RKUL: Time Well Spent 10/10/2024

Halloween 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?

Richard Dawkins is currently touring the US promoting his latest book, The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie. Dawkins, 83, has made clear this will be his last professional tour. It will also mark the end of an era of science communication, particularly in the domain of evolutionary biology. With the loss of E. O. Wilson’s in 2021, and Stephen Jay Gould’s early passing in 2002, Dawkins and Steve Pinker are the last representatives of a generation of scientific thinkers who were also estimable prose stylists; there are no natural heirs apparent. And Dawkins will likely be remembered as the greatest of them all, consistently delivering both elegance and economy of prose while delving into some of the most substantive debates in evolutionary biology.

It seems likely that Dawkins’ most influential book will remain his first major work, The Selfish Gene. Published in 1976, The Selfish Gene extends and elaborates upon ideas in George Williams’ Adaptation and Natural Selection, as well as popularizing the theories of John Maynard Smith, W. D. Hamiton and Robert Trivers. Unfortunately, part of the reason for the popularity of The Selfish Gene was the title: the connotation that it had something to do with selfishness and its genetic basis. Really though, the selfish gene is another way to describe what Dawkins terms “replicators,” the segments of genetic material that propagate as a unit of inheritance from generation to generation. The reason this book proved such a seminal contribution in the field is that it concisely and substantively articulates to the lay public an approach to thinking about evolution from the point of view of genes, rather than individuals, groups or species. Dawkins also introduces the idea of inclusive fitness and explores game theory’s applications to evolutionary biology. Finally, The Selfish Gene is where Dawkins debuted the concept of a “meme,” culture’s equivalent of a gene. Though memes ultimately did not prove quite as powerful an analytical concept in the scientific literature as its analog the gene (the field of “memetics” remains stillborn), the idea’s applicability and cultural currency still made it a commonplace term in the broader culture of the internet age.

In 1982, Dawkins gave  the ideas in The Selfish Gene further elaboration in The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. Dawkins often notes that The Extended Phenotype is his favorite of his books, perhaps because here he explores and deepens his own ideas from  the The Selfish Gene . The Extended Phenotype’s basic thesis is that a gene's influence extends into the environment, affecting other organisms and surroundings, and ultimately the gene's own fitness. Dawkins argues that natural selection acts on all the effects a gene has, whether those effects are inside the organism's body, or externally in the environment within which the organism exists. The genes, the genotype, translate into the phenotype, the organism’s observable characteristics, but they also impact the extended phenotype, the observable impacts of the organism upon their local environment. The extended phenotype of the beaver is her dam and her local pond, while the extended phenotype of the human may be the local ecosystem. Through this work Dawkins rejects group selectionist models, taking care to emphasize that despite a more holistic narrative, the ultimate unit of natural selection remains the gene.

While The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype were trenchant popularizations of evolutionary ideas, staking out positions in within-field debates, Dawkins’ third book, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design, begins to wade into cultural controversies. Dawkins contends in The Blind Watchmaker that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Published in 1986 at the height of America’s Reagan era, and with the end of the Cold War not yet in sight, a book that allowed for intellectually fulfilled atheists courted more controversy than one that one that strenuously made the case for selection at the level of the gene rather than the organism. The key thesis of The Blind Watchmaker is that natural selection exhibits all the hallmarks of purpose and design, despite being entirely undirected, showing no signs of intelligent guidance. Evolution produced the appearance of design without a designer. Because of Dawkins’ arguments relevance to the then roiling Creationism debate, The Blind Watchmaker is perhaps the most influential of his books among those who did not go on to become biologists later in life. If ever there was a book to pop the epistemological bubble of impressionable young evangelical Protestant Creationists and shake their belief system, this was probably it. .

Much of Dawkins’ early work involved fleshing out an abstract concept, like the selfish gene, that offered an analytical payoff in understanding the process of evolution. In 2004’s The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution he shifted to a narrative description of evolution through the lens of natural history. The Ancestor's Tale is less zeroed in on a particular concept than Dawkins’ earlier works, because it is less an argument in search of a defender, and more a matter of pleasure to be derived from surveying the grandeur of how evolution uniquely unfurled in each epoch. It is also notable that The Ancestor's Tale came out several years after Gould’s death. Without Dawkins’ rival as an evolutionary communicator whose forte had been natural history, it was almost as if he pivoted his focus so as to also occupy a newly empty ecological niche.

