RKUL: Time Well Spent 11/11/2024

A Season to Give Thanks 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?

About 2,000 years ago the Chinese devised a series of collars, reins and carts that allowed them to harness horses without constricting their breathing, and therefore pull much heavier loads. Two immediate consequences promptly impacted Chinese society: a much greater total tonnage was carried overland in China compared to in the Roman Empire, and new agricultural techniques that relied exclusively on horsepower were broadly deployed.

Centuries later, around 1000 AD, these advances spread to Europe, triggering a massive population explosion. The horse-pulled mouldboard plough dug deep into Europe’s clay soils, and was much more efficient in turning the earth. Vast tracts of land were opened up to agriculture, and even more had to be cultivated in turn to produce the oats that fed the horses now replacing oxen as man’s primary helpmates in agricultural tasks. In England where 5% of plowing had been done by horses before 1000 AD, by 1200, it was over 50%. Though oxen are very strong, stronger than most horses, they tire more easily and have a shorter lifespan. Work-horses simply clock far more labor in a lifetime, thus the shop-worn phrase.

The horse’s central importance to our species is emphasized in two recent books, Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History and The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity. Sometimes two books so similar come out simultaneously that you wonder if you should just pick one (think: In Gods We Trust and Religion Explained, both of which came out in 2003). Here, although the subtitles point to similar theses, you have a case where the two are perhaps better together . This is in part because The Horse’s author is a historian while the author of Hoof Beats is an archaeologist, and this adequately distinguishes the thrust of the works to make them complementary.

Timothy Wineguard, author of The Horse, has written wide-ranging histories of World War I and mosquitos, while William T. Taylor, author of Hoof Beats, is an archaeologist whose day-to-day work involves the origins of the horse. While Taylor digs deep into and expounds fluently on the latest genomic and archaeology research, Wineguard’s narrative is much more focused on tangents and asides that relate the horse to broad arcs of history. While The Horse is an expansive 544-page narrative, Hoof Beats is a tighter and more focused 360-page distillation of scholarship and its relevance beyond the field of zooarchaeology. In this way the two books are very complementary; where there are overlaps, Hoof Beats cuts the deeper furrow, but I found worthwhile some broad swaths of economic and cultural horse-related history that only The Horse touches.

The Horse and Hoof Beats may convince you that horses are man’s most useful domesticate, but neither will argue that horses are man’s best friend. Domesticated only within the last four to five thousand years, the horse was to a great extent pre-adapted to domestication. This is not the case with dogs: all the evidence points to strong adaptations to coexist with humans dating back to the Pleistocene. The latest that dogs, descendants of an extinct branch of wolves, began to live with humans seems to be about 20,000 years ago, but the likelihood is that domestication occurred even earlier. While feral horses are substantially similar to their wild ancestors, feral dogs, like dingos, never turn back into wolves. Pat Shipman argues in The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals To Extinction that our two species can be thought of as collaborators, a package deal. Because of dogs’ descent from Eurasian wolves, this initially only applies to Eurasians, but in the last few centuries other people like the natives of the Andaman Islands seem to have frictionlessly begun using dogs in their hunts, underscoring how universally our canine companions seem fitted to our inclinations.

Though you can argue about whether the horse or dog is more important to humans in a functional and utilitarian sense, despite the cat-dog rivalry most people would admit that our feline companions exist less to work than just make us happy. Abigail Tucker’s The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World emphasizes the uniqueness in the relationship; unlike dogs, cats have not lived with us since the Ice Age, but are relative newcomers to human company. And, though cats likely served some role in pest control, and were tolerated accordingly, their existence in human settlements can probably mostly be chalked up to the reality that they are winsome. Tucker highlights that we can argue whether or not domestic cats are even domestic, a point I have argued myself. Their differences in characteristics from Middle Eastern and European wildcats are relatively minor compared to that between dogs and wolves. But even if their economic utility is negligible, cats engender a great deal of human passion and affection, regardless of where you come down in the debate over whether it’s really us they love, or just the food and shelter we provide.

Contemplating horses, dogs and even cats, perhaps the most interesting questions include the shaping influence they have exerted on human history. The Horse for example makes it clear that without equid domesticates the Silk Road might never have mattered to human history; lumbering oxen simply don’t offer the full package to speedily tie Eurasia together along the trade routes. Rondo Cameron’s  A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present is excellent because it puts all the disparate details into perspective, and shows how the domestication of the horse supercharged the world economy, especially trade, and how dogs aided Paleolithic humans in the Arctic. Cameron’s narrative is light on diplomacy and wars, and heavy instead on agriculture and climate, the endogenous and exogenous shocks that determined the course of human civilization. Until the last few decades, working horses and working dogs were essential cogs in the human economy, and A Concise Economic History of the World does not neglect this key reality, as it delivers a broader perspective.

Thought

The educated professional class is out of touch with America. Politicians, journalists and pundits are almost all college-educated, but the public is only minority college-educated. Noah Smith highlights the reality that college-educated elites simply pretend the majority of the population does not exist, and in a democratic system such a delusion will come at the cost of political power.

The Plot to Manage Democracy: Elites are building a system to control and constrain Americans’ self-expression and political freedom. Jacob Siegel makes the case that elites are swapping out democratic accountability for technocracy.

Reinventing Concrete, the Ancient Roman Way. Incredible that in some ways ancient concrete was more robust than the modern stuff.

What Went So Wrong With Boeing? They were swapping out aerospace engineering for financial engineering.

