Despite the preprint being out for two years, Akbari et al.’s Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia publication in Nature this week has resulted in a massive media response. Though Razib has discussed this work before, he thought it would be useful to review it, and put it in context in a new monologue.

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Today Razib talks to Matthew Schmitz, a journalist who previously served as an editor at the religious journal First Things. He is the cofounder of the online magazine Compact, alongside Edwin Aponte and Sohrab Ahmari. He currently serves as editor of Compact, religion editor of Washington Post Opinions, and co-host of the podcast Against the Grain. Compact His essays on politics and culture have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Claremont Review of Books. A native of O’Neill, Nebraska, Schmitz is a graduate of Princeton University.

First, they discuss Schmitz’s piece in the Washington Post, The unreligious religiosity of Christian identity politics. Here Schmitz articulates the view that the nationalist-inflected Christianity exemplified by many MAGA and MAGA-adjacent figures is quite different from the sincere but earnest evangelicalism of the older religious right. Rather, it is more performative, more civilizational, and tied into white identity politics. Additionally, it turns away from the philo-Semitism that has been typical of the American religious landscape. Schmitz and Razib also address the rise and fall of the New Atheism over the last 20 years, from the decline of public Christian faith as the center of the body politic, the rationalist critique and the marginalization of both by woke social-justice political theology. They also discuss the difficulties and travails of religious pluralism in the US today, including the tensions caused by the arrival of large numbers of Hindus in places like Texas, where they erect statues to their gods, including the semi-monkey divinity Hanuman.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to returning guest Megan McArdle. She is the author of The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success and a Washington Post columnist and op-ed board member. McArdle grew up in New York City and attended Riverdale Country School. She obtained an undergraduate degree in English from University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the University of Chicago. McArdle’s previous positions were at The Economist, The Atlantic and Newsweek. She has a new podcast for the Washington Post, Reasonably Optimistic, and also contributes to Central Air and The Dispatch.

Razib and McArdle talk about the follies of populism, left and right, and the damage being done to America in the name of anti-elitism. Razib asks McArdle if there is any way out of a national debt crisis and fiscal insolvency (answer: probably not). Then they discuss the role high cost of living and confiscatory tax rates on the flight of capital and high-income individuals from blue states, and McArdle explains the historical-structural reasons that liberal cities cannot cut back on their top-heavy labor force. Razib and McArdle discuss immigration, trade and globalization, and the short-sightedness of MAGA-populism. Finally, they address AI, McArdle’s usage of it, and the promise it has in revolutionizing work and transforming our society.

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On this episode, Razib talks about race, and how to think about this touchy subject.

• Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease

• The Apportionment of Human Diversity

• Human genetic diversity: Lewontin’s fallacy

• A Family Tree in Every Gene

• How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’

• Race: The Power of an Illusion

• A Genealogical Interpretation of Principal Components Analysis

• Inference of Population Structure Using Multilocus Genotype Data

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On this episode Razib talks about where we are when it comes to “Out-of-Africa,” Neanderthal origins and the broader state of understanding the dynamics of Homo evolution.

Cited:

• Hypothesis: A modern human range expansion ~300,000 years ago explains Neandertal origins

• Did Levallois tools make Neanderthals human?

• Interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern…

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Today Razib talks to Chris Bradley, a serial entrepreneur and the CEO and Co-Founder of Matter Bio, a company dedicated to preserving genome integrity and addressing the root causes of aging. With a multidisciplinary background spanning neuroscience, cell biology, and computer science, Bradley aims to translate early-stage biotech concepts into practical therapies that can extend human lifespan Matter Bio is focused on diagnosing, quantifying, and repairing the structural variations and mutations that accumulate in human DNA. Bradley has BS is neuroscience and cell biology from Rutgers and a MS in computer science from New York University.

The discussion first aims to focus on fundamental science concepts. What is genome integrity, and why does it matter? Bradley reviews the current state of the science to understand how errors creep into our genomic code over our lifetimes, and how it can lead to cancers and other pathologies. He points out that there is a wide variation in lifespan and cancer-risk across animal species, showing that in some ways nature may have “solved” the problem. In addition, Razib reiterates how complex and amazing any genome is, with billions of base pairs, and how incredible it is that our body’s repair mechanisms function as well as they do.

