RKUL: Time Well Spent 09/09/2022

Almost Autumn Edition

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?

Despite not having been a religious adherent past the age of seven, as an adult, I’ve taken a deep interest in religion as a social and cultural phenomenon. To understand human experience and history, you have to grapple with religion. In my youth, I trusted you simply needed to ask people what they believed or perhaps read the books believers claimed to be guided by or hold sacred. This simplistic logic explains why after 9/11 so many Americans purchased the Koran or went to informational sessions at mosques. They wanted to understand Islam, so they read its holy book and listened to Muslims.

This is certainly a start, but it is only a tiny component of religious phenomena. Though texts are essential to many religions, they are not a universal feature of religion, and for most of human history, most believers were illiterate. Additionally, the personal impressions and understandings of adherents of a particular religion are not always informative. Many will explain they believe what they believe because their religion is true, which only leads you to the question of how so many contradictory beliefs can all be true.

To delve under the surface of religious belief and practice, you need to think like an anthropologist. But you also must plumb human psychology and evolution to get beyond the purely descriptive, integrating human culture into a broader theoretical framework. Three books deploying the tools of cognitive anthropology were critical for me to understand the universal instincts and intuitions that led to the ubiquity of religion across human societies.

First, Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer wrote In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion and Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought in the early 2000’s. As you can tell by the titles, the two books are pretty similar, and Atran and Boyer were both part of the same intellectual circle in France. In Gods We Trust and Religion Explained both aim to understand the universality of human religion as an outcome of common human cognitive intuitions about the world that were the outcome of evolutionary pressures. Of the two,  In Gods We Trust is arguably the denser and more abstruse book, while Religion Explained is probably more accessible for a newcomer to the field, using a more explicitly evolutionary psychological paradigm.

Jason Slone’s Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't operates in the same framework as Atran and Boyer to explore one crucial phenomenon: why do humans not seem to believe the things they explicitly say they believe? Slone is an anthropologist who draws upon his fieldwork in Sri Lanka, where he showed that Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus shared more in common than their avowed sectarian differences advertise. For constitutionally irreligious people, this book is an essential read because it makes more comprehensible otherwise inexplicable behavior. Religion is not axiomatic, it is usually intuitive.

Of course, religion is more than just intuitions about the supernatural world that bubble out of our common psychology. It is a bundle of beliefs, practices and institutions, and adherence to a “world religion” gives members a civilizational identity. This level of analysis is the focus of David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. While Atran, Boyer and Slone are curious about how evolution shapes human psychology and how that leads to universal religious institutions, Wilson aims to resurrect a ‘functionalist’ tradition in social science that began in the 19th century with Emile Durkheim trying to understand the usefulness, or in evolutionary parlance the adaptiveness, of religious phenomena. If Atran, Boyer and Slone focus on why religious beliefs are so similar, Wilson drills down on why some religious practices are beneficial and widespread.

This brings us to why some religions spread while others wither. For Western audiences, that big question usually revolves around Christianity, and Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries posits an answer. In Stark’s telling, the specific practices and beliefs of Christians not only encouraged conversion to the new religion but crucially were pro-natalist. Stark outlines an autocatalytic model that fits with the sparse data on the spread of Christianity and laces the narrative with his rational choice and supply-side theory whereby believers are “consumers” of the “goods” (heaven) and “services” (charity) of “religious firms” (churches).

Though a sociologist, Stark helped to foster a whole field attempting to understand religious belief and diversity through economic models and methods. The scholars working in this tradition are profiled in Larry Witham’s Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion. To be candid, I believe this economistic understanding of religion is only satisfying in a few nations. A theory of competition between sects that vie for believers is not convincing worldwide. But the United States is arguably one of those nations where an economistic framework does seem to apply, so it is essential to understand the insights that these scholars have gleaned from their model building and data analysis, as understanding American culture is essential in and of itself.

