RKUL: Time Well Spent, 10/10/2025

Autumn chill edition

Cerberus, 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?

In the USA, the month of October culminates in Halloween, a binge of packaged candy and costumed children trudging along sidewalks that rarely see that much foot traffic in a month. In the past, Halloween celebrated life’s macabre dimension, and children were widely welcomed to dress up as the monsters and demons that might otherwise haunt their nightmares. Indeed the holiday’s cultural origins run far deeper than its current sanitized incarnation; it was on this day that people believed the barriers between the spirit and material worlds were at their annual low. Even though American Halloween’s proximate origins lie in the pagan Celtic festival of Samhain or the Christian All Hallows’ Eve, the holiday’s genesis is more primal. In Mexico, Samhain’s equivalent is Día de Muertos, the multi-day ritual that drove the plot of the 2017 film Coco. And such celebrations are not exclusive to ‌the broader historical lineage of the West. Think of China’s Hungry Ghost Festival, when the spirits rise from the lower realm. Almost all human societies share a widespread belief that at times and places the spirit world draws closer to our own material reality.

In Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, UC Davis anthropology professor Manvir Singh takes the commonalities across these cultural traditions as evidence of deep cognitive instincts fashioned by our evolutionary history. These intuitions, which reliably form the foundation of culture and folkways, reflect a preexistent universal shamanic mind. Singh argues that shamanism is present in all societies, even if we conventionally differentiate it from the “higher religions,” especially Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In fact, SIngh argues that this earlier religious sensibility suffuses the monotheistic faiths as well.

Shamans are classically associated with small tribal societies scattered across Siberia, with their origins going back to the Pleistocene. So what does an Ice-Age soothsayer have to do with the God of Abraham? Perhaps more than you think. The Hebrew Bible is not just a religious text; it is also an ethnographic record of a tribal people. In the first centuries after their arrival in the Holy Land, the Bible records that the Israelites were led and advised by prophets and judges whose powers went beyond pure persuasion. First, in the Book of Samuel, the obscure witch of Endor calls back the spirit of the prophet Samuel to the world of the living to advise Saul, first king of the Israelites. Angered at being called back to the world of the living, the spirit prophesies doom upon Saul and his army. Later, in the Book of Kings, the prophet Elijah’s prayers bring a dead boy back to life, the first instance of bodily resurrection in the Bible. And of course, in the Gospels of the New Testament, Jesus’ miracles testify to powers that in other contexts would be those of a magician, with his greatest wizardry being his own resurrection from death.

So perhaps the matrix of cognitive intuitions that seem to come preloaded in humans makes the widespread emergence of holidays like Halloween inevitable. The world of magic will at some point intersect with the world of matter. But this was not necessarily something to be welcomed, even if pre-modern people felt that it was inevitable. One original aspect of Halloween obscured by its modern consumerist incarnation is a sense of foreboding, fear, and the ever-present potential of horror. Coltan Scrivner’s Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away examines horror the way Singh inspected religion: why do we seek scenarios where our sense of fear is triggered, and why do some even actively enjoy it? Rather than cultural anthropology or ethnography, Scrivener’s explanation rests upon a foundation of evolutionary biology. In the ancient evolutionary environment, humans were both predator and prey, so phenomena that would otherwise horrify us in our prey guise retain a certain fascination. The fearless live a carefree, but short life, given their inattention to the dangers of their environment. Horror, a deep awareness of danger’s ubiquity, would have kept us alert in an Ice-Age world of real-life monsters, from cave bears to menacing mammoths. A relict fascination with horror is a key part of our psychology because our hunter-gatherer ancestors truly lived in a universe of endless dangers and threats far beyond their powers to control or tame.