Bradley then discusses the practical goals of Matter Bio as they begin their first clinical trials. Rather than just focusing on basic science, Bradley’s long-term focus is to make a difference in human lives. He discusses how the drastic gain in human life expectancy over the last 150 years already shows that we can increase longevity. Ultimately, Matter Bio aims to push the frontier so that we are less and less surprised by centenarians. Bradley also addresses the reality that a lot of the innovation in biotech right now, including what Matter Bio wants to achieve, is limited by the regulatory state, rather than what can be done in terms of the science or funding environment.

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Today, Razib talks to Chris Masterjohn, a nutritional scientist and leading expert in mitochondrial biology who believes hidden energy bottlenecks underlie much of modern disease. After years of work as a professor and researcher, he founded Mitome, the first mitochondrial analysis designed for everyday health, and serves as its Scientific Director. His mission is to make mitochondrial testing accessible so people can identify and correct the specific energy limitations holding them back. After earning his PhD in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Connecticut in 2012, he completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and subsequently served as an Assistant Professor of Health and Nutrition Sciences at Brooklyn College. He has a Substack.

Razib and Masterjohn first discuss the impact of social media on the communication of science, and his wrangling with the public health establishment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Masterjohn explains how digging into the primary literature showed that the authorities were claiming far greater certainty than they should have, and recounts attempts to censor and rebuke him when he pointed this out. He also addresses some misrepresentations that Anthony Fauci engaged in during his tenure. Next, Razib asks Masterjohn about the insights he has gained from nutritional science in terms of how he lives his own life, and his overall philosophy of public health. Masterjohn pushes against the tendency to over-medicalize and rely on pharmaceuticals before looking to common-sense nutrition and exercise. They then discuss the importance of the mitochondrion in molecular genetics, and how that is relevant both in terms of physiology and evolution. Masterjohn then talks about his company, Mitome, and the added value of greater and greater metabolic and genetic information in the present age.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Mike White, a Genetics professor at the Washington University in St. Louis. White has a position at the School of Medicine in St. Louis, where he leads a research team focused on understanding the biophysical architecture of regulatory DNA. He earned a B.A. in music before pivoting to the sciences, receiving his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Rochester in 2006 and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Wash U under Dr. Barak Cohen. White’s work combines functional genomics, synthetic biology, computational biology, and deep learning to decipher how cells interpret regulatory sequences. His lab aims to predict how non-coding genetic variations impact complex human traits and disease risk, while exploring how to apply transcriptional circuits for broader applications in health and agriculture.

Razib first talks to White about the cultural, political and social winds moving through academia since 2010. How did academic science become so politically polarized, and what significance does it have for future funding streams? White brings his insights from the viewpoint of someone whose perch is in a medical school, and so somewhat at the margins of the cultural revolution sweeping through academia and even STEM. He notes it seems that the activist high tide peaked around 2020, though the hostility between the Right and institutional academia continues unabated, affecting NIH funding.

Then White discusses where we are in terms of understanding gene regulation, and its importance in biological function. Razib and White review how almost 99% of the human genome does not code for proteins, so often it is called “junk DNA,” but the reality is that there are other functions in that region, first and foremost, regulating and modifying protein expressing regions. Razib asks White where we are in human genomics more than 25 years after the draft, has it lived up to expectations? And where we are going in the future?

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Aaron Renn. Renn is a writer, consultant, and urban analyst known for his work on the challenges facing American cities and religious institutions in the 21st century. He is a contributor to The American Reformer and the author of Life in the Negative World, a book exploring the cultural shifts regarding Christianity in America. Renn previously served as a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for five years and as a contributing editor for City Journal, having established his voice on urban policy through his widely cited blog, The Urbanophile. Prior to his career in public policy and journalism, he spent 15 years in management and technology consulting, including a tenure as a partner at Accenture.

Before getting into the meat of the discussion, Renn and Razib discuss management consulting and the value that a firm like Accenture provides a corporation. Razib wonders whether consultants are simply brought in to rubber-stamp what management has already concluded, but is aiming to pin the blame on an external actor (e.g., layoffs). Renn argues that this is not the case, and in fact, though he acknowledges that management consultants provide an outsider view unencumbered by internal politics that allows them to be taken more seriously. They also discuss the impact of AI on some services that management consultants provide, and the future of white-collar work.

Then Renn goes on an extended riff on the rise and fall, and possible new rise, of the Midwestern social and economic landscape. A native of southern Indiana, Renn has spent time in Chicago and New York before settling down in the affluent suburb of Carmel, Indiana. Razib and Renn discuss the decline of the Northeast and the industrial Heartland, and what makes the Midwest unique, with its origins as part of the original early American republican frontier. Renn discusses candidly the upsides and downsides of living in “flyover country,” from its peace and tranquility, to the reality that Midwestern metropolitan areas do not have the same intellectual and cultural dynamism as coastal cities.

