RKUL: Time Well Spent 2/2/2025

Almost end of winter of 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?

American mathematician Claude Shannon is credited with introducing the idea that if it is a surprise, that constitutes information. If what you expect to happen always happens, you never walk away any more enlightened than you arrived. Though our world hums along with predictability and regularity, surprises now and then highlight or bring to our attention new realities we weren’t even considering, forcing us to update our mental models accordingly. In the past week, the Chinese company DeepSeek has proven that when it comes to AI-models, it can do more with vastly less, a surprise that has overnight driven complete recalibration of common assumptions about what is possible in the AI technological space.

History is littered with these sorts of surprises. From the vantage point of 100,000 BC, we might have expected the locus of human civilization to emerge somewhere in Africa. From the vantage of 2500 BC, we might have bet on the Near East. And in 700 AD, smart money would have placed it in China. And so on. History is packed with such surprises because it’s impossible to account for every variable. If we’re following along, life involves a constant updating of mental models with new data. Any source of future brilliance beyond the shortest time horizons, whether individual thought, innovation or societal greatness, is, as a rule, poorly predicted by past brilliance.

In the Iliad, Homer enumerates the ships that descended on Troy from each of Greece’s many kingdoms. Odysseus, from far western Greece, brought just 12 ships to the expedition. Agamemnon, the most powerful Greek ruler, helmed 100 ships from Mycenae. Peloponnesian Argos, ruled by the hero Diomedes, contributed another 80. Those were the great powers of the age. Meanwhile, Athens, ruled by the sons of Theseus, sent 50. This is not exactly a trifling number, but neither was it a top tier contribution, a fact which reflects Bronze-Age Athens being a city of only middling importance, a status that endured down to the early centuries of Classical Greece.

But some time after 500 BC, Athens, inauspiciously situated in the heart of dry and austere Attica, rose to become the most culturally vibrant city in the world. Christian Meier documents this unique development in Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age. Today, it’s hard to avoid taking past Athenian brilliance for granted, whether in the form of homegrown thinkers like Plato or Socrates, or the foreigners who flocked to the world’s intellectual heart like Aristotle, Anaxogorus and Protagoras. But prior to Athens’ fifth-century rise, most of the seminal philosophical minds of Greek antiquity flourished in Ionia, across the Aegean, or even in parts of the Greek west, like Italy, home to Parmenides. Though Athens remained something of a “university town” down into the Roman period, Meier’s narrative shines a light on an exceptional and glorious century where cultural, economic and military brilliance was focused for four generations on a previously undistinguished Greek polis.

If barren Attica was an unlikely seedbed for the birth of Western philosophy, late 19th-century small-town southern India would likewise seem an improbable candidate to produce one of the world’s most talented intuitive mathematicians. Robert Kanigel’s The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan documents the strange life of the Indian mathematician whose uncanny facility for numbers seems to have been both innate and unparalleled (he attributed his talents to the gods). Lacking any formal training, Srinivasa Ramanujan, by day a clerk in Madras, patiently re-derived much of Western mathematics by himself. He attempted to share his findings with those around him, which only elicited perplexity. Eventually he made contact with the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy (he of the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium), who recognized his genius and brought him to England. Through Hardy, Ramanujan was introduced to the world of academic mathematics. He lived in England for five years, became the second Indian inducted into the Royal Society, and the first to become a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He died from ill health in 1920 at only 32, having already made contributions to mathematics that remain notable more than a century later (the 1970’s rediscovery of one his misplaced notebooks sparked incredible excitement among number theorists).

While Ramanujan was singular, Istvan Hargittai’s The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century surveys the contributions of a cohort of five extraordinary physicists born around the turn of the 20th century in the Austro-Hungarian city of Budapest, who would go on to shape emerging fields from nuclear energy to computing. Under the thumb of the venerable Habsburg dynasty, the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary by the time of their birth was already being termed the “sick man of Europe,” easily dispatched by Prussia in an 1866 war and soon to be consigned to play junior partner to the new nation-state of Germany. And yet despite the Habsburg monarchy’s military feebleness and economic mediocrity, the Empire’s cities: Vienna, Budapest and Prague, retained immense cultural richness.

Hargittai’s narrative focuses on Theodore von Kármán, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller. All were sons of the Austro-Hungarian Jewish bourgeoisie, thoroughly integrated into the society of the day, and exceptionally loyal to the Habsburg monarchy. Two, von Neuman and von Kármán, notably came from families that had even been ennobled for their prominence and contributions to law, education and finance. Budapest’s secular Jews had a peculiar status as simultaneously consummate insiders and determined outsiders as a matter of choice. Religiously alienated from the Christian Magyar ethnic majority, and having adopted the second language of the Empire, Hungarian, rather than German, the Jews of Budapest represented an absolutely singular community within the cosmopolitan world of Mitteleuropa. Whereas the German and Hungarian elites might serve in government or the military, haute bourgeoisie Jews like John von Neuman were shunted off to the academy or industry, but it was there that they were able to fully leverage their talents.

If the Hungarian Jews came into their own in the shadow of Europe’s most decrepit monarchy, the Dutch helped invent modernity under conditions of perpetual war. At least according to Lisa Jardine in Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory. A small, densely populated nation barely above sea level, for 80 years between 1568 and 1648 the Netherlands fought for independence against a Habsburg Empire at its imperial apogee, as Phillip II of Spain attempted to suppress his Low Country subjects’ Protestantism. Though the southern provinces ultimately remained under Habsburg rule, and were brought back to Catholicism (becoming Belgium), the northern provinces obtained their independence and became the Protestant Netherlands. Nevertheless, generations of war against far larger powers forced the Netherlands to adapt, innovate and extemporize; religious toleration and a commercial orientation were necessary for Dutch survival. The Dutch East India Company became the world’s first international corporation, and Jardine argues that many 17th-century Dutch economic innovations would be profitably assimilated by the English in the 18th. If the United Kingdom became Europe’s preeminent modern power in the late 18th century, deploying navy and merchant traders together as a dual force, such an approach came only through emulation of a model pioneered by the Dutch.

Whereas the Netherlands was the story of a European underdog that survived and even flourished, the tale of Temujin in Frank McLynn’s Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy is one of adversity along the ascent to the peak of human power. Born a minor noble among the nomadic Mongols in 1162 AD, the young Temujin’s father died when he was eight, and his tribe abandoned him and his family to the wilderness. Temjuin hunted squirrels in the forests of northern Mongolia to survive, and at one point was captured by enemies and enslaved. But far from letting these events crush him; by adulthood Temujin was gradually accruing followers, and harnessed the loyalty of his soldiers against all the peoples of Mongolia, conquering tribe after tribe.

But Genghis Khan’s biographers who compiled his life in The Secret History of the Mongols just after his lifetime note that Temujin’s early experiences stamped him: he emphasized personal loyalty over pedigree or blood connection. Inexorably defeating his rivals likely owed to the emphasis he put on competence over lineage, and Temujin extended and expanded this rationalist outlook to manage his military forces right up to his death. His victories were so absolute that his followers proclaimed him Genghis Khan, or “Universal Ruler.” McLynn’s narrative sidesteps sentimentality, reporting, for example, the contemporary finding that the Mongol genocides in Central Asia were so extensive that wilderness reclaimed vast swaths of land that had been pastures and fields, triggering a global cooling. But Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy highlights the reality that Temujin’s rise to power was no coincidence, his was a great talent honed by his early life’s vicissitudes.

If Temujin finding