But ultimately, folkways must build, extend and elaborate on our most innate intuitions about the nature of the universe and psychological reflexes rooted in emotions like fear. The diversity of human cultures attests to our creativity, taking base instincts and overlaying them with stories, traditions and rites. The persistence of beliefs and traditions which served as Halloween’s basis attests that despite the religious homogeneity Christianity’s spread implies, Europe long retained many of its primitive folk beliefs; they persisted as superstitions long after the old religions’ official suppression. Calvinist scholar Aton Wessels in Europe Was It Ever Really Christian? argues that the dismissal of peasant folk superstitions as beneath consideration papers over the reality of de facto paganism among the continent’s peasantry until the Reformation, and perhaps later. Wessels makes the case that the rural population was poorly catechized, theologically ignorant, and regularly practiced clearly pagan rituals like praying to the moon at sacred sites well into early modernity. Wessels, a convinced Protestant, implies that this owed to the Roman Catholic Church’s inattention to proper indoctrination, with Christianization only pushing past the surface level once Protestant traditions like universal Bible study took root.

Jumping a few centuries beyond the end of Wessels’ narrative, in the late 19th century, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology documents the attempts of modern political movements to leverage Europe’s folk beliefs toward political and social ends. The Occult Roots of Nazism is a deep exploration of intellectual genealogy and the influence of Ariosophy, the “wisdom of the Aryans.” This proto-Nazi occultism integrated bits of European folklore with the new anthropological and historical sciences and strains of spiritualist movements stimulated by ‌ideas from India. Goodrick-Clarke’s monograph exposes the fundamentally creative aspects of the reconstructionist neo-pagan enterprise. After Lithuania’s conversion in the 14th century, formal paganism with its priestly class disappeared from Europe, leaving nationalist thinkers to invent sacred rites and formulate new traditions, albeit building upon folk beliefs that survived Christianization. This supports Wessels’ thesis that a substrate of pagan belief and practice really remained submerged beneath Europe’s Christian superstructure. Even if the SS rituals were ‌what we might dismiss as “live-action role playing,” with their neo-pagan events bearing little resemblance to the traditions of Germany’s pre-Christian tribes, the underlying intuitions about an immanent divine, and the necessity of balancing light and dark forces, harken back to Singh’s arguments in Shamanism, that any new religion must rest upon the foundation of our primal faith. Hitler’s followers were inventing a new form of Germanic shamanism.

Finally, Heather Pringle in Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust explores the synthesis of the occult, archaeology and racial ideology during the apogee of Hitler’s Third Reich. Though the Nazi leadership was not traditionally religious in the sense of being devout Christians, many were extremely superstitious. Adolf Hitler himself made recourse to astrologers, but as head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler was a deeply convinced believer in Ariosophy and the power of magic and the supernatural. Pringle reviews the textual evidence that the Reich’s archaeological program was explicitly driven by the search for magical technologies which might rival the “wonder weapons” that their scientists were producing. She relates these quixotic endeavors to Himmler and his inner circle’s bizarre beliefs about the European race’s past, and illustrates how credulous and naive they were in underwriting the quest for Finnish wizards or prehistoric Aryan talismans. Master Plan makes it clear that Himmler and the Nazi leadership were motivated by both horror and fear, in particular of both Jews and their putative Communist confederates. Their irrational and unwarranted fear was so powerful they felt no compunction in undertaking the horrors of the Holocaust and the extermination of “enemy races.” The Nazi project was in a sense the stripping away of modernity and the scientific outlook, to leave little more than the most primitive mind’s raw fears, emotions and reactions. Albeit, hitched to the full destructive might of a modern nation-state’s industrial capacity and war machine

Thought

Bigger is often better: Competition is good, smallness isn’t. Economies of scale matter in the modern world; “mom and pop” airlines wouldn’t really work. A few large firms competing is often the optimum. When those firms have structural impediments to innovation, like Google sitting on their AI-technology for years, start-ups emerge to challenge them.

The Superintendent’s Bio Seemed Too Good to Be True. It Was. An illegal immigrant with a frankly fake doctorate (his dissertation literally revolved around administering a nine-question survey to fifteen respondents at a single school) becomes superintendent of Des Moines school district. Even though delving deeper makes clear that DEI significantly influenced his hiring, the evidence also suggests that he was, in reality, a reasonably active and capable educator. He didn’t need a fake doctorate for anything but signaling.

Who Is Nick Land? He has been the most important name in Silicon Valley you’ve never heard of. But now the influential ‘father of accelerationism’ is finally in the spotlight. A beautifully written profile of a very obscure yet influential figure, the philosopher Nick Land. Land regularly linked from his old website, Xenosystems, to my long-time weblog Gene Expression, so our intellectual journeys in the 21st century have intersected periodically. His exposition of a system of belief that is both technophilic but anti-liberal has strongly shaped the thinking of many figures in the right-wing tech scene.