Finally, Razib asks Renn, a Protestant Christian who identifies as evangelical, about the cultural and theological shifts occurring on what was once called the Religious Right. Renn argues that this movement’s peak was really in the mid-1990’s, and the whole thirty-year period since has seen retreat and retrenchment. He believes that Christians have lost control of the cultural narrative and have to accept a position as outsiders. Renn also addresses the decline of premillennial dispensationalism, most famously illustrated in the Left Behind series of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the rise of Christian nationalism, and in particular, the role of Reformed pastor Doug Wilson in this shift.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Daniel Tabin, a 5th-year Ph.D. student in David Reich’s lab in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. His research focuses on using ancient and modern DNA to answer questions about human history. Tabin completed a degree in Computer Science and Math and Master’s in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He Ph.D. project involves the population genetic history of Central and East Asia.

First, Razib and Tabin discuss a recent paper he co-authored that looks at problematic results in the paleogenetic literature due to contamination and DNA damage. Tabin reviews all the processes and analyses that paleogeneticists go through to validate that the ancient DNA data they have is truly ancient, rather than recent contamination, from wet-lab precautions to downstream analysis. Then they dig into the empirical results over the last 15 years from the field of ancient DNA, from what we know (or don’t) of the out-of-Africa bottleneck, early modern humans in Asia and how we think about persistent mysteries like “Population Y” in the New World (Population Y is more closely related to Papuans and Andamanese than Northeast Asians).

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Between 2017 and 2020 Razib co-hosted the podcast The Insight. A year ago it went offline, but now the archives are back! On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib re-posts two important episodes from The Insight. First, a conversation with evolutionary anthropologist Joe Henrich about his 2020 book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Second, starting at 51 minutes and 45 seconds, Razib interviews Cosimo Posth about a paper on which he was co-author, The genetic history of Ice Age Europe.

With Henrich Razib initially discusses the emergent field of cultural evolution, and his earlier book The Secret of Our Success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smart. Then, they discuss the confluence of history, anthropology and economics that led him to propose, along with his colleagues, the thesis that psychological peculiarities of medieval Europeans explains their dynamic success down into the modern period, leading to the emergence of “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies.”

Changing tacks, Razib’s conversation with Posth surveys the field as it was in the late 2010s, and in particular focuses on what we had learned about the genetics of Upper Paleolithic Europeans. This refers particularly to the period between 45,000 and 11,700 years before the present, the end of the last Ice Age, when various big game hunting societies dominated the continent after the extinction of Neanderthals.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Peter Nimitz about the rise of the Slavs. His Substack, titled Nemets, explores world history through the lenses of archaeology, paleogenetics, and historical processes. His writing focuses on "deep history," such as the Bronze Age Collapse and the migration of Indo-European peoples, while connecting these ancient shifts to broader patterns of civilizational rise and fall. Nimitz often integrates technical data from genetics and climate science to challenge traditional narratives about nomadic tribes and early state formations across Eurasia. Beyond antiquity, the newsletter also touches on modern geopolitical developments and regional studies, ranging from the war in Ukraine to the cultural history of the Americas.

Razib and Nimitz explore the thousands of years of Slavic history and prehistory, from their fragmentary mentions in antiquity, to their explosion in the Middle Ages. Nimitz discusses the many archaeological cultures in northeastern Europe that might be candidates for the proto-Slavs as they emerged from the Corded Ware Culture during the Bronze Age, as well as the historical, cultural and genetic effects of the Slavic migrations that impacted Christian Europe after 600 AD. He also addresses the role of Slavs as one of Europe’s preeminent ethnolinguistic configurations in early modern Europe.

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On this episode Razib talks to Jesse Arm, VP of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute. His writing and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, New York Post, Fox News, City Journal and Jerusalem Post. Arm graduated with honors from the University of Michigan, where he majored in international political economy, and studied language and international affairs at Tel Aviv University. He has also worked for Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Dan Benishek, and the analytics arm of American Continental Group, a major lobbying firm.

