RKUL: Time Well Spent, 07/14/2025

Bastille Day edition

Eiffel Tower, pencil drawing, O. Khan, age 8.

Your time is finite. Your phone and the internet stand ready 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?

Bastille Day, on July 14th, marks a crucial turning point in what became known as the French Revolution, the tumultuous years that saw the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of the Republic. In the 19th century, Britain and its daughters surpassed France in political, military and economic importance, but even since then, the “Eldest Daughter of the Church” has continued to exert an outsized cultural and social influence. This was clear in the Belle Époque, the 40-year peace between the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 and World War I. Auguste and Louis Lumière screened the first public films in Paris in 1895, Pablo Picasso pioneered Cubism in Paris amid its fervid international art scene in the 1910s and the Eiffel Tower opened in 1889. In the 21st century, French intellectuals remain relevant, and have significantly shaped the Anglo-American world that became the new global culture.

Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, published in 2000 when the author was 93 years old, is a tour de force, swan song and magnum opus that leans both on Barzun’s learned erudition and lived experience. In Paris, Barzun’s parents hosted assorted literary and artistic luminaries in their home, in particular pioneers in modernism and Cubism. After his family relocated to the US in 1919, Barzun studied at Columbia University. He eventually became an academic and a fixture in America’s literary scene. Barzun’s personal experiences with major cultural figures in Europe and the US inform the later chapters of From Dawn to Decadence, injecting a touch that shifts his narrative away from a detached academic treatise. The erudition and decades of learning show through early on, as he reflects on Petrarch’s impact on the rise of the vernacular and the efflorescence that we now call the Renaissance. In psychometrics, most results show that fluid intelligence, pure ability to engage in abstraction and analysis, peaks in around age 25. But crystallized intelligence, knowledge and recall of that knowledge peaks after age 50. Reading From Dawn to Decadence allows you to partake in decades of learning.

If From Dawn to Decadence is Barzun’s attempt to describe the arc of Western creativity and artistic production over the last five centuries, Dan Sperber’s Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach unpacks a project bent on modeling the general phenomena that drive cultural variations and universality. Sperber, a former director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is an anthropologist who helped integrate psychology and Darwinian theory into a system that explains how culture emerges and evolves. While many American cultural anthropologists focus on interpreting specific cultural variations, Sperber and researchers trained in what is sometimes called the “Paris School” flesh out the dynamics internally and externally that might drive that variation in the first place. Explaining Culture outlines the “epidemiology of representations,” that is, culture can be thought of as the expression of ideas that reproduce like contagion within the structure of the human mind. For example, musical forms rooted in percussion may have a wide distribution across human societies because the human auditory system is already pre-adapted to absorb this sensory input in a pleasurable manner for evolutionary reasons. In this, he moves beyond the structuralist anthropology outlined by an earlier generation of French anthropologists, in particular Claude Lévi-Strauss, that marginalized causal explanations in favor of the plain acceptance of deep structural elements in human cultures as unquestioned priors.

One of Sperber’s younger French colleagues, Pascal Boyer, was part of an informal salon that gathered at the elder anthropologist’s house. While Explaining Culture takes the 50,000 foot view, Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought zooms in on one of the most pervasive phenomena, or structures if you will, of human cultures. Religion Explained describes the shocking diversity that we know from anthropology, but collapses them down to large categories subject to analysis via cognitive science, ultimately caused by evolutionary pressures that result in a human psychology susceptible to supernaturalism. Religion Explained does not purport to explain a specific religion, like Christianity or Voodoo, but it explains the general features of religion that seem to be universal and invariant, driven by common selection pressures that have produced a brain shared across our whole species.