How the boomers crippled France. As far as we know, France is the first nation to hit the demographic transition; I do wonder if France will be the first European nation that engages in serious structural reforms to its welfare state. According to current reports, the median French pensioner has a slightly higher income than the median French worker.

Why Republican Normies Will Bend the Knee to Groypers: The “I just want to grill” crowd will not save conservatism. Richard Hanania thinks that the future belongs to the energetic radical youth. I am not so sure, but it seems more likely than it did a few years ago, with Candace Owens still being a major figure despite her shift toward traditionally anti-Semitic positions.

So Long to Tech’s Dream Job: It’s the shut up and grind era, tech workers said, as Apple, Google, Meta and other giants age into large bureaucracies. Don’t feel sorry for people who can get paid $250,000 per year while barely doing any work, and much more if they actually produce. The boom times of the late 2010s were underwritten by financial conditions, with very low interest rates allowing tech companies to flood the market with cash. With massive financial resources, they heedlessly loaded up on employees by the truckload. What we are seeing today is simply a correction for those excesses.

Data

Identifying the Levant as a potential contact and interbreeding zone for Neanderthals and modern humans. The authors used paleoclimate modeling to fix on the geographical region we’ve conventionally estimated via genomics alone.. Since “Basal Eurasians” didn’t have Neanderthal admixture that means they were likely in Arabia to the south, or, I suspect more likely, in northeast Africa.

Beyond years of schooling: Shifting genetic influences across educational milestones in two Norwegian cohorts. The extreme cases show less heritability. Why? Well, once you have an undergrad degree, getting further education tends to be very discretionary and conditional on what your values are, not your abilities.

Comprehensive gene heritability estimation reveals the genetic architecture of rare coding variants underlying complex traits. Rare variants probably explain some of the “missing heritability” in genomic studies. That means big sample sizes and whole genome sequencing will resolve many mysteries.

Largest-Scale Genomic Resource Reconstructing the Genetic Origin, Population Structure, and Biological Adaptations of the Hui People. Looks like Chinese Muslims have diverse origins. Northern Hui are part Central Asia, while southern Hui are entirely East Asian. So Islam arrived via the Silk Road, but also through maritime trade. Finally, the skin-lightening variant for SLC24A5 is selected for in Hui even after admixture with Han. This leaves the motive for selection mysterious and rules out skin color, since northern Han are the same complexion as the Hui.

Ancient DNA connects large-scale migration with the spread of Slavs. The Slavic migration into the Balkans is historically attested, but these data imply that they’re newcomers in much of Central Europe as well, with origins in modern western Russia.

Hominins on Sulawesi during the Early Pleistocene. Early humans clearly were very enterprising when it came to maritime voyages. Southeast Asia seems to have received many of these early human groups, who get to islands and become isolated, some arriving over 1 million years ago.

My Two Cents

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

A recent series was this two-part examination of the Austronesian diaspora:

Part 1, Fortune favors the fearless: millennia of Austronesian maritime feats:

The attested voyages between Polynesia, maritime Southeast Asia and Madagascar that created a human cultural diaspora are all undeniably epic long hauls. But they are likely just the tip of the iceberg. At some point, it seems probable that Austronesians explored the entire Indian and Pacific ocean basins, save for the most prohibitively frigid zones. Outside of Southeast Asia, whenever there were already entrenched human populations, like the Aboriginals in Australia and Amerindians in South America, the newcomers did not tend to settle or establish cultural outposts. But when they encountered virgin land, as in Hawaii, New Zealand and Madagascar, they flourished, established new cultures, always innovating furiously to adapt to novel local conditions.

Part 2, From Formosa to the Four Corners of the Earth: the Austronesian expansion’s long arc:

Genetics, archaeology and linguistics all roughly converge on the reality that some 4,000 years ago, during the late Neolithic, a group of rice farmers out of Taiwan crossed over into the Philippines, and from there fatefully radiated out along numerous long-distance trajectories, waves of humanity rippling across sea lanes between 3,500 and 3,000 years ago, westward into Southeast Asia, and east all across Oceania, with pushes still as late as 700 years ago to New Zealand and Hawaii. Their furthest outriders both reached the New World, and settled Madagascar, exotic outposts at the antipodes of the world from one another.