Razib and Arm discuss the perceptions and attitudes of Gen Z Republicans, focusing on a group of 18-29-year-olds in Nashville, TN. Arm notes that while Gen Z feels economic anxiety, they are also entrepreneurial and comfortable with the world of social media. Gen Z Republicans are religious, like previous generations, but less likely to be married or have long-term partners at the same age as earlier cohorts. They express a desire for politics to be entertaining, similar to reality TV. The conversation also touches on the influence of social media on their views, the power of influencers like Nick Fuentes, and the potential for future political figures to emerge from the creator class. Arm also addresses the impact of intergenerational wealth transfer on political attitudes.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Davide Piffer, whose Substack examines genetic differences between populations. Piffer has been publishing on human genetic variation for a decade, and recently started a Substack, Piffer Pilfer, exploring similar issues in detail over a series of posts.

Razib asks Piffer about the difficulties in analyzing polygenic scores from quantitative traits in ancient DNA samples. How does he do in technical terms, from genome quality to imputation to ancient populations from modern ones? Then, they discuss some of Piffer’s findings, in particular, his work on pigmentation. Piffer talks about how he discovered that modern European pigmentation, and in particular, light complexion, is the product of both admixture from different populations with different characteristics and natural selection over the millennia. Piffer talks about how he discovered that selection for lighter pigmentation continued into the Iron Age.

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Today Razib talks to Aneil Mallavarapu, a scientist and technology leader based in Austin, Texas, whose career bridges the fields of biochemistry, systems biology, and software engineering. He earned his doctorate in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from the University of California, and has held academic positions at Harvard Medical School, where he contributed to the Department of Systems Biology and developed the "Little b" programming language. Mallavarapu has transitioned from academic research into the tech and venture capital sectors, co-founding ventures such as Precise.ly and DeepDialog, and currently serving as a Managing Partner at Humain Ventures. He remains active in the scientific community through local initiatives like the Austin Science Network.

Most of the conversation centers around Mallavarapu’s arguments outlined in his Substack The Case Against Conscious AI - Why AI consciousness is inconsistent with physics. The core of his argument rests on the "Simultaneity Problem" and the "Hard Problem of Physics,” which involve non-locality and the memorylessness of artificial intelligence phenomena. Though Mallavarapu believes that artificial intelligence holds great promise, and perhaps even “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) is feasible, he argues that this is a distinct issue from consciousness, which is a property of human minds. Razib also brings up the inverse case: could it be that many organisms that are not particular intelligence, also have consciousness? What does that imply for ethics of practices like eating meat?

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On this episode Razib, talks to Richard Hanania, a returning guest to the podcast. Hanania holds a Ph.D. from UCLA, a J.D. from the University of Chicago, and an undergraduate degree from CU Boulder in linguistics. He is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe and UnHerd, and has his own newsletter. Hanania is also the author of The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics.

Razib and Hanania talk about his new book Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, and his developing views on populism and immigration. They highlight the rise of populism on the Right, the rejection of cognitive elitism, and the impact of social media on political discourse. Hanania criticizes the far-right’s nativism, particularly against Indian immigrants, and the rise of anti-Semitism, both as a feature of low-IQ populism. They also touch on foreign policy, noting the failures of authoritarian regimes like Russia and China, and the potential for democratic systems to prevail.

Hanania brings up cultural differences, particularly in Asia, and the impact of personality traits on success. They talk about the Big Five personality traits, and note that disagreeableness and low neuroticism are linked to professional success, especially in men. Razib also brings up the 2017 James Damore Google memo controversy, highlighting the cultural and political implications down to the present. Hanania reflects on his experiences with cancel culture and the evolving acceptance of diverse viewpoints. They also discuss the role of Substack in promoting free speech and the challenges faced by platforms in maintaining this principle.

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On this episode, Razib talks about:

• Why sex is evolutionarily deep and persists

• Why males and females exist

• Cultural norms of patriarchy

• The feminist revolution and its connection to the rise of modern liberalism

• Male-female differences in biology (size, strength and anatomy)

• Male-female differences in psychology

• How psychological differences impact individual performance and social norms

• Why hyper-patriarchal societies cannot transition to a modern consumer society

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Your time is finite. The world is awash in slop to help you squander it. Here are my latest picks for spending it well instead. Feel free to add more in the comments.

Books, what else?

With the turn of a new year, many find themselves seized by the need to commit to some ambitious plan or another. And as any year-round gym-goer knows, these resolutions have a way of being decidedly front-loaded for the majority of their makers. Which, is perhaps all the more argument for either keeping them modest or starting straight in on the best of them. Either way, if it’s reading material or edification you’re after, I’ve got you. You can sprint through the following books while the New Year spirit is still upon you and know you’ve spent the first days of the dawning year well. Or read one every couple months and you’ll have guaranteed yourself some excellent company all year long. These titles have stood up to repeat reading for me, but if none are new (or calling to you again), perhaps you will prefer a previous New Year’s post where I recommended an entire year’s reading list if you were to commit to precisely 20 pages a day for 365 days.