While Boyer focused on the expansive phenomenon of religion, Stanislas Dehaene, based out of the Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale, uses many of the same tools to understand numeracy in The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics. Dehaene illustrates how deep numeracy is as a trait, by showing how rats and pigeons, two model organisms commonly deployed in psychology, share some of our same intuitions. A key feature of our numeracy is the distinction between our gestalt numeracy and our mathematical skills which emerge out of our general intelligence. When you see four marbles, you recognize four marbles. This is deeply hard-wired into our brains by evolution, where we need to recognize groups of animals all around us. Large numbers of predators mean we should run; large numbers of other humans you recognize mean stay. In contrast, when we see 27 marbles we have only a rough sense of quantity; our innate recognition fails. Here we must make recourse to our general intelligence, and count manually. These two elements of our cognition, our hard-wired and fast recognition capabilities, along with our learned, slow but flexible analytical skills, allow us to build a vast cultural-intellectual edifice that is arguably the purest expression of the human ability to think abstract mathematics.

Michel Foucault is our planet’s most frequently cited intellectual according to Google Scholar, with his most cited work of all being Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Foucault considered himself more of a historian of ideas than a philosopher, and Discipline and Punish tries to show that in the late 1700s, the West shifted toward a rationalized system of citizen-control that could lead to an almost totalitarian level of state sovereignty over individual humans. Foucault’s argument is that the prison is simply the most extreme expression of the power of the society over the individual, and that insights from the systematization and industrialization of the carceral state illustrate the nature of contemporary institutions we might perceive to be more innocuous, from factory workplaces to schools.

Even in English translation, Foucault’s work persuades the naive reader; he was a thinker of great erudition and analytic power. But criminologists have argued that the rhetoric about power suffocates any serious domain-specific analysis, crowding out any broader understanding buttressed by actual supporting evidence from economics or legal history or taking into account major technological changes. Some scholars argue that the intrusiveness Foucault ascribes to power relations throughout his work was not even possible across most societies before the advent of the totalitarian state, which followed the communications revolutions of the late 19th century, allowing state surveillance nationwide, and a far more effective bureaucracy. Foucault was, arguably,, a sophist. No one doubts his brilliance, but his works tend to promote views with which specialists into whose fields he parachuted take issue on empirical grounds.

Foucault’s most decisive influence has arguably been to nudge large factions of academia's focus toward cynically marshalling intellectual power to ascend social hierarchies via persuasion, force of will and erudition, with the true goal personal status, not any good-faith attempt at objectively understanding the world. Discipline and Punish is a stark exercise in deploying intellectual power to serve particular self-interested human ends, rather than necessarily to illustrate empirical phenomena.

After a 1971 debate with Foucault on the nature and roots of justice, Noam Chomsky commented that the French intellectual seemed “completely amoral,” consistently reducing ethical considerations to simply the elucidation of power structures. This is the path that much of the humanities academy has since taken, setting aside considerations of truth and beauty to discern and deconstruct the workings of only power relations. For all his brilliance, Foucault’s naked self-interest in deploying his intellectual gifts collapsed a whole world of ideas down into the narrow workings of power and oppression and left his less talented intellectual heirs with a far poorer world, stripped of wonder and celebration of the genius of human creativity.

Thought

The Enormous Longhouses of the Linear Pottery Culture (video). Archaeologist and historical fiction author Dan Davis has a new video out about the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK), the first farmers of Northern Europe. These were the people who built longhouses during the Neolithic, at the time the largest structures in the world. The LBK people pushed agriculture north into Scandinavia, and their genes still flow through the veins of almost all Northern Europeans.

6 Months of MAHA. It is a worthy goal to make America healthy again, but too often the driving forces behind MAHA cling too tightly to their alternative worldviews in kneejerk opposition to mainstream therapeutic medicine, when its many wins include everything from the drastic decline in mortality we owe to mass vaccination to the far longer average lifespans enjoyed in recent generations thanks to advancements in treatments for congenital diseases like cystic fibrosis or HIV. Strange that militant enthusiasts of raw milk and psychedelics in therapy are now steering the ship.