Young Doctors Want Work-Life Balance. Older Doctors Say That’s Not the Job. We need more AI-technology to supplement doctors, and looser regulations on what tasks non-doctors can perform within the scope of providing medical care.

A tale of two machines - Democrats need to stop shrinking the tent. Iron law of institutions, the way you earn status within the group (purity spiral) is not the way the group accrues status; if anything it undermines the group’s overall effectiveness. The Democratic coalition is groaning under the weight of its countless hall-monitor types.

Wagon Driving Warriors of the Bronze Age Steppe: The Catacomb Culture. Very illuminating video about a successor to the Yamnaya culture. If you want to learn about the ancestors of the ancient Greeks, this is a place to start.

Data

A history of multiple Denisovan introgression events in modern humans. Excellent review of when and where the various admixture events occurred.

The metabolic costs of meiotic drive. Meiotic drive is the “selfish gene” on steroids, but these results imply that the phenomenon’s metabolic cost is what prevents it from driving even more genomic evolution.

Multivariate Trait Evolution: Models for the Evolution of the Quantitative Genetic G-Matrix on Phylogenies. We don’t have good models for the evolution of complex traits yet, but this is a good step. It gives us intuitions about how complex traits might evolve in the real world, as opposed to leaving us to speculate after the fact.

Extinction vortices are driven more by a shortage of beneficial mutations than by deleterious mutation accumulation. The current models emphasize accumulation of bad mutations driving reduced fitness, so this is an interesting and counterintuitive result. Doesn’t mean it’s true, but it can’t hurt to consider that we might still have things wrong.

Genomic analysis of intracranial and subcortical brain volumes yields polygenic scores accounting for variation across ancestries. Basically, genes control your brain size. We kind of already knew this, but it will be interesting to see which genes do, and don’t correlate overall with IQ prediction models.

Deep coalescent history of the hominin lineage. This is using very powerful genomic methods to explore evolution as far back as 5-7 million years ago, when we share ancestors with chimpanzees.

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 two deep dives.

A language family of one, a land beyond conquest:

To a great extent, the antiquarians who saw in the Basque a window onto bygone ages were correct. But rather than Pleistocene Europe, the Basques are actually untouched descendents from a time before both Rome’s and Islam’s rise. Ironically, because of gene flow from the Eastern Mediterranean during the Roman era, and North Africa during the Islamic period, the Basques’ Indo-European-speaking southern and eastern neighbors today carry less steppe ancestry from the waves of Indo-European colonists and conquerors than the Basques do. The Basque people’s high fraction of steppe ancestry, and the dominance of steppe-origin Y chromosomes, tell us that the Basques were not frozen in chrysalis during the Bronze Age, but dynamically engaged with their Indo-European neighbors. And yet unlike their neighbors, the Celtiberians to their west and south, the Basque retained their culture despite the genetic influx. That their linguistic relatives on the other side of the Pyrenees, in the province of Aquitania, also stubbornly retained their linguistic distinctness down to antiquity suggests a cultural commonality between these two groups that enabled their exceptional resilience. Perhaps they owe this to the matrilineality Strabo singled out? In those systems, young men were mentored by their maternal uncles, so that successive generations of R1b sons of fathers who still spoke Indo-European languages and worshiped Indo-European gods ‌would have instead been inculcated by male paternal figures fluent in and wholly loyal to their mother’s culture.

Africa’s exception to every rule: Ethiopian genetics, sovereignty and religion:

Ethiopia’s independence was a major turning point in history, because it preserved a fragment of the Late Antique world that had been shattered by the emergence of the Arab Muslims in the 7th century, and would have been entirely swallowed by them were it not for Ethiopian resistance. Ethiopia, like Armenia to the far north, or the embattled Coptic Christian minority in Egypt, survived as a remnant of a vast eastern Christian realm ascendent 1500 years ago, everywhere from Somalia in the south to the Caucasus in the north and Iraq to the east. Historian of religion Philip Jenkins calculates in The Lost History of Christianity that until at least 1000 AD, the majority of the world’s Christians lived within this region. Only as the millennium turned did Islam go from a religion of the ruling elite to one of the demographic majority. In the 6th century AD, much of this world north of Ethiopia was under East Roman, later to be called Byzantine rule. Here, the Christian Emperors in Constantinople decided theological disputes between their diverse subjects. Christians in Egypt, Syria and Armenia believed that Jesus Christ had one nature, and so orthodox Byzantine Christians dubbed them Monophysites (though today this faction prefers the term Miaphysite); this is, in contradiction of the orthodox position promoted by the Empire that Christ had two natures, as reiterated by the Second Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, and endorsed by modern Roman Catholics, Protestants and Eastern Orthodox Christians. Such seemingly pedantic theological disagreements may have had real-world sequelae; many historians have argued that the conflict between pro-imperial Chalcedonian Christians and anti-imperial Miaphysite Christians across the Near East was an essential precondition for the relatively quick and bloodless 7th-century conquest of Arab Muslims of the Levant and Egypt; the Miaphysites preferred rule by non-Christians to that by their theological enemies, at least initially.

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:

• The Horse: Man's Most Useful Companion

• Crémieux Recueil: US election 2024 analysis

• Wilfred Reilly: confronting historical myths propagated in schools

• Leighton Woodhouse: chaos and corruption in urban America

• Lyman Stone: a demographer against the birth dearth

(also, there are now seven episodes of my 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 (total content aggregation blog too), 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 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 Palladium Magazine, The New York Times, City Journal, National Review, Slate, Unherd, Quillette and Nautilus.

• 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.