First, a fitting book for this Substack: at the intersection of science, history and politics, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond. This work grew out of Ullica Segerstråle’s dissertation, and it is at once a very broad and fine-grained description and analysis of the debate around sociobiology that began in the early 1970s and continued through the 1980s. The central players are E. O. Wilson, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, but the bit players read like a who’s who in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields; John Maynard Smith, W. D. Hamilton, Richard Dawkins, George Price and Noam Chomsky all make appearances. Segerstråle, a sociologist by training, employs an ethnographic method, sitting in on meetings of the two camps, the pro-sociobiologists led by Wilson and the anti-sociobiologists led by Lewontin and Gould. The events recounted in Defenders of the Truth date back about 50 years now. Many of the principals have died. But, you can’t help but discern very similar dynamics to those currently seen in academia’s “woke” period, when groups of activist students with the cooperation of some faculty targeted thinkers and movements that they accused of being “problematic.” Carole Hooven’s recent cancellation saga at Harvard could have been in Defenders of the Truth, though a further shift to the Left in academia since the 1970s makes it hard to imagine a modern-day “sociobiology controversy” even seeing the light of day in the 2020s. Though written accessibly, Segerstrale’s narrative rewards repeat reading, because it is so dense with historical detail that remains relevant today.

It’s not for nothing that ancient Rome, both at its height and in its fall, continues to haunt people’s thoughts over 1500 years later. The rise, apogee, decline and fall of the first Europe-based multi-ethnic empire has served as a warning over the last two centuries of Western imperialism. Recurring thoughts of ancient Rome have practically become a pop-culture cliché. But if there is one book I would recommend on that civilization’s collapse, it would be Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. The genius of this work is its interdisciplinary scope. Since Ward-Perkins is an archaeologist, he actually examines the material basis when evaluating the nature and vigor of Roman civilization. Instead of looking at ancient texts where contemporary commentators complain about economic stress, The Fall of Rome reports such ingenious and memorable measures as the increase in coin hoards after 400 AD, which signalled that people were saving in anticipation of impending lean times. Ward-Perkins also shows how economic activity in the Empire correlated strongly with pollution recorded in the layers of sediment in British ponds. The Fall of Rome makes it clear exactly how and when the Roman Empire went into decline based on graphs reporting widely varied data, rather than arguments based on narrow archival analysis. Again, like Defenders of the Truth, Ward-Perkins’ book is long on data, sparing the reader tendentious arguments and speculation.

Joe Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter also sits at a nexus of various disciplines. A decade on, it already feels possible that in the future, commentators will argue that this specific fruitful synthesis lit the fuse on evolutionary cultural anthropology’s explosion (with due apologies to earlier books from L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, E. O. Wilson, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd). Henrich combines the density of data from anthropology, which allows for so much description, with the analytic power of formal evolutionary genetics. While evolutionary psychologists discuss the impact of our cognitive hardware on our culture, cultural evolutionists like Henrich treat our memes like protean units of evolutionary analysis. Though Henrich acknowledges the reality of gene-culture co-evolution, the focus in The Secret of our Success is how evolutionary forces like drift, memetic exchange and natural selection might actually shape the cultural variation we see around us. While an evolutionary psychologist observes the universals across all societies, like the existence of religion, a cultural evolutionist might ask why religions vary between societies.

Not that that takes away from the genuine pleasure of detailed description in histories of culture, like Jaques Barzun’s 912-page From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. Although Barzun (1907-2012) penned the work while still in his 80s, it’s worth pausing to consider that the author himself personally lived through a full 20% of the time period he chronicles in this, his magnum opus. Born to an elite family in France who moved in European literary circles, Barzun came to the US in 1920, eventually enrolling as a student at Columbia and becoming a professor there in the 1930s, before doing a stint at Cambridge. From Dawn to Decadence reflects the fruits of a massively erudite mind after a long career or scholarship, but as it moves into the 20th century, it further benefits from the author’s personal familiarity with many prominent figures in literature and the arts, like W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot and Marcel Duchamp. Few will deeply read as many works of literature across the Western canon as Barzun did, given his exceptionally long career in academia, but From Dawn to Decadence grants the humble reader an extraordinary vantage, thanks to Barzun’s vast corpus of knowledge and his perspicacious observations about cultural currents across half a millennium.