Welcome to Dallas: The City That Just Can’t Stop Expanding. You may not like it, but this is what abundance looks like. Dallas is not the most aesthetically pleasing, chic or trendy city, but it’s affordable. It’s the heart of an America that still knows how to grow economically.

The stationary bandits of New York City-Urban governance needs reform, not whatever the Cuomo/Mamdani debate is. Large urban areas, America’s economic dynamos, are sitting ducks for rent-seekers who just want to pull money out of the system for their own profit. New York City’s transportation system apparently literally does not have an “org chart,” meaning that they don’t know who works for them as a whole. A lot of city jobs exist solely to provide sinecures, not services.

In Los Angeles, Iranian Jews Dream of an Iran They Could One Day Visit. Persian Jews are proud of their culture, synthesizing a serious devotion to Judaism with a pride in Persian history and identity. But American Persian Jews are also some of the most vociferous critics of the Islamic Republic of Iran given its patronage of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

Will Austin Survive the Driverless Car Revolution? Right now, Waymo and Tesla’s Robotaxi are competing on the streets of Austin, but I am seeing many Zoox test cars around town too. Driverless cars do well in Austin because there is very rarely snow or ice on the roads, the state of Texas is very keen on keeping regulatory hurdles as low as possible and a large number of tourists downtown means demand for car services remains eternally high. The future is here, and it does look and feel like the future.

Data

Whole-genome sequencing in Galicia reveals male-biased pre-Islamic North African ancestry, subtle population structure, and micro-geographic patterns of disease risk. This paper confirms that for some reason Galicia is the region of northern Spain where there is a lot of North African ancestry, but places its arrival two to three generations before the Islamic conquest. I believe the first result is correct, but am skeptical of the second, where these sorts of estimates can be sensitive to the parameters you have in the model and less robust than you might think. High numbers ofBerber soldiers seem to have settled in Galicia during the early centuries of al-Andalus.

Whole-genome ancestry of an Old Kingdom Egyptian. Scientists have completed the sequencing of an individual's genome from Egypt's main dynastic period, a time when the Nile Valley’s complex civilization was developing under the aegis of a unitary state. They find the ancestry is mostly North African, but with a substantial minority component that seems to derive from Mesopotamia. This buttresses diffusionist arguments that Mesopotamian features in early Egyptian culture were due to migration.

Genetic affinities between an ancient Greek colony and its metropolis: the case of Amvrakia in western Greece. Continuity and mixture both seem to have defined early Greek colonizations. Amvrakia is on the Adriatic coast, near the border with Albania, ancient Epirus, while its mother city, Corinth is 150 miles to the east, near where the Peloponnese meets the rest of the Greek mainland. Nevertheless, the genetics of its initial years seem to reflect its people’s transplanted nature, before they finally later mixed with the regional substrate.

Hidden structure in polygenic scores and the challenge of disentangling ancestry interactions in admixed populations. Basically predictors are “trained” on populations that are somewhat homogeneous, and the consumer predictions delivered are superior for individuals who better match the training populations. In admixed individuals this is clearly a problem, so a fair amount of statistical research goes into improving the predictions. These sorts of papers aim to resolve issues relating to the generalizability and portability of the predictive models across populations, though the authors also reiterate that most of the predictors are already pretty good even trans-ethnically.

My Two Cents

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall.

Hiding in plain sight: uniting Denisovans’ famous DNA with a set of mysterious physical remains:

