RKUL: Time Well Spent 1/1/2025

2025 Early Bird sale and New Year's Day Edition

2025 Early Bird sale

Lock in a lifetime low annual rate on Unsupervised Learning. Through 11:59pm, January 2 (CST), $50/year. January 3: $55/year. January 4: $60/year. Regular price is $79/year. This is one of only two annual discounts I offer. Thank you for supporting in-depth science writing!

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?

Some books are so wholly cut against the grain, so completely undermine prevailing wisdom, that their thesis, if accepted, cannot but be transformative. Their authors are commonly dismissed as heretics or crackpots by their contemporaries. Of course, such labels are no guarantee anything they’re proposing will actually be vindicated; but the simple act of thoughtful provocation, challenging a stagnant status quo, can sometimes spark creativity in an intellectual class grown too repressed by its age’s orthodoxies. In the pre-modern world, publishing a radical book was dangerous. Copernicus’ was reluctant to disseminate his work until persuaded by students to publish On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres just before, as it turned out, his untimely death, while Spinoza chose not to ever claim authorship of his major work of religious criticism, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

The stakes for heresy are not as high today (although you might not guess that from tenured academics’ self-avowed terror at publicly doubting the current thing), but Charles Murray has faced decades of opprobrium since co-authoring The Bell Curve with Richard Hernstein. For 30 years, Ibn Warraq has written under a pen name due to the risk of threats on his life, for authoring works like Why I am not a Muslim. And most notoriously, Salman Rushdie has not only had to live with decades of heightened security after publishing The Satanic Verses, a Japanese translator of the work was actually murdered, while Rushdie himself narrowly escaped a public assassination attempt in 2022.

Nothing so horrendous happened to Judith Rich Harris after she published The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do in 1998, but perhaps personal health circumstances that had left her outside the mainstream of her field emboldened her to freely explore a growing suspicion that parents had far less influence on the outcomes of their children (beyond heredity) than psychology then taught. Her thesis went against every prevailing doctrine in developmental psychology of the time and undercut the concepts of “blank slate” intensive parenting that came into vogue in late 20th century America. Harris knew well thanks to a career writing and revising psychology textbooks that nothing in the field then supported her conclusions. But when she sat down to write The Nurture Assumption, and the academic papers that underpinned it, she was guided by insights gleaned as a parent of one biological child and one adopted child, observations which contradicted her field’s prevailing wisdom. Harris’ work received wide publicity when Steve Pinker reviewed it extensively in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, and went on to influence already heterodox thinkers like Bryan Caplan in his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.

Harris writes that only a small proportion of long-term life outcomes in children owe to decisions parents make when they are growing up, while most can be traced to parental genetic contribution and random environmental inputs we don’t control or anticipate. And yet the prevalence of helicopter parenting and attachment parenting’s enduring popularity make it clear that The Nurture Assumption has not been widely absorbed in the broader culture. Nevertheless, a counter-culture of “free range” parents integrates Harris’ ideas with their academic imprimatur in their common sense armamentarium.

Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species gets all the press, and you’ve probably heard of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. And to be fair, Origin, his first major scientific book (he was already known for The Voyage of the Beagle) triggered a cultural fury, so he punted on the origin of our own species for over a decade. By the time The Descent of Man did finally come out in 1871, the educated reading public had become habituated to the likelihood of evolution. But that later book still carries the whiff of heresy; some of Darwin’s ideas in there still remained far ahead of their time. Unlike most thinkers at that time, and even for a few more decades after, Darwin was persuaded that our species was originally African, observing that there were more great apes on that continent than elsewhere. This went against the Victorian and early 20th century intuition that humans must have evolved in Eurasia, the seat of the “higher races.” The Descent of Man also introduces the novel idea of sexual selection, that evolutionary change may be driven by individual preferences as much as fit to the environment.

Of course, much of The Descent of Man still manages to be a jarring read for modern people habituated to cultural sensitivities. His discussion of “savage” versus “civilized” races marks him as a man of his time, even if he was a Victorian liberal. But not many thinkers, heretical or otherwise, have a second act as rich in ideas as Darwin did with The Descent of Man.

Sometimes heretical ideas are so intriguing that they stimulate even while being plainly wrong. Julian Jaynes’ concept of the bicameral mind, introduced in his 1976 work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, is a radical idea that consciousness as we understand it post-dates the Bronze Age. Jaynes argues that all Bronze Age people (and presumably those prior) did not have an inner monologue (like some modern people). Jaynes’ basic theory is that before 3,000 years ago humans divided cognition into two wings, with one receiving messages from gods and authors (“voices”) and the other obeying and executing those messages. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind argues that introspection and reflection, interiority in other words, were not features of Bronze Age psychology. The reason that Plato’s dialogues on the other hand, composed 2,400 years ago, feel so modern to us is that the emergence of writing and the various philosophical and social revolutions associated with the Axial Age brought about modern consciousness.