After Barzun’s nearly 1000-page tome, my friend Stuart Ritchie’s Intelligence: All That Matters, is a brisk, punchy read that grants you a good sense of the latest work in one of the most robust and replicated social sciences we have, all in well under 200 pages. Despite what you might hear about intelligence testing being statistically unsound from the likes of Nassim Taleb, Ritchie’s work will make it clear how useful and important the concept remains to understanding sociological patterns around us. He explains the “general intelligence factor” without excessive mathematics and tackles the major questions directly and concisely (for example, “are intelligence tests biased?”). Ritchie’s book fulfills the promise of the series’ formula (and to be clear, far from an intelligence-specific provocation, All That Matters is the title of a 44-volume series, although… perhaps readers of other volumes, like Muhammad: All that Matters, will be open to construing it otherwise.) Read Intelligence, and there’s a good chance you may never need another work of psychometrics to be up to speed.

Thus far, I’ve resisted the temptation to recommend abstruse texts. But if you’ve already plowed through the previous five, I’d like to invite you to tackle a genuinely academic text this year. This is the lone recommendation here I’ve only read once: Daniel Hartl’s A Primer of Population Genetics and Genomics. And the only reason I haven’t circled back to this worthy work, is, as long-time readers will know, because I had already read Principles of Population Genetics many times. That 2010 work, referred to as “Hartl and Clark” in the field, after its co-authors, served my purposes in work and research.

But Principles is a very dense work, suitable perhaps for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, while Primer is much more accessible for laypeople, and less than half the length. And, being published a decade later, in 2020, it is more up-to-date on the latest in genomics. A book like A Primer of Population Genetics and Genomics pays long-term dividends, allowing you to understand dynamics observable everywhere in the world, and to make sense of patterns and trends that otherwise might mystify. When people are tempted to opine about the operation of dynamics like genetic drift, bottlenecks or natural selection, this book will have equipped you with the analytical tools to assess and construct models off the top of your head.

Thought

An Apology for Philology, Solveig Gold and Joshua Katz survey the impact of political radicalization on classics as a field, and in particular, Latin and Greek philology as the backbone of Classics degrees. In 2021, Princeton’s Classics department notoriously eliminated the requirement to learn ancient Greek or Latin as a condition of earning a Classics degree. The value of Classicists being steeped in Latin and ancient Greek seems self-evident to me, so of more interest was their examination of what is happening in their chosen fields. Woke may be past high tide in the broader culture, but its warping effect on academia remains substantial. Critics of language requirements say they exclude people, but the search for excellence will always exclude. Anti-racists criticize problematic views of past practitioners in order to reject philological methods. They question even the possibility of impartiality. And when you then have scholarly journals publishing articles with such insights as, “Through a combination of Audre Lorde’s Black queer lens and Paul Preciado’s trans scholarship on the dildo, I further argue that by imagining Simulus as Black, queer, and/or trans, the power imbalance between Simulus and Scybale is greatly reduced,” it’s tempting to throw up your hands and just remind yourself that this is not your circus. And yet, this is hardly the only field where past human practitioners were problematic. Surely the enterprise of scholarship is robust enough to accept that the measure of a scholar’s value is in the utility of their insights or methods, not the merit of their personal views. Statisticians (to say nothing of every researcher publishing statistical data analysis across most rigorous academic disciplines) still use regression and correlation daily, even though Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, who were unabashed eugenicists, first developed those tools.

Among Savage Tribes: Napoleon Chagnon meticulously documented the customs of a tribe where violence was sexually rewarded. Some of his academic colleagues never forgave him for it. This profile of the life and times of the late Napoleon Chagnon is a flashback to controversies in evolutionary psychology 25 years ago. In short, an embittered journalist slandered Chagnon, permanently damaging his reputation. Many anthropologists agreed at the time that the criticisms were baseless, but they could not bring themselves to support someone perceived as regressive. Nothing too surprising, but well written, and if you don’t know about the controversy surrounding the book The Darkness in El Dorado, where prominent scientists including Chagnon were accused of human rights violations and possibly even genocide, while colleagues and professional societies stood by, this article is worth a read.

Companies Are Outlining Plans for 2026. Hiring Isn’t One of Them. The title says it all, and the cause is to a large extent firms are holding back while they are trying to get a read on the impact of AI.

Religion Holds Steady in America - Recent polling shows no clear evidence of a religious revival among young adults. The great secularization of the last generation in the US seems to have halted, but there is no aggregate increase in religion, just the maintenance of the status quo.

