RKUL: Time Well Spent 09/09/2024

Almost Autumn Edition

If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

---

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?

It’s the election season in America. Which drives heavy traffic to short time horizon horse-race sites like the Silver Bulletin. But to understand 2024, I think you get as much or more juice out of studying previous elections, as well as America’s cultural and demographic history more broadly. Appalachia’s Scots-Irish regions sharply changed their voting patterns synchronously between 2000 and 2016, but do you know why? There’s the indispensable 1991 Albion’s Seed for that. Why are American libertarians more likely to throw in their lot with the Republican than the Democratic party? For that, you can read Radicals for Capitalism.

Sara Diamond and Paul Gottfried are both thinkers focused on the rise of post-war conservatism. But in Diamond’s Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States and Gottfried’s The Conservative Movement I find a distinctive outsider perspective, from Diamond as a left-wing sociologist, and Gottfried as a right-wing political theorist who rejected neoconservatism. Roads to Dominion is by a more ideological outsider, focusing on how different streams of conservative and reactionary thought converged over the decades into the mature form ascendent by the 1990’s, when Democratic President Bill Clinton declared that the “era of big government is over.” Gottfried’s intellectual pedigree has a dual aspect, from an aspiring insider to an expelled outsider; a pall of ressentiment is detectable in The Conservative Movement, as Gottfried’s distaste for the arriviste neoconservatives is palpable. Covering roughly the same periods and same factions, Diamond traces the rise of a triumphal movement, while Gottfried details factional turnovers and transformations.

In 1994, a year before Roads to Dominion and two years after The Conservative Movement’s second edition, David Frum came out with Dead Right. The book is notable because it called out the hubris and failures of the conservative movement at their peak, in 1994, when Republicans finally took control of the House of Representatives and forced Democrat Bill Clinton to both rule and run for re-election as a center-right candidate. Frum’s basic thesis was that ‌Reaganite politics were more rhetoric than reality. When it comes to foreign policy, with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, movement conservatism achieved a total victory. But in both the economic and social sphere, attempts to roll back the size of government and reverse cultural radicalism failed. Though the government grew more slowly under conservative rule, Frum pointed out that it still grew. Finally, he was also prescient enough to predict that a nationalism conservatism would likely become more powerful in the coming decades.

If Dead Right was an analytic exercise in prediction that hit its target, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s thesis in 2002’s The Emerging Democratic Majority saw swift vindication in the 2008 and 2012 Democratic victories and refutation in the left’s defeat of 2016. The core argument of The Emerging Democratic Majority was that structural demographic factors would lend the Democrats a natural advantage over the Republicans, because the former were the “coalition of the ascendant.” That last phrase became popular during the first Barack Obama term, and his 2008 and 2012 victories seemed to confirm Judis and Teixeira’s thesis. But Donald Trump’s 2016 win broke the model, and it is no longer clear that demographics are necessarily on the Democrats’ side. Teixeira, of the Substack The Liberal Patriot, has argued that a major issue has been a Democratic shift to cultural liberalism that has alienated the core working class support once assumed to be a floor or baseline for any future coalition.

Brink Lindsey’s The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture takes us back to the second half of the 20th century, and shows how the era’s economic and cultural dynamism drove political changes on both Left and Right. As a libertarian, Lindsey stands at some remove from partisan factions, and The Age of Abundance is refreshingly free of cheerleading for either the 1960’s liberal cultural revolution or the right-wing reaction that followed. Rather, the thesis seems to be that in an age when provision of basic human necessities is a given, the political rise and hegemony of post-materialist ideologies was inevitable. The “culture war” politics and polarization we take for granted today really found their incipient form in the 1960’s, as class-based coalitions retained less and less salience in a world of overwhelming prosperity. In some ways, 2024’s politics is the culmination of this trend, as Democrats assimilate more and more well-educated and affluent Republicans and Republicans rebrand themselves as a coalition championing a working-class constituency, previously a Democratic strength.

Finally, Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, places modern politics in its historical and geographical context. If political parties are coalitions of constituencies, then constituencies emerge out of local and regional identities and histories. Early 21st-century America is still the land of Albion’s Seed, but immigration and the rise of mass pop culture mean that the categories have proliferated from the original four. The results of any election will always reflect dynamics specific to some of Woodard’s given “nations.” For example, in 2020 “El Norte,” the Mexican-American-dominated counties on the US’s southern border, began to shift from a reliably Democrat blue territory to a more purple zone. The continued shift of college-educated suburban Southern whites toward Democrats counterbalanced this. There may not be an overall flip in any given year, but subtle underlying shifts within given factions determine the outcome of elections within an America now politically split down the middle, with little prospects for landslides.

Thought

Ancient East Eurasians and their genetic legacy. This massive review in Medium is worth reading in full, even if some of it is abstruse. The author has an excellent command of the scientific literature, and though translating it to prose that is broadly legible is difficult, the essay richly rewards multiple re-readings.

Advocates hope Harris will boost momentum on reparations to Black Americans. This Washington Post story is like a throwback to 2020, and underscores how far some institutions like the media and academia are now out of step with social, cultural and political realities. Racially targeted reparations are extremely unpopular outside of the black community, and Kamala Harris knows most voters are not black. The title is an attempt at wish-fulfillment and illustrates that parts of the media still aspire to drive the news rather than report it.

Waymo’s new robotaxi will feature fewer sensors to help lower costs. Just when Uber is finally turning a profit, a transformation might be right around the corner for the entire sector of urban transportation, as robot-taxis undercut human drivers. Waymo might be Google X’s first success, but if it is, it will be a massive one (and out-competing Uber may not even be its primary goal).

A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage. A few conspirators changed the whole course of geopolitics over the last few years.