Could Jaynes be right? Doubtful. But his work does push us to grapple with the reality that the past was fundamentally different from the present. And this difference, this sense of the alien, can be found in occasional religious texts which are passed down unaltered out of reverence for sacred content, and thus accurately reflect mores and values that might otherwise be bowdlerized. At several points in the Bible, men offer their own concubine or female offspring to aggressive mobs to slake their thirst for rape. The concept of the bicameral mind may not be able to explain this behavior, but only radical attempts to get outside of our present worldview can allow us to comprehend these actions.

Nearly two decades ago , Lee Smolin wrote The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. Like many popular physics books, it is well written: precise, engaging and dense. Unfortunately, like I suspect the entire population of my fellow non-physicists, I don’t in any deep way understand what either string theory or loop quantum gravity is. But The Trouble with Physics is nevertheless a great sociological treatment of the way science should and shouldn’t work. Smolin is a heretic because he is a skeptic of string theory, a field dominated since the 1990’s by arguably the smartest man alive, Edward Witten. When Smolin was writing in the first decade of this century scientists could still get exercised about science without any need to appeal to external considerations like politics or policy. Smolin cares about the truth, and believes that the smartest people in the world, string theorists, are going down the wrong path, even though nearly twenty years later his preferred theory of loop quantum gravity seems no closer to dethroning the regnant orthodoxy. Unlike with Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, Smolin may well prove wrong (and therefore more like Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind), but I value The Trouble with Physics’ depiction of the social, intellectual and institutional practice of science in the late 20th century, with all its upsides and downsides.

When I set myself the task of choosing books by heretics, I felt at least one should be a heretic as decreed by the Catholic Church. John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, published in 1536, is a massive, dense and abstruse work that most people will never read in full. Nor do they need to, to be entirely candid. Like St. Augustine, Calvin had neither the blessing or the curse of a real editor, so he had room to run, but from the modern perspective that probably spells excessive self-indulgence; where Calvin could have been concise, he is always an exhaustive completist. Even just select sections of the work give you the flavor of a mind and outlook that would transform Europe in the succeeding centuries; as with Luther, a whole movement within Christianity carries his name Calvinism would go on to convert the ruling family of Prussia and become the official faith of both Scotland and the Netherlands. The shift from mystical late medieval Catholicism to rationalist early modern Calvinism saw the first steps towards the world’s disenchantment as Max Weber theorized. The court of heaven was stripped of its angels and saints, left with merely the spareness of the Trinity; and the age of miracles and demons was declared over. For Calvinists, the only miracle of God manifest in the world was the Bible.

The Reformation is often discussed as if it were one movement, but in fact there were several Reformations. The first started with Martin Luther, and led to Lutheranism’s explosion across Europe. But the second Reformation saw the rise of the Reformed and Calvinist traditions, which stripped away even more theology and rite that had accrued to Western Christianity over 1,500 years. Though Weber’s ideas about the Protestant work ethic have been the subject of dispute, I find it hard to reject the thesis that Calvinism, with its austere theology and ultimately individualized conception of religion was part and parcel of the mental revolution that brought us modernity. Institutes of the Christian Religion shines a light on a mind making fateful steps to bridge the chasm between the medieval and the modern.

If there is any one literal heretic who remains important to moderns, that would be Baruch de Spinoza. Born a Sephardic Jew in Amsterdam, but excommunicated from his community and also unwilling to convert to the Christian faith. Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World explores the origins of our own inherited intellectual landscape via the tension between the strategies and world-views of Spinoza versus Gottfried Leibniz. While Spinoza was a relatively open heretic and nonconformist, Leibniz adhered more publicly to the orthodoxies of his age, attempting to affect change through established institutions and powers. Leibniz was the courtier, and Stewart’s narrative is clear that in his day and in the generations after, his strategy of lying low and hiding his true colors elicited more respect and admiration than Spinoza’s confrontational and more transparent stance. With his ideal of a pantheistic and deterministic God, Spinoza anticipated Enlightenment philosophers. HIs independence and frank heresy more neatly matches the ideal of bohemian and heterodox modern intellectuals than Leibniz, who better aligns with thinkers who rely on sinecures and patronage.

Thought

Vibe Shift - There's a reason things feel different. Leighton Woodhouse, trained as a sociologist, explains the last decade as an intra-elite battle where those with prestige or cultural influence battle it out with the capitalists.

The Return of the Eunuch. Fascinating piece that depicts an entire anti-sexual class of modern eunuchs quite different from mainstream transgender individuals.

The Progressive Moment in Global Politics Is Over. Slow economic growth and mass immigration are recipes for a right-wing reaction.

Netflix’s Extraordinary Parental Leave Was Part of Its Culture. That’s Over. I think a lot of what’s going on is the end of cheap money during the very low-interest-rate period. Tech companies like Netflix developed particular cultures when they had a lot of money and no real consequences for experimentation.

The Last Days of Kolkata’s Baghdadi Jews. The kind of ethnic diasporas that once spangled the globe seem to be in decline.

Data

Reconstructing the Genetic Relationship between Ancient and Present-Day Siberian Populations. It looks like the earliest Siberian ancestors of Finns are from Yakutia.