India Is on a Himalayan Building Spree to Prepare for a Clash With China. India’s neglect of its northern border with China is bizarre given that there have been multiple conflicts, the Sino-India War of 1962, and the border clashes of 1967, 1975 and 2020, where both sides have suffered casualties. Additionally, most of India’s population lives just south of it (in contrast to China, for whom the Indian border lies very distant from major population centers).

Humans killed millions of vultures. We’re now living with the consequences. Vulture numbers in India went from 4 million to 32,000 in a generation because of the use of painkillers for dying cattle, which ended up destroying the kidneys of the avian scavengers. Now the painkillers are banned, but in the meantime, feral dogs have taken the vulture’s role in the scavenging ecosystem, resulting in a new equilibrium. And unlike vultures, dogs also bite and spread rabies, resulting in many human deaths, often children, from the disease. Millionth installment in the tragic annals of unintended consequences.

Data

Genetic history of Rus’. No big surprise, but shows just how extensive the admixture of Finnic people into northeastern Russians has been over the centuries. Also, there was almost no Scandinavian ancestry in early Rus, suggesting that the impact of the Varangian Swedes was genetically minimal.

Upper Palaeolithic genomes reveal deep roots of modern Eurasians. Using ancient DNA, this paper detects differences today that date to the diversification of populations 45,000 years ago. Populations like “Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers” (CHG) seem to have roots in their home regions this early, as opposed to differentiating later.

Insights into human history and complex traits from the genomes of African populations. This paper looks at the extremely diverse populations of Africa across its varied environments and shows how adaptation (along with admixture) shaped each regional group.

Invasion of new adaptive zones retains telltale signs of directional selection at macroevolutionary scales in mammals. Essentially, the authors discovered that environmental transitions shaped changes in skull morphology across numerous lineages. Exactly what you would expect, basically, but nice to confirm it with data and subject the hypothesis to statistical tests.

My Two Cents

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall. Most recently, I covered where we stand on Indo-Europeans and Indians when it comes to genetics and history.

First, Two Steppes forward, one step back: parsing our Indo-European past:

Ironically, the improbable connection between literary cultures half Eurasia’s breadth apart, from Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s vast and varied Bengali oeuvre (which includes both India and Bangladesh’s national anthems) to the lyrical language of Shakespeare’s timeless corpus, all owes to cultural transformations wrought by those first pre-literate nomadic barbarians. They poured forth out of Eurasia’s great grasslands, tall, dark and violent, plague speeding their emphatic arrival, burning down old civilizations and rewriting the continent’s genetic legacy overnight. How astonishing that such humble horsemen’s intervention would spawn globe-spanning cultural empires destined to leave their mark on the whole species, not just in our genes and the practices of patriarchy, but in millennia of myths and some of our most exalted, eternal, written works.

Then, The Waiting Game: Past, Present and Future of Indian Genomics:

The findings of 50,000 years of evolutionary history of India: Impact on health and disease variation may be as far as we can go with modern samples towards understanding the structure of the South Asian past. Nearly three thousand whole genomes from dozens of ethnic groups push the frontier of our understanding of the past appreciably, but thirty thousand whole genomes from hundreds of ethnicities would push it only marginally further. We’re well into the territory of diminishing returns at this point. There are only so many stories to be wrung from modern data alone. At some point, you just keep confirming and refining what you already knew. Again and again, geneticists have confirmed very high levels of Indian endogamy (and attendant low levels of within ethnic group genetic diversity) within a broader context of extremely high aggregate South Asian diversity. First, with the early genomic age’s coarse methods from just a few informative markers, and now with the fine-grained, data-rich methods possible since 2010 that scan the whole DNA sequence. Two facts remain indisputable: Indians have more overall genetic diversity than Europeans and East Asians, but greater inbreeding is also clearly written in their genomes. Global diversity, local homogeneity. More samples will simply reiterate this reality.

Unsupervised Learning Journal Club

A periodic feature for paying subscribers, the Unsupervised Learning Journal Club briskly reviews notable new papers or preprints. At the end of each edition, I invite subscribers to vote on papers/preprints for future editions.

