RKUL: Time Well Spent 09/09/2023

Back-to-school edition

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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?

I recently talked to Michael Muthukrishna, Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics, affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERlD and Data Science Institute, Azrieli Global Scholar at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Technical Director of The Database of Religious History and board member of the One Pencil Project. The conversation will be released as a podcast on 10/19/2023, ahead of the release of his book, A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going.

Normally, I don’t note a scholar's every last affiliation, but with Muthukrishna it feels relevant, because his disciplinary scope is quite broad, and A Theory of Everyone is an incredibly ambitious book. Like his mentor Joe Henrich, Muthukrishna has training as an engineer, but later become interested in anthropological and cultural questions: like Henrich, he applies toolkits brought in from evolutionary biology and population genetics.

When I opened my review copy of A Theory of Everyone I expected a broad and ambitious book in the vein of Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. And there’s plenty of cultural evolution in A Theory of Everyone. But actually, the beginning and end underscore that it’s a global book with galactic ambitions. Muthukrishna’s narrative spans everything from the Cambrian Explosion being a win for self-organizing cooperative systems to our species’ future as a fusion-powered civilization. True, the middle portion of the book that bridges the gap between deep history and future history, does address cultural evolution, but concepts like the amount of energy needed to obtain more energy and its role in powering civilization loom just as large.

If A Theory of Everyone’s theme of the relevance of cultural evolution, human flexibility and social organization in understanding our civilization’s complexity speaks to you, The Secret of Our Success still remains the seminal popular work in the field due to its singular focus on the topic. In this work, Henrich illustrates how conventional evolutionary forces like selection and drift can be applied to a cultural context, and how collective knowledge and intelligence beat individual cognition. Like A Theory of Everyone, The Secret of Our Success is a progressive book, imagining a world of greater cooperation and human flourishing. Still, it probes more into the nuts and bolts of how human societies self-organize and become more productive through constant innovation. 

Perhaps one of the central themes of A Theory of Everyone and The Secret of Our Success is the importance of imitation in our species' advancement. For Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, the central organizing idea is non-zero-sum interactions. Robert Wright’s book, published over two decades ago already, works with a more traditional evolutionary framework predicated on methodological individualism. If Muthukrishna looks to cooperation and energy as the two pistons driving the galactic ambitions of our species, Wright is focused on positive interactions between individuals, and how our lineage broke out of the Malthusian trap. Nonzero also presents a narrative in the framework of teleology; our purpose as an intelligent species is to spread intelligence through the cosmos. Chapters like “the inevitability of agriculture” drive home Wright’s contention that there’s nothing coincidental about the world around us; breaking out of the cycle of destruction competition was inevitable. Once it happened, an eventual liftoff was fated. Writing in the late 20th century, at the time Wright’s cosmic narrative seemed a bit eccentric, but today, with the rise of the specter of “artificial general intelligence,” the idea of a looming global mind becomes more concrete and less visionary.

Wright’s focus on game-theoretic concepts in Nonzero is balanced by aspects of history and economics that he uses to illustrate the power of non-zero-sum interactions. Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium, a massive collaboration between economic historians Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, amplifies the descriptive economic historical aspects of Nonzero, in a massive global history of the last 1,000 years. Surveys of economic historical questions often consider a particular region over several centuries, but Power and Plenty begins in the year 1000 AD, and expands across the entire world to examine an entire millennium, framing the Pax Mongolica of 1300 AD as the beginning of true globalization. Through their description of numerous Eurasian and African societies, they converge upon the conditions that eventually resulted in the “great divergence” and “Western takeoff” that shape the modern world’s conditions today, with a chasm between the West and the rest of the world, a divergence that is slowly lessening as the rise of Asian economies rebalances world power into a configuration more reminiscent of that before 1700.

Moving the scope beyond economics, and to the whole history of our species, William H. McNeill’s The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History offers a theory of the importance of information nodes in the collective increase of robustness as human civilization as a whole is stitched ever tighter together through trade and communication. The author of Plagues and Peoples, McNeill co-authored  The Human Web with his son, and it was his last major book in a decades-long career as a historian dating back to the 1940s. Rather that deep and thick description, The Human Web proposes a framework for why we see empirical patterns like more disruptive “Dark Ages” more in the deep past than in the past millennium. In short, once civilization spread far and wide and became interconnected, redundancy prevented information loss. The vast world of written Greek in the western provinces of the Roman Empire: Iberia, Britain and Gaul, disappeared with the Dark Ages and the emergence of barbarian kingdoms, but in the early 1000's, Greek reappeared in the West via the migration of Byzantine scholars, illustrating the importance of redundancy. 

Finally, J. M. Roberts’ The History of the World delivers the 1000-page heft and depth that The Human Web lacks. Today, comprehensive surveys of world history for a general audience are not common; historians prefer narrower and more focused topics that allow them to flesh out general patterns. But Roberts’ narrative can serve as the foundation and map to attempt to comprehend global history and the future of our species. All the dynamics driving history have concrete and specific outcomes, and The History of the World lays them out in detail.

Thought

China’s Economic Pain Is a Test of Xi’s Fixation With Control. China is 19% of the world economy, so it matters. It looks like excessive micromanaging still has downsides.

This Post Will Not Go: Viral Elon Musk, X and the end of tweeted articles. I agree with Ethan Strauss: Elon is turning X into its own closed community rather than a central node in a global information network.

Misreading Middle-Earth: Tolkien and the Contemporary Reader. J. R. R. Tolkien was deeply enchanted with the world, and as a result his earnest intent often doesn’t land quite right in a modern cultural context. His oeuvre is laced with moralistic themes, but we live in a somewhat amoral world, so we are prone to completely miss the clues to the moral universe he took for granted as a deeply devout Roman Catholic strewn across the narrative.

Consciousness is a great mystery. Its definition isn't. Sometimes we overcomplicate things. We think, we know we are, therefore we are.

Colleges Spend Like There’s No Tomorrow. ‘These Places Are Just Devouring Money’ - Students foot the bill for flagship state universities that pour money into new buildings and programs with little pushback. The fundamental problem is that the current college-age generation is far smaller than the millennial bump. The economics of 2010 don’t work in 2023, but universities haven’t caught up.

How a Small Gender Clinic Landed in a Political Storm. The idea that there is a unified natural world and things like medicine are invariant across cultures seems to be falling by the wayside. For my money, it seems likely “Blue States” will go on having lots of gender clinics and “Red States” very few.

Data

Climate change facilitated the early colonization of the Azores Archipelago during medieval times. This paper argues that there was human activity in the Azores between 700 and 850 and that the humans were probably Norse given that the mice on the Azores seem genetically Scandinavian. Presumably, these settlements died off only for the islands to be rediscovered in the 1400s. The absolute memory-holing of this era of settlement points to the fact that human occupation in the past was more ephemeral than we might think.

On the estimation of genome-average recombination rates. Recombination is a fundamental population genetic parameter, but it is variable across the genome and individuals, so there is still a lot of work to be done on it.

Structural-demographic analysis of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) collapse in China. Basically, it was population growth and elite overproduction. One thing that became a serious issue in many Chinese dynasties is that descendants of all emperors would receive stipends, and when they proliferated into the thousands it became a major fiscal drag.            

Detecting inbreeding depression in structured populations. It can be hard to produce a general inbreeding estimator because so many populations vary in their basal level of genetic diversity. You know this when you’re working with pooled data sets from different populations and quality-control thresholds sometimes work for one population but not another.

Frequent, infinitesimal bottlenecks maximize the rate of microbial adaptation. So “changing the metric of optimization to incorporate experiment runtime, and using a full binomial distribution for bottlenecking, rather than a Poisson approximation” changes the predicated rate of adaptation. What hath the wrong distribution wrought? This result has major implications for experimental protocols of bacterial evolution.

The evolution of sexual dimorphism in gene expression in response to a manipulation of mate competition. Sex differences on the genomic level are taken for granted, but how they emerge is surprisingly little understood.

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 my guests (and monologue topics) since the last Time Well Spent:

• Cory Clark: adversarial collaborations in science

• Inez Stepman: fixing higher education

• Erik Hoel: The World Behind the World

• David Anthony: when we were Yamnaya

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

For subscribers, I post transcripts (automatically generated, though I have someone going through to catch major errors).

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On the blog

People In Brazil Are Quite “Mixed-Race”:

The main problem with the first narrative is it is just a plain fact that most Brazilians are mixed-race in the American context. Bündchen is the exception, not the rule. This has been hard to ascertain because of the lack of high density SNP array surveys in the early years of this blog, but I decided to go back and check now that these chips are very cheap, and a paper with 6,500 Brazilians typed on 370,000 SNPs exists to illustrate the ancestry distributions within: A minimum set of ancestry informative markers for determining admixture proportions in a mixed American population: the Brazilian set.

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 hope I’ll write about, lay it on us.