But what about the richly textured narratives of the major world religions? Religion is more than just a theoretical framework, it is a phenomenon that exists in specific times and places, informing other aspects of culture and society. Lawrence Sutin’s All Is Change: The Two-Thousand-Year Journey of Buddhism to the West is a unique window on the history of the world’s first missionary religion, from its origin in eastern India to its spread among upper-middle-class “seekers” in the West. This is no dry history of Buddhism; Sutin documents the religion’s interaction with the West in the 19th century and the synthetic process of cultural amalgamation that led to the emergence of a de facto “new religion,” Western Buddhism. If All Is Change tells a story that is exotic to most Westerners, Vivian Green’s A New History of Christianity is a comprehensive survey of the cultural evolution of the West’ dominant religious tradition, a civilization that was once called “Christendom.” Green hits all the major beats to help grasp Christianity’s roots, diversity and its role in Western culture.

Thought

The gossip trap: How civilization came to be and how social media is ending it. If you assign time to one “long-read” this month, make it Erik Hoel’s explanation for why human cultural evolution exploded only in the last 10,000 years, and why it might end soon.

Schools should try to teach kids the basics. This seems so common sense you might wonder why someone would have to write it, but if you have children in American elementary schools, you’ll understand. Far too few basics and far too much…well, I don’t know what “social-emotional learning” is supposed to teach.

These identical twins married identical twins. Now they have sons. Not going to argue this is the “deepest” story out there, but it’s pretty fun.

The case for high-skilled immigration reform (and how to make it happen). The standard economic argument is that high-skill immigrants generate positive externalities and spillover effects. The cultural argument would be that too many high-skill immigrants will transform the nature of American society in unpredictable ways since they will capture the intelligentsia. 

China’s Property Market Has Slid Into Severe Depression, Real-Estate Giant Says. China has serious structural problems. I wouldn’t bet against them, but there are severe economic and sociological headwinds.

Data

Hunter-gatherer admixture facilitated natural selection in Neolithic European farmers. This should be expected theoretically. The mixing of two populations is like reciprocally adding new mutations, many of which have already been selected to be neutral or beneficial. The finding that immunological alleles from hunter-gatherers were favored is exciting and is in line with the need for diversity at these loci, as well as the possibility of local European diseases to which the natives were adapted.

Genomes from a medieval mass burial show Ashkenazi-associated hereditary diseases that pre-date the 12th century. Seems in line with earlier work. Shows that the basic outlines of Ashkenazi heritage were already present in Europe in the 1100’s, though some demographic processes reshaped it in the subsequent centuries.

American geography of opportunity reveals European origins. This paper reiterates an old finding with better methods: the outcomes of Americans of European descent tend to recapitulate social patterns prevalent in their nations of origin. “Deep history” is a real thing.

Worldwide late-Quaternary population declines in extant megafauna are due to Homo sapiens rather than climate. I think we knew this, but no harm in getting it more quantitative.

Genome-wide DNA methylation profiles in smoking discordant and concordant monozygotic twin pairs. Epigenetics is a real thing in specific contexts. This is one case where environmental “insults” have obvious genomic consequences.

My Two Cents

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack are beyond the paywall. Since the last “Time Well Spent” I’ve had a few big pieces for paying subscribers.

First a two-part series on the Greeks. Part 1, They’re all Greeks to me - Gazing upon the genes of Agamemnon:

And yet today, modern genetics, using both ancient DNA and surveys of contemporary Greeks and how they relate to neighboring peoples, can test the disgruntled conjectures of the 19th-century Philhellenes, rooted, as they were, unrealistically in their love of the vaunted Athens and disciplined Sparta. Though the ancient world was one of transformation, migration and dislocation, the Nazi fantasies do indeed turn out to be mostly fiction. The ancient Greeks were not Nordic, but a Mediterranean race, and to a great extent, the Greeks of today are their descendants, even if the collapse of the classical world did bring some newcomers to the edge of Homer’s “wine-dark sea.” The typical lineaments of modern Greeks would be recognizable to their classical ancestors and even their more distant Bronze-Age forebears.