Most recently, Antiquity’s miracle skin whitening method: migrate to Sweden, wait millennia:

Details remain to be worked out regarding descriptive aspects of these traits, but this PNAS paper really totally confirms the overall pattern that scientists have been describing for more than a decade. Europeans got lighter very recently, and the selection is persistent and continuous. Why? A lot of work in earlier decades hypothesized reasons, whether Peter Frost’s sexual selection theories, or Nina Jablonski’s hypotheses about vitamin D. But now we are in a genomic age, and can see the trajectory and geography of selection. We know it occurred. We see changes in gene frequencies. But the fact remains that we don’t know why. That’s a harder question to answer, but at least we have the preliminary piece, the description, out of the way.

Previous editions:

• Wealth, war and worse: plague’s ubiquity across millennia of human conquest

• Where Queens Ruled: ancient DNA confirms legendary Matrilineal Celts were no exception

• Eternally Illyrian: How Albanians resisted Rome and outlasted a Slavic onslaught

• Homo with a side of sapiens: the brainy silent partner we co-opted 300,000 years ago

• Brave new human: counting up the de novo mutations you alone carry

• The wandering Fulani: children of the Green Sahara

• Genghis Khan, the Golden Horde and an 842-year-old paternity test

• Rewriting the Family Tree one skull at a time

• Ghost Population in the Machine: AI finds Out-of-Africa plot twists in Papuan DNA

• Immigrants of Imperial Rome: Pompeii’s genetic census of the doomed

For free subscribers: a sense of the format from my coverage of two favorite papers last year:

• The other man: Neanderthal findings test our power of imagination

• We were selected: tracing what humans were made for

Discussion

All my podcasts go ungated two weeks after their Substack release. So I encourage subscribers on the free plan who’d like to automatically get them to subscribe to that podcast stream (Apple and Spotify). If you want to listen on YouTube, please subscribe.

Here are podcasts since the last Time Well Spent:

• Monologue: year-end review of Proto-Indo-European origins and humanity’s deep evolution and diversity

• Francis Young: Baltic paganism in modern times

• Eric Cline: Love, War and Diplomacy, international relations in the Bronze Age

ICYMI

My domain also has all my links and updates: https://www.razib.com, including links to the few different podcasts I’ve contributed to or run, my total RSS feed, and my more mainstream or print articles when I remember to post them, my Twitter, the occasional guest appearance, etc.

• DM me

• Facebook message me

• Some of my past pieces for Palladium Magazine, The New York Times, Slate, Quillette and Nautilus.

Over to you

Comments are open to all for this post, so if you have more reading/listening suggestions or tips on who I should be talking to or what you’ve been waiting to read about, put them here.

On this episode of Unsuperivsed Learning Razib reviews two big stories he has followed and written about on this Substack in 2025, Indo-European origins and how genomics has illuminated human evolution.

• Two Steppes forward, one step back: parsing our Indo-European past

• The cave where it happened: Denisova cavern’s congress of ancient peoples

• The wandering Fulani: children of the Green Sahara

• John Hawks and Chris Stringer: Neanderthals, Denisovans and humans, oh my!

• Re-writing the human family tree one skull at a time

• John Hawks: varieties of humankind all mixed-up

• Cesar Fortes-Lima: the Fulani out of the Green Sahara

• Lost Green Saharans: ancient DNA unearths a new race from a verdant North African interlude

• Homo with a side of sapiens: the brainy silent partner we co-opted 300,000 years ago

• Bonus monologue: man the hybrid monster

• Bonus monologue: ancient North Africans and the Green Sahara

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On this episode, Razib talks to returning guest, Francis Young, a historian who teaches at Oxford. Young specialises in the history of religion and belief from ancient times to the present day, and provides expert indexes for academic books and translates medieval and early modern Latin. He holds a PhD from Cambridge University and is the author, editor or co-author of over 20 books. On his last visit to the podcast, he discussed his book Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic, an account of the practices and persistence of Baltic paganism down to the 16th-century, the age of the Renaissance and Reformation. Today he discusses his new book, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples.

Razib and Young first discuss what it means to be “pagan” in a European context, first during Classical Antiquity, but more recently in Northern Europe down to the early modern period. Young discusses how it is difficult to understand and define paganism without reference to Christianity, which was a major force in shaping the nature of pagan religion in Northern Europe. Razib asks about the specific nature of northeast Baltic paganism, and in particular, the late survivals of pre-Christian religion among Lithuanians and Estonians, and the differences between the two groups. Young explains his understanding of different religious practices and the various forms of non-Christian practice that persisted among different groups, including mixed “creole” identities. Razib also inquires about the Mari El, a Finnic group in the Urals that might be the only continuously officially pagan people in Europe, as well as evidence Young reports that Estonian peasants were never truly fully Christianized.

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