporary “small-scale societies.”  The “initial-study-population” problem crops up again elsewhere in the misleading representations of prehistoric societies that come out of studying the rare marginalized foragers of the modern world, pushed as they often are into desolate lands, eking out an existence on the Malthusian margin. Singh argues that for too long anthropologists and the public have back-projected into the past based on unrepresentative modern people like the !Kung, when the past was actually filled with a diversity of human lifestyles. One takeaway is that we can’t expect to reconstruct prehistory by cobbling together unrepresentative fragments of the present.

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Dr. Judge Glock about the case for optimism in America in 2022. An economic historian by training, Glock is a Chief Policy Officer at the Cicero Institute. Though public polling shows that 80% of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the nation, Glock really doesn’t share the sentiment, and he puts forward a case for sunny optimism in the historical and geographical context. In short, it turns out that for the vast majority of human history our species was living at the Malthusian level, and today Americans pursuing the consumer lifestyle never consider simple subsistence sufficient. Glock’s contention is that we live like kings, and we should appreciate this. In fact, the poorest Americans have access to miraculous technologies that would have amazed Henry VIII. Glock also points out that China, and much of the developed world, has lower fertility than the US, and we are the world’s number one magnet for skilled immigrants. In the great positional game of power, Glock reckons that the US has a good shot purely due to its demographic profile. Moving beyond economics and onto culture, Razib and Glock discuss the differences between the present and past of American society and argue about whether the US is quite as decadent as many argue. After all, rates of teen pregnancy are down, and crime is nothing like it was in the 1970’s, so perhaps our best days aren’t behind us?

Dr. Iona Italia’s name often perplexes the public, but it’s entirely explicable considering her background. Her late father was from the Parsi community of the Indian subcontinent. Descendants of Persians who continued to adhere to the Zoroastrian religion of their ancestors, the Parsis migrated to northwestern India about 1,000 years ago. Remaining predominantly endogamous, they nevertheless developed a synthetic culture, adopting the Gujarati language, Indian dress, as well as some very idiosyncratic surnames, including Italiya. As far as her first name, Iona is very common in Scotland, her mother’s homeland. Though raised in Karachi, Pakistan, as a child, Italia was orphaned at ten and grew up in Britain, under the supervision of her half-sister (on her mother’s side), who was nearly twenty years older. Razib and Italia discuss the complexities of her personal history and racial identity in the context of an essay posted at her Substack, The Skin I'm In. Her story, that of a mixed-race person who “presents as white” and grew up detached from her subcontinental heritage, is especially interesting in light of the new identitarian regime that has arisen on the political Left in the last few years. Razib also asks Italia about the possible future of the more old-fashioned liberalism she espouses forthrightly on her podcast, Two for Tea, as well as what distinguishes the magazine she edits, Areo, from similar publications.