PITX2 expression and Neanderthal introgression in HS3ST3A1 contribute to variation in tooth dimensions in modern humans. Human teeth may have been shaped by Neanderthal characteristics. This shows the impact of Neanderthals on our physical characteristics even while only some 2% of the genome of most humans is Neanderthal.

Inherited infertility: Mapping loci associated with impaired female reproduction. This sort of thing should be strongly selected against, but perhaps we caught this before it disappeared? In any case, this is a recessive trait, so it reiterates the importance of carrier screening.

Swallows with sexually dimorphic tails have higher speciation rates. This supports Charles Darwin’s theory that sexual selection can drive diversification, as opposed to simply adaptation to ecological niches.

High-resolution genomic history of early medieval Europe. A new statistical genetic method allows for distinguishing between populations, like Scandinavians and Central Europeans, that are very genetically close. They show that places like Poland have seem massive demographic turnovers over the last 1,500 years.

My Two Cents

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

Science giveth and science taketh away:

It is almost miraculous how deeply research has vindicated Origin of Species’ central thesis, even though Darwin’s seminal work wholly lacked any accounting for heredity’s inner workings. Even after genetics emerged in the early 20th century, scientists still needed several decades more to discover that DNA was the substrate of inheritance, finally demonstrating how genes, a powerfully useful abstraction, manifested concretely in the world. And many decades more would pass before we could extend our theoretical scientific understanding of DNA to actually map, sequence and minutely catalog DNA at billions of positions per organism, and then apply to it powerful techniques of statistics and computer science. The book of life finally lies open for all to read.

Ultimately though, for the nonscientist today, what do DNA’s dull strings of digits really add to Darwin’s grand ideas? The Origin of Species is wholly without a model of inheritance. When genetics emerged as a science, it was like finding an express elevator to a pinnacle we had longed to reach. Thus positioned, we actually traded in some of theory’s hazy grandeur for the power to behold evolution as a prosaic probabilistic process. Some will dismiss that detailed accounting of the infinite sea of A’s, C’s, G’s and T’s as disappointingly reductionistic.

But I find grandeur in this comprehensive view of life, in the power to observe this multifarious molecule breathing into life innumerable experiments, from the humblest to the most exalted. I see us as having attained one of the planet’s highest peaks. You can still just relish the grand vista. But what magic to also have a telephoto lens for zooming in on the detailed fortunes of any region of those fateful swirls of letters across all time. A penetrating wit from an age more eloquent than our own might muse: four humble glyphs unspooling endless forms most beautiful, destined to adapt and evolve from age to age to age.

Additionally, this week, I’m posting three special pieces about my picks for the biggest ancient DNA papers of 2024. My top pick comes out next. Number three and two are these:

We were selected: tracing what humans were made for:

Over the past 15 years, ancient DNA has already transformed our understanding of phylogenetics and the movements of human populations around the planet. But methods to detect natural selection require larger sample sizes and higher quality data. This preprint, and others of its kind, herald a promising new chapter in ancient DNA. 14,000 years in Europe represents a truly minuscule slice of the human adaptive story since our species’ emergence 200,000 years ago. Within the next decade, we can expect to pull off similar analyses of humanity’s tenure on the planet, from the time our species arose and across every continent it colonized, thus mapping entire global patterns of natural selection. As we advance, we can truly expect to understand human adaptation over the long arc of our history. And in so doing, we will bring to fruition the project Darwin first envisioned 150 years ago in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.

The other man: Neanderthal findings test our power of imagination:

Because DNA degradation is a function of age, we will always obtain less DNA from the time period of Neanderthals, more than 40,000 years ago, than we can hope to from the last 10,000 years. Additionally, our lineage was always much more numerous than Neanderthals, so we can always expect to find many more of our own ancient whole genomes than our cousins’. But at some point soon we can expect to graduate from ~20 whole-genome caliber ancient samples to ~200. At that scale, we can hope to begin grasping Neanderthals not only in their unitary essence, but also in their diversity, because we will obtain enough chronological and geographical variation to actually hypothesize about their demographic history with some real granularity. Thorin’s existence argues for both similarities and differences between sapiens and neanderthalensis; like our own lineage, Neanderthals did exhibit population structure, and it seems likely that the Neanderthal population structure was far greater than can be found across branches of Homo sapiens. We will never know the exact details of how Neanderthals and our ancestors interacted, but we can now see in ever more detail that they were at once both aliens and our own flesh and blood.

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 since the last Time Well Spent (12/12 to 01/01 is my only Time Well Spent span that doesn’t run over four weeks, so there are only two since the last edition!):

• Dan Hess: the fertility collapse

• John Hawks: 2024 in Neanderthals, Denisovans and Hobbits

(Additionally, you can now hear twenty 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, links to more mainstream or print articles when I remember to post them, my Twitter, the occasional guest appearance, etc.

• DM me

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• Some of my past pieces for UnHerd, National Review, The Manhattan Institute, Quillette, and The New York Times

• My old podcast, The Insight

• The Khanversation, a current events podcast, unaffiliated with 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 to read about in 2025, put it here.