By the 21st century, Dawkins had long since shifted away from publishing original scientific research, having settled into his role as pre-eminent popularizer and commentator; in 1995 he became the endowed Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. There his editorializing on social and political matters began to earn comparable prominence to his scientific arguments. This was on full display in his 2006 bestseller, The God Delusion. Though this book explored the evolutionary, psychological and sociological roots of religion as a phenomenon, it was also a full-throated polemic against theism, and Christianity in particular. If The Selfish Gene inspired new scientists, and The Blind Watchmaker disabused young Creationists, The God Delusion became the “Little Red Book” of New Atheism. Arguably, Dawkins has lived long enough to see his atheistic worldview move from being unpatriotic in the 1980’s, to edgy in 2006, and now passé in 2024. On the cutting edge of the culture wars when The God Delusion was published, Dawkins has balked at embracing the nostrums of the new woke dispensation like gender ideology. Perhaps no surprise then that he has pivoted back to science with The Genetic Book of the Dead.

Thought

So, Are You Pregnant Yet? China’s In-Your-Face Push for More Babies. The same interfering government functionaries who were pressuring women to abort second pregnancies in the eighth month two decades ago are now hectoring them to have more children. From an American perspective this sounds patently obnoxious, but I also suspect it will be futile.

Conservatives Are Lying on Immigrant Crime. At minimum, I think Republicans are exaggerating how big an issue crime is in relation to the broader question of migration (though instances of gangs from Latin America taking over towns are well known). The reality is that people want border controls, and the Biden-Harris administration abdicated any responsibility for that in the first two years of the administration. The people did not vote for “open borders,” but until last year, that's what they got. All the specific gripes about crime, housing and assimilation are secondary to the reality that the electorate wants to feel that they have control over our borders. 

Google’s Grip on Search Slips as TikTok and AI Startup Mount Challenge. The main problem is that Google search is no longer good. Those of us who quickly and enthusiastically adopted Google in the fall of 1998 remember what a revelation it was, so it’s disappointing to see this decline over the 21st century, where it now returns ever more irrelevant and biased results.

How Canada Became an Indian SLAVE STATE. The title is more alarmist than the video, which is a pretty objective take on what’s happening in Canada. Basically, diploma mills are working an angle on Canadian immigration law, taking advantage of Canadians and Indian immigrants.

How Intel Fell From Global Chip Champion to Takeover Target. The late Andy Grove, under whom Intel became the largest chip-maker in the world, famously said that “only the paranoid survive.” I guess over the past decade, Intel undershot optimal paranoia.

The Protestant Reformation was a really big deal - Like reading and science? Thank Martin Luther and John Calvin. The long-term consequences of modest cultural changes remain underrated.

Data

A previously reported bottleneck in human ancestry 900 kya is likely a statistical artifact. The paper now in question was published in Science, but many in the field were skeptical almost immediately. Peer review doesn’t always work as promised, with cooler heads prevailing and saving what specialists would immediately flag as likely erroneous results from being credulously disseminated.

Complex genetic variation in nearly complete human genomes. Usually you hear about single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNP’s, which are single base pair changes to an A, C, G or T. But another major genre of genetic variation is structural changes, deletions, insertion and copies. Higher quality genomes are finally allowing for an appropriate cataloging of structural variants.

Wide-scale Geographical Analysis of Genetic Ancestry in the South African Coloured Population. This population has ancestry from Khoisan, Bantu, Northern Europeans, South Asians and Southeast Asians. Much of human population history has been defined by admixtures, but with the Cape Coloureds you see how admixture plays out over a few centuries.

Genetic Signatures of Positive Selection in Human Populations Adapted to High Altitude in Papua New Guinea. Everywhere humans settled at high altitudes they seem to have adapted in some way.

The genetic history of Portugal over the past 5,000 years. No surprise that Magdalenian populations persisted longest on the westernmost edge of Europe.

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 brought three deep dives.