Then, part 2, They're all Greeks to me - Farmers, Minoans, Mycenaeans and Slavs:

So what’s the genetic upshot? The ancient and modern DNA does seem to confirm that over the past few thousand years many Greeks have grown genetically closer to Northern Europeans than they were in the late Bronze Age due to the Slavs. This dynamic is most robust in northern Greece, in and around Salonika and the region of Thessaly, which seems to have borne the brunt of Sclaveni invasion. In contrast, Greek speakers in Cyprus were barely impacted due to geographic realities. And, a subset of modern Greek speakers, those I labeled Greek Anatolians, seem to show little connection to Northern Europeans.

Next, I wrote a post about inbreeding that used a pop-culture hook, Only from the mind of Martin: a perfect inbred queen - Disentangling the hard reality of inbreeding from Game of Thrones’ fantasy:

But fiction is fiction. Daenerys Stormborn is hale and healthy in Game of Thrones. Unfortunately, (ten-year-old spoiler alert), her son with the leader of the Dothraki horde, Khal Drogo, is born deformed, a monster. Could this finally be the realistic genetic consequence of inbreeding in the descendants of the Targaryens? Actually, no. Because Daenerys and her husband are unrelated, the inbreeding coefficient of their offspring is 0 (on a scale of 0 to 1, with 1 a case where the two matching copies of DNA are always identical. Daenerys is 0.375, her parents both 0.25.). Remember, it doesn’t necessarily matter how inbred the parent’s own genome is, the basic condition for inbreeding is the existence of paired segments inherited from the mother and father that exactly match. Since Khal Drogo is not related to Daenerys, by definition their offspring will not be inbred (and even if the Dothraki leader was inbred himself, as long as he was genetically distinct from Daenerys, the offspring would still be outbred). One generation of outbreeding removes all adverse effects of inbreeding; the sins of the forefathers and foremothers do not forever pass on to the descendants. Little Rhaego can blame blood magic, not inbreeding, for his untimely end.

If you want to browse my more geographically focused pieces, Dry.io has created an interactive map of them. We’ll keep adding to that page over time. Also, Dry.io set up a nice skin for my pinboard bookmarks and a page for reader-submitted links.

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).

Here are my guests (and now, occasional monologues) since the last Time Well Spent:

• Jason Walters: from Salafism to Sartre - An ex-radical Islamist speaks

• Razib Khan: surveys of the great ancient human DNA Diasporas

• Katherine Brodsky: from internet entrepreneur to cultural commentator

• Razib Khan: the "southern arc" and Indo-European origins

• And here are the currently ungated podcasts all in one place.

The two podcasts under “Razib Khan” are monologues where I reflect on a topic. The response has been positive, and I plan to do these occasionally. In one specific episode I have in the works, I will touch on major genetic questions I get over and over again, so if you have something you want me to address, feel free to leave a comment below.

For subscribers, I’m now posting transcripts (automatically generated, though I have someone quickly scanning for the most egregious errors).

ICYMI

Some of you follow me on my newsletter, blog, or Twitter. But my own domain also has all of the links and updates:

https://www.razib.com

. You’ll find links to the few different podcasts I’ve contributed to or run, my total RSS feed, links to more mainstream or print articles when I remember to post them, my Twitter, the occasional guest appearance here and there, etc.

• Email me

• DM me

• Facebook message me

• My total feed of content

• My long-time blog, GNXP

• A group blog, Secular Right, vintage at this point, but worthwhile for Heather Mac Donald’s prescience

• My Indian/South Asian focused blog, Brown Pundits

• Some of my past pieces  for UnHerd, National Review, The Manhattan Institute, Quillette, and The New York Times 

• My old podcast, The Insight

• My podcast today, Unsupervised Learning

On the blog 

The Re-Enchantment Of The World:

This is not to say that scientists were ever objective. They’re human. But in past generations, there was a sense that in some cases, in some instances, they had to put aside their views. To give a concrete example, I know the case of an eminent geneticist who spoke in front of a conservative group, even though his own politics leaned toward socialism.  My understanding is that when queried about this choice he stated that he believes in setting aside politics when it comes to science. Today this would be seen as a regressive viewpoint. Most young geneticists would I’m sure avoid speaking in front of a conservative group.

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 I really should be writing for you, lay it on me.