And we follow a recent ancient DNA find back to a favorite people, with A Nile shadow 4,500 years long:

Ancient DNA allows us to examine exactly how continuous a people are with their forebears, but the way ancient Egyptians preserved their elites’ remains with chemical processes has left paleogenetics a relative dearth of material. Ironically, the very mummification that brings us so eerily close to the human faces of antiquity, guarantees their DNA’s destruction. Nevertheless, a 2017 paper reported genome-wide data on three ancient Egyptians, with the authors finding substantial continuity between ancient and modern Egyptians. After their conquest by Arab tribes Egyptians were subsequently Islamicized and Arabicized, but their genetic origins remained predominantly among the native peasantry. However, a major lacuna in this work is that the oldest whole genomes (as opposed to just mtDNA) date to the 8th century BC, after the New Kingdom’s fall, at the very end of dynastic Egypt proper. Though this was still the Egypt of the pharaohs, these last centuries of native rule marked a great civilization’s twilight, and outside influences, from Libya in the west, Nubia to the south, as well as the Levant and Iran, loomed large.

And, finally, whichever side of paywall you’re on, I welcome you to read my recent How the West was wrought:

When intellectual historians trace the lineage of Western civilization to the Greeks, they mean the Greeks of 5th and 4th-century BC Athens, a cosmopolitan city that drew intellectuals and entrepreneurs from the entire Greek-speaking world of that day. They do not mean the Greeks of 1200 BC, who constructed vast fortified citadels, raided their neighbors across the Near East and employed literacy primarily as an accounting tool. Something special occurred with the Iron-Age Greeks that connected them to a tradition destined to endure another 2,500 years and counting; they were different, but not entirely alien. You have only to read the Athenian historian Thucydides recalling the conflict between Melos and Athens, where the latter issue the former an ultimatum that includes the phrase “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” to appreciate that while this people may lack a modern sense of justice, they were fully in possession of a modern sense of tragedy. The critical-rationalist perspective, an analytic frame of mind tinged with skepticism but confident in reason’s ability to see to the heart of things, is at the core of the West’s modern self-conception, the germ that would blossom into the Enlightenment. This may not reflect the preponderance of who the Classical Greeks were, but it is nevertheless the fertile seed of what would come to define the West’s unique self-conception millennia later..

Unsupervised Learning Journal Club

A 2025 feature for paying subscribers, 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.

Most recently, Re-writing the human family tree one skull at a time.

Lucy, Turkana Boy, Java Man and Ardi. These are just a few of the seminal fossils widely known by name for their role in shaping and re-shaping our understanding of human evolution over the last century. They have been instrumental in how scholars construct the human family tree, predating DNA evidence by decades. Fossils, the mineralized remains of bones and teeth, offer a concrete solidity DNA data cannot. Simply beholding a single Neanderthal skull brings home how profoundly different they were from us given their robustness and unique morphology. It was fossil evidence from Africa, in the first half of the 20th century, that finally convinced physical anthropologists Homo’s origin was on that continent, rather than Eurasia (on this, Charles Darwin was correct, though his argument had been based more on biogeography, as our nearest relatives live in Africa).

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

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:

• Nate Soares: we are doomed (probably)

• Alexander Cortes: broscience, health science and fertility

• Kat Rosenfield: after the vibe shift

• Eric Kaufmann: a cultural revolution in winter

• Ryan P. Williams: the Claremont Institute standing athwart history

• Chad Orzel: the state of physics and academia in 2025

• Jonathan Anomaly and James Lee: is eugenics in our future?

• Jason Richwine: immigration moratorium now

• Alex Nowrasteh: an immigration libertarian in Trump’s America

• John Hawks: varieties of humankind all mixed up

• Noah Millman: from finance to the culture industry

• Cesar Fortes-Lima: the Fulani out of the Green Sahara

• Jack Despain Zhou: in defense of tracking

ICYMI

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Over to you

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