First, France: Europe’s crème de la crème:

France’s centrality to European history is an accident of its location, facing the Atlantic and blessed with good fortune denominated in the abundance of its harvests. The land’s plentitude has made it a perennial human-population magnet, from the first modern bands who arrived more than 50,000 years ago fleeing the Eurasian heartland’s ice and chill, through the Romans, Visigoths and Franks, right down to today’s migrant groups from Francophone Africa. The France that Hugh Capet inherited, a nation that received the mantle of Imperial Rome in Charlemagne’s age, had an ambition and arrogance that would not be curbed until Napoleon’s time. It was just the last iteration of a nation whose peoples have waxed in power, prodigy and audacity: the Gauls of Vercingetorix, whose wealth drew Roman greed and challenged Roman might, the nameless Neolithic megalith builders whose mighty works still stud the Breton headlands and spangle shores all the way north to Scandinavia and south to Malta, and even earlier, during the long Ice-Age epoch when an explosion of Paleolithic creativity bore witness to the rise of the modern mind in addition to modern human lineaments.

Second, La France: blessed eldest daughter of a blessed continent:

France’s later stewardship of Europe was preordained. Always a wealthier part of Europe, from the Pleistocene to the present, ancient Gaul anchored the Western Roman Empire, and medieval Gaul became the most powerful and significant state in the post-Roman world. Simultaneously in the northern orbit with a wary eye on Britain, and in the southern, with a Mediterranean aspect, all successor states to Gaul would find themselves bridges and byways to trade and migration, the center of the great civilizational revival in the void left by Rome's collapse. Not only was France natively blessed with rich soil and a moderate climate, its location simultaneously facing the Atlantic and as a path to Eurasia’s heart put it at an eternal advantage. Modernity saw it both dispatching fleets out into the Atlantic to establish colonies abroad and hurling vast armies deep into the heart of Russia to establish its imperium. The French reputation for arrogance and conceit is perhaps simply a natural confidence born of the reality that the French have been inordinately blessed, and rather than requiring laborious gleaning, the blessed fruits of history have had a way of falling directly into their laps.

Finally, All together now: did human joiners outcompete rugged Neanderthal individualists?:

Once this dynamic was in place, winner-take-all dynamics would define all of human history. Biological adaptation often occurs gradually via genetic evolution, but cultural mutations come at you fast and they drive incredibly rapid shifts in norms, customs and skills. We don’t know the specifics of that fateful shift, but 38,000 years ago, the second wave of modern humans in Europe replaced the first, and it was almost certainly because of another winner-take-all cultural shift. The demographic replacement is just too clear and quick. Something similar occurred in Eastern Europe 5,000 years ago, as the Yamnaya and their cousins replaced the last Neolithic Europeans. We know what happened in this case, a combination of disease among the Neolithic people and the Yamnaya embrace of nomadism that allowed them to expand at a trot; indeed the newcomers from the steppe fatefully took over new territories in a few generations. 

This had nothing to do with any genetic or cognitive change, but as cultural evolution theorists point out, it is not trivial to adopt one culture’s toolkit in toto, so a major advantage can persist for generations. In the late 19th century, Japan was singular in that it pulled off modernization with an alacrity that left China in this dust; Chinese society was riven by conflicts between traditionalists and modernists and collapsed as a unitary polity. More than a century later, China began to transform and Westernize, but it remains generations behind the West while on many metrics Japan runs ahead. Convergence can occur between two cultures, and we see evidence of late Neanderthals borrowing from and adapting to their modern human neighbors, changing their tool sets through imitation and trade, but ultimately ‌they lacked the innate cultural flexibility to compete against the multiplicative power of our lineage's compulsive sociality and  cooperation.

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

• Peachy Keenan: cosmopolitan radical traditionalist

• Jesse Singal: after the replication crisis and into the youth gender medicine debate

• Sam Hammond: I for one welcome our A.I. overlords

• 14,000 years of natural selection

• Europe: 40000 BC to 1200 BC

(also, there are now eleven episodes of my current events podcast with Josiah Neeley, including the latest where we discuss Amy Wax)

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.

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• My other podcast, the Khanversation

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.