RKUL: Time Well Spent, 1/1/2026
Modest-resolutions edition
Your time is finite. The world is awash in slop 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?
With the turn of a new year, many find themselves seized by the need to commit to some ambitious plan or another. And as any year-round gym-goer knows, these resolutions have a way of being decidedly front-loaded for the majority of their makers. Which, is perhaps all the more argument for either keeping them modest or starting straight in on the best of them. Either way, if it’s reading material or edification you’re after, I’ve got you. You can sprint through the following books while the New Year spirit is still upon you and know you’ve spent the first days of the dawning year well. Or read one every couple months and you’ll have guaranteed yourself some excellent company all year long. These titles have stood up to repeat reading for me, but if none are new (or calling to you again), perhaps you will prefer a previous New Year’s post where I recommended an entire year’s reading list if you were to commit to precisely 20 pages a day for 365 days.
First, a fitting book for this Substack: at the intersection of science, history and politics, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond. This work grew out of Ullica Segerstråle’s dissertation, and it is at once a very broad and fine-grained description and analysis of the debate around sociobiology that began in the early 1970s and continued through the 1980s. The central players are E. O. Wilson, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, but the bit players read like a who’s who in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields; John Maynard Smith, W. D. Hamilton, Richard Dawkins, George Price and Noam Chomsky all make appearances. Segerstråle, a sociologist by training, employs an ethnographic method, sitting in on meetings of the two camps, the pro-sociobiologists led by Wilson and the anti-sociobiologists led by Lewontin and Gould. The events recounted in Defenders of the Truth date back about 50 years now. Many of the principals have died. But, you can’t help but discern very similar dynamics to those currently seen in academia’s “woke” period, when groups of activist students with the cooperation of some faculty targeted thinkers and movements that they accused of being “problematic.” Carole Hooven’s recent cancellation saga at Harvard could have been in Defenders of the Truth, though a further shift to the Left in academia since the 1970s makes it hard to imagine a modern-day “sociobiology controversy” even seeing the light of day in the 2020s. Though written accessibly, Segerstrale’s narrative rewards repeat reading, because it is so dense with historical detail that remains relevant today.
It’s not for nothing that ancient Rome, both at its height and in its fall, continues to haunt people’s thoughts over 1500 years later. The rise, apogee, decline and fall of the first Europe-based multi-ethnic empire has served as a warning over the last two centuries of Western imperialism. Recurring thoughts of ancient Rome have practically become a pop-culture cliché. But if there is one book I would recommend on that civilization’s collapse, it would be Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. The genius of this work is its interdisciplinary scope. Since Ward-Perkins is an archaeologist, he actually examines the material basis when evaluating the nature and vigor of Roman civilization. Instead of looking at ancient texts where contemporary commentators complain about economic stress, The Fall of Rome reports such ingenious and memorable measures as the increase in coin hoards after 400 AD, which signalled that people were saving in anticipation of impending lean times. Ward-Perkins also shows how economic activity in the Empire correlated strongly with pollution recorded in the layers of sediment in British ponds. The Fall of Rome makes it clear exactly how and when the Roman Empire went into decline based on graphs reporting widely varied data, rather than arguments based on narrow archival analysis. Again, like Defenders of the Truth, Ward-Perkins’ book is long on data, sparing the reader tendentious arguments and speculation.
Joe Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter also sits at a nexus of various disciplines. A decade on, it already feels possible that in the future, commentators will argue that this specific fruitful synthesis lit the fuse on evolutionary cultural anthropology’s explosion (with due apologies to earlier books from L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, E. O. Wilson, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd). Henrich combines the density of data from anthropology, which allows for so much description, with the analytic power of formal evolutionary genetics. While evolutionary psychologists discuss the impact of our cognitive hardware on our culture, cultural evolutionists like Henrich treat our memes like protean units of evolutionary analysis. Though Henrich acknowledges the reality of gene-culture co-evolution, the focus in The Secret of our Success is how evolutionary forces like drift, memetic exchange and natural selection might actually shape the cultural variation we see around us. While an evolutionary psychologist observes the universals across all societies, like the existence of religion, a cultural evolutionist might ask why religions vary between societies.
Not that that takes away from the genuine pleasure of detailed description in histories of culture, like Jaques Barzun’s 912-page From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. Although Barzun (1907-2012) penned the work while still in his 80s, it’s worth pausing to consider that the author himself personally lived through a full 20% of the time period he chronicles in this, his magnum opus. Born to an elite family in France who moved in European literary circles, Barzun came to the US in 1920, eventually enrolling as a student at Columbia and becoming a professor there in the 1930s, before doing a stint at Cambridge. From Dawn to Decadence reflects the fruits of a massively erudite mind after a long career or scholarship, but as it moves into the 20th century, it further benefits from the author’s personal familiarity with many prominent figures in literature and the arts, like W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot and Marcel Duchamp. Few will deeply read as many works of literature across the Western canon as Barzun did, given his exceptionally long career in academia, but From Dawn to Decadence grants the humble reader an extraordinary vantage, thanks to Barzun’s vast corpus of knowledge and his perspicacious observations about cultural currents across half a millennium.