Fifteen years ago, a humble genome sequence revealed a never-before detected human lineage. The Siberian cave, Denisova, where DNA was extracted from unidentified trace hominin remains, lent its name to this newly discovered people. Called “Denisovans,” everything we have so far gleaned of them has come from the slow accretion of data in a mere handful of genomes that have come to light since, including that of a 13-year-old teen girl given the unimaginative nickname “Denny,” who lived 90,000 years ago and astonishingly happens to have had a pure Denisovan father and a pure Neanderthal mother. The 2010 discovery of this class of hominids, accomplished by genome sequence alone, occurred in tandem with the sequencing of Neanderthals, published six months earlier; together they revealed that all humans outside of Africa harbored some ancestry from this long recognized people, whose fossils were first discovered more than two centuries ago. But the Neanderthals were not the only now extinct contributors to the genomes of modern humans; comparisons between various human populations and Denisovans have shown that an average of some 5% of people’s ancestry in New Guinea, thousands of miles from Siberia, actually derives from Denisovans. Further comparing the genomes of Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans, we’ve seen that our ancestors parted ways with the Neanderthals’ and Denisovans’ ancestors about 600,000 years ago, and that Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged from one another about 400,000 years ago.

Unsupervised Learning Journal Club

A new feature for paying subscribers this year, 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. The sixth and seventh Journal Clubs have just come out, and you’re in time to vote for the eighth’s paper.

From The wandering Fulani: children of the Green Sahara:

In March 1903, in the market square of Sokoto, capital city of an empire approaching its centenary, the last vizier of the improbable Sokoto Caliphate officially submitted to British rule. This act came in the wake of a series of brutal defeats by the European colonial power as it pushed northward from its coastal redoubts, bristling with modern weapons to which the locals had no answer. British forces promptly elevated a new puppet caliph to the role, but the more momentous event was the end of an audacious African imperial project that had been materially and permanently reshaping the Sahel for the previous century. The dawning age of European colonialism would unceremoniously carve up the entire continent, but the chapter closing at that moment had indelibly marked the Sahel alone. A century earlier, the fist of conquest came not from a far off continent, but from the arid wastes to the north; armies marched under the banner of a self-proclaimed caliph, and his fanatical followers swept across the Sahel’s sun-baked plains. The waves of conquest and conversion they unleashed would leave a legacy of eventually binding together much of modern Nigeria, Mali, Niger and Cameroon, uniting disparate kingdoms and tribes ostensibly under the domineering aegis of a strict Islamic faith, helmed by a preeminent ruler, the Caliph, or “Commander of the Faithful.”

And from the newly released Genghis Khan, the Golden Horde and an 842-year-old paternity test:

Although it was said that Genghis Khan never questioned his son's paternity, his irascible second son, Chagatai, did, sowing discord within the ruling clan. Because of this conflict between his two eldest, Genghis Khan tapped his ‌third son, Ogedei, habitual peacemaker between his two elder brothers, to be his direct heir. From the Mongol capital in Karakorum Ogedei kept a close watch on the lands that were coming into his rule via the conquest of China. These eastern territories were the most populous and richest portion of the Genghiside domains. Further west, Chagatai would inherit the great cities of Central Asia, from Samarkand to Kashgar. The youngest son, Tolui, died campaigning in China before coming into his inheritance, the Mongol homelands, in keeping with tradition that confers upon the lastborn son their herds. To the firstborn Jochi and his heirs were then granted the vast northwestern lands, the most expansive of the domains, but also the poorest. They were also the furthest removed from Eurasian civilization’s rich hearths, which stretched in a vast arc from Anatolia to Iran, through South and Southeast Asia and up toward China. But Europe was within the ambit of the Mongol armies that coalesced into the Golden Horde, which ranged as far as the Adriatic and the forests of Poland, but that continent was only just recovering from the Roman Empire’s collapse, and its wealthiest regions were the furthest from the pasturelands that could sustain the vast Mongol herds.

The first five editions:

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

For free subscribers: a sense of the format from my coverage of two favorite 2024 papers:

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, Stitcher, and Spotify). If you want to listen on YouTube, please subscribe.

Here are podcasts since the last Time Well Spent:

• Nikolai Yakovenko: the $200 million AI engineer

• David Van Ofwegen: a peripatetic philosopher across Eurasia's antipodes

• Claire Lehmann: after the Intellectual Dark Web

• Nathan Cofnas: Judaism's group evolutionary strategy and hereditarianism defended

ICYMI

My own 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.