AI Is Coming for India’s Famous Tech Hub. AI seems to prove most competitive with low-end service sectors in India and the Philippines.

The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Rednecks. No, AI can’t make movies, but it can easily create trailers. I for one would absolutely watch a redneck-reinterpretation of The Fellowship of the Ring.

Data

Reconstructing contact and a potential interbreeding geographical zone between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans and The Persian plateau served as hub for Homo sapiens after the main out of Africa dispersal. These two papers posit that Iran was a major secondary modern human ur-heimat or “hub.” Not only is the human-Neanderthal admixture likely to have occurred in the central Zagros, but several later expansions to western, northern, eastern and southern Eurasia might originate from this region.

Number of ancestors and length of identity-by-descent tracks over time and The ancestry of a genome or The amazing ubiquity of exponential distributions. These two preprints explore the theoretical and empirical distributions associated with the genealogies and genomes of individuals as you go back in time. Parameters like population history and mating patterns affect these distributions (here is a Slate piece I wrote more than a decade ago that scratches the surface, Which Grandparent Are You Most Related to?).

Genetic associations between non-cognitive skills and academic achievement over development. Heritable elements of your psychology beyond IQ, like self-control, matter more and more to academic performance as you age. Not surprising. 

Archaic introgression and the distribution of shared variation under stabilizing selection. Different human populations (Neanderthal vs. modern) have quantitative traits with different optima (e.g., different median heights or muscle mass). When admixture occurs across a large enough genetic distance, the variants associated with these traits in one population are selected against in the other population. This means when Neanderthals and modern humans mixed, the same regions of the genome in both populations, controlling the same traits, were subject to purifying selection that purged genetic variants from the other population. This is one of the ways that modern non-African humans ended up only ~2% Neanderthal even though the original admixture was higher.

My Two Cents

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

First, the second of my pieces on South Asian immigration to the US, Everywhere you want to be: Indian immigrants in America (part 2 of 2):

There’s little risk of overstating how radically different our early 21st century is from the turn of the 19th in attitudes to race and ethnicity. The years around 1900 marked the nadir of race relations between blacks and whites, a resurgent nativism that led to the revival of the Klu Klux Klan and international political chaos driven by a global diaspora of Leftist radicals that triggered the first Red Scare. Though it was never in doubt legally that Jews were white, America felt no great enthusiasm for huddled masses of wretched Ashkenazim fleeing Russian pogroms and Polish poverty wholesale, their numbers dwarfing the more modest earlier stream of mid-19-century German Jewish arrivals (a wave whose scattering across the continent even that early probably offered many more of their kids an immersion and integration into American life akin to my own). Instead, a whole Ashkenaz-in-America arose in the decades after the Ellis Island migration, and the suspicious and insular nature of white Christian America persisted long enough for this Jewish subculture to establish deep roots all across Northeastern urban America. Indian arrivals in America today are often entirely alien from the American mainstream in appearance, religion and language, but 2024 America has a flexibility and overpowering integrationist mandate, especially at its elite levels, that leaves little space for the long-term persistence of an “Indian America.”

Next, for a bit of a change-up, Got milk? Get -13910*T:

As for lactase persistence’s brief, bizarre co-option by white nationalists, any European milk chuggers who like to imagine milk’s supposed preference for their race will need to explain why in an American context it only looks kindly upon 80% of white Americans, loves African Americans next best (about 35% of African Americans would be expected to be lactase persistent based on genetic admixture), favors a subset of Indian immigrants from the northwest corner of the subcontinent at probably even higher rates than white Americans, and has absolutely no love for any East Asians, most South Asians or any Native Americans. Oh, but prefers some select Arab populations and pastoralists from the Horn of Africa at possibly the highest rates of all. If lactose tolerance is a referendum on racial superiority, someone should let the Masai know they are the natural masters of our species. If true, the American far right’s championing of milk was a bizarre dalliance. But its improbability doesn’t hold a candle to the true patchwork story of how selection pressures on our species have been decisively changing our biology to best adapt to the specific opportunities our environment offers. And that, like most genetic storylines, has unfolded completely without regard for petty human hangups about race or anything else.

Then back to a specific national genetic narrative, Korean identity: a story of genetic continuity 1,400 years in the making:

The demographic patterns inferred from genetics allow us to finally begin to establish a broader meta-narrative that encompasses northern Northeast Asia, with Korea in the center. The early history of Korea and Manchuria more than 2,000 years ago is known from the annals of the Chinese, which record Gojoseon and Jin in the north and south of the peninsula, along with other barbarians like the Xianbei, Wuhuan and the Buyeo and Yemaek. The ethnographic atlas is spotty and we are feeling our way through the retreating darkness, but the arrival of genetically Korean-like people to Japan in the first few centuries AD confirms the existence of a reservoir of Japonic-speakers in the southern Korean state of Jin. Centuries later, these Japonic Koreans evolved into the Kaya confederacy. Kaya’s fall to Silla ultimately spelled the cultural death knell of the Korea of many peoples. In its place arose an enduring Korea of Koreans.

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:

• Inez Stepman: Silicon Valley's post-human world

• Halie May: the democratization of genomics

• Rachel Haywire: the edge of the avant-garde

• Misha Saul: the Antipodean Anglosphere

(also, there are now seven episodes of my new current events podcast with Josiah Neeley)

ICYMI

Some of you follow me on my newsletter, blog, or Twitter. But my own domain also has all my links and updates: https://www.razib.com

There 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, etc.

• DM me

• Facebook message me

• My total feed of content

• My Indian/South Asian-focused blog, Brown Pundits

• Some of my past pieces for Palladium, UnHerd, National Review, The City Journal, Quillette, and The New York Times 

• My old podcast, The Insight

• This podcast, Unsupervised Learning

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 dig into next, put it here.