After Barzun’s nearly 1000-page tome, my friend Stuart Ritchie’s Intelligence: All That Matters, is a brisk, punchy read that grants you a good sense of the latest work in one of the most robust and replicated social sciences we have, all in well under 200 pages. Despite what you might hear about intelligence testing being statistically unsound from the likes of Nassim Taleb, Ritchie’s work will make it clear how useful and important the concept remains to understanding sociological patterns around us. He explains the “general intelligence factor” without excessive mathematics and tackles the major questions directly and concisely (for example, “are intelligence tests biased?”). Ritchie’s book fulfills the promise of the series’ formula (and to be clear, far from an intelligence-specific provocation, All That Matters is the title of a 44-volume series, although… perhaps readers of other volumes, like Muhammad: All that Matters, will be open to construing it otherwise.) Read Intelligence, and there’s a good chance you may never need another work of psychometrics to be up to speed.
Thus far, I’ve resisted the temptation to recommend abstruse texts. But if you’ve already plowed through the previous five, I’d like to invite you to tackle a genuinely academic text this year. This is the lone recommendation here I’ve only read once: Daniel Hartl’s A Primer of Population Genetics and Genomics. And the only reason I haven’t circled back to this worthy work, is, as long-time readers will know, because I had already read Principles of Population Genetics many times. That 2010 work, referred to as “Hartl and Clark” in the field, after its co-authors, served my purposes in work and research.
But Principles is a very dense work, suitable perhaps for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, while Primer is much more accessible for laypeople, and less than half the length. And, being published a decade later, in 2020, it is more up-to-date on the latest in genomics. A book like A Primer of Population Genetics and Genomics pays long-term dividends, allowing you to understand dynamics observable everywhere in the world, and to make sense of patterns and trends that otherwise might mystify. When people are tempted to opine about the operation of dynamics like genetic drift, bottlenecks or natural selection, this book will have equipped you with the analytical tools to assess and construct models off the top of your head.
Thought
An Apology for Philology, Solveig Gold and Joshua Katz survey the impact of political radicalization on classics as a field, and in particular, Latin and Greek philology as the backbone of Classics degrees. In 2021, Princeton’s Classics department notoriously eliminated the requirement to learn ancient Greek or Latin as a condition of earning a Classics degree. The value of Classicists being steeped in Latin and ancient Greek seems self-evident to me, so of more interest was their examination of what is happening in their chosen fields. Woke may be past high tide in the broader culture, but its warping effect on academia remains substantial. Critics of language requirements say they exclude people, but the search for excellence will always exclude. Anti-racists criticize problematic views of past practitioners in order to reject philological methods. They question even the possibility of impartiality. And when you then have scholarly journals publishing articles with such insights as, “Through a combination of Audre Lorde’s Black queer lens and Paul Preciado’s trans scholarship on the dildo, I further argue that by imagining Simulus as Black, queer, and/or trans, the power imbalance between Simulus and Scybale is greatly reduced,” it’s tempting to throw up your hands and just remind yourself that this is not your circus. And yet, this is hardly the only field where past human practitioners were problematic. Surely the enterprise of scholarship is robust enough to accept that the measure of a scholar’s value is in the utility of their insights or methods, not the merit of their personal views. Statisticians (to say nothing of every researcher publishing statistical data analysis across most rigorous academic disciplines) still use regression and correlation daily, even though Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, who were unabashed eugenicists, first developed those tools.
Among Savage Tribes: Napoleon Chagnon meticulously documented the customs of a tribe where violence was sexually rewarded. Some of his academic colleagues never forgave him for it. This profile of the life and times of the late Napoleon Chagnon is a flashback to controversies in evolutionary psychology 25 years ago. In short, an embittered journalist slandered Chagnon, permanently damaging his reputation. Many anthropologists agreed at the time that the criticisms were baseless, but they could not bring themselves to support someone perceived as regressive. Nothing too surprising, but well written, and if you don’t know about the controversy surrounding the book The Darkness in El Dorado, where prominent scientists including Chagnon were accused of human rights violations and possibly even genocide, while colleagues and professional societies stood by, this article is worth a read.
Companies Are Outlining Plans for 2026. Hiring Isn’t One of Them. The title says it all, and the cause is to a large extent firms are holding back while they are trying to get a read on the impact of AI.
Religion Holds Steady in America - Recent polling shows no clear evidence of a religious revival among young adults. The great secularization of the last generation in the US seems to have halted, but there is no aggregate increase in religion, just the maintenance of the status quo.
India Is on a Himalayan Building Spree to Prepare for a Clash With China. India’s neglect of its northern border with China is bizarre given that there have been multiple conflicts, the Sino-India War of 1962, and the border clashes of 1967, 1975 and 2020, where both sides have suffered casualties. Additionally, most of India’s population lives just south of it (in contrast to China, for whom the Indian border lies very distant from major population centers).
Humans killed millions of vultures. We’re now living with the consequences. Vulture numbers in India went from 4 million to 32,000 in a generation because of the use of painkillers for dying cattle, which ended up destroying the kidneys of the avian scavengers. Now the painkillers are banned, but in the meantime, feral dogs have taken the vulture’s role in the scavenging ecosystem, resulting in a new equilibrium. And unlike vultures, dogs also bite and spread rabies, resulting in many human deaths, often children, from the disease. Millionth installment in the tragic annals of unintended consequences.
Data
Genetic history of Rus’. No big surprise, but shows just how extensive the admixture of Finnic people into northeastern Russians has been over the centuries. Also, there was almost no Scandinavian ancestry in early Rus, suggesting that the impact of the Varangian Swedes was genetically minimal.
Upper Palaeolithic genomes reveal deep roots of modern Eurasians. Using ancient DNA, this paper detects differences today that date to the diversification of populations 45,000 years ago. Populations like “Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers” (CHG) seem to have roots in their home regions this early, as opposed to differentiating later.
Insights into human history and complex traits from the genomes of African populations. This paper looks at the extremely diverse populations of Africa across its varied environments and shows how adaptation (along with admixture) shaped each regional group.
Invasion of new adaptive zones retains telltale signs of directional selection at macroevolutionary scales in mammals. Essentially, the authors discovered that environmental transitions shaped changes in skull morphology across numerous lineages. Exactly what you would expect, basically, but nice to confirm it with data and subject the hypothesis to statistical tests.
My Two Cents
There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall. Most recently, I covered where we stand on Indo-Europeans and Indians when it comes to genetics and history.
First, Two Steppes forward, one step back: parsing our Indo-European past:
Ironically, the improbable connection between literary cultures half Eurasia’s breadth apart, from Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s vast and varied Bengali oeuvre (which includes both India and Bangladesh’s national anthems) to the lyrical language of Shakespeare’s timeless corpus, all owes to cultural transformations wrought by those first pre-literate nomadic barbarians. They poured forth out of Eurasia’s great grasslands, tall, dark and violent, plague speeding their emphatic arrival, burning down old civilizations and rewriting the continent’s genetic legacy overnight. How astonishing that such humble horsemen’s intervention would spawn globe-spanning cultural empires destined to leave their mark on the whole species, not just in our genes and the practices of patriarchy, but in millennia of myths and some of our most exalted, eternal, written works.
Then, The Waiting Game: Past, Present and Future of Indian Genomics:
The findings of 50,000 years of evolutionary history of India: Impact on health and disease variation may be as far as we can go with modern samples towards understanding the structure of the South Asian past. Nearly three thousand whole genomes from dozens of ethnic groups push the frontier of our understanding of the past appreciably, but thirty thousand whole genomes from hundreds of ethnicities would push it only marginally further. We’re well into the territory of diminishing returns at this point. There are only so many stories to be wrung from modern data alone. At some point, you just keep confirming and refining what you already knew. Again and again, geneticists have confirmed very high levels of Indian endogamy (and attendant low levels of within ethnic group genetic diversity) within a broader context of extremely high aggregate South Asian diversity. First, with the early genomic age’s coarse methods from just a few informative markers, and now with the fine-grained, data-rich methods possible since 2010 that scan the whole DNA sequence. Two facts remain indisputable: Indians have more overall genetic diversity than Europeans and East Asians, but greater inbreeding is also clearly written in their genomes. Global diversity, local homogeneity. More samples will simply reiterate this reality.
Unsupervised Learning Journal Club
A periodic 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, Antiquity’s miracle skin whitening method: migrate to Sweden, wait millennia:
Details remain to be worked out regarding descriptive aspects of these traits, but this PNAS paper really totally confirms the overall pattern that scientists have been describing for more than a decade. Europeans got lighter very recently, and the selection is persistent and continuous. Why? A lot of work in earlier decades hypothesized reasons, whether Peter Frost’s sexual selection theories, or Nina Jablonski’s hypotheses about vitamin D. But now we are in a genomic age, and can see the trajectory and geography of selection. We know it occurred. We see changes in gene frequencies. But the fact remains that we don’t know why. That’s a harder question to answer, but at least we have the preliminary piece, the description, out of the way.
Previous editions:
Wealth, war and worse: plague’s ubiquity across millennia of human conquest
Where Queens Ruled: ancient DNA confirms legendary Matrilineal Celts were no exception
Eternally Illyrian: How Albanians resisted Rome and outlasted a Slavic onslaught
Homo with a side of sapiens: the brainy silent partner we co-opted 300,000 years ago
Brave new human: counting up the de novo mutations you alone carry
Genghis Khan, the Golden Horde and an 842-year-old paternity test
Ghost Population in the Machine: AI finds Out-of-Africa plot twists in Papuan DNA
Immigrants of Imperial Rome: Pompeii’s genetic census of the doomed
For free subscribers: a sense of the format from my coverage of two favorite papers last year:
Discussion
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Here are podcasts since the last Time Well Spent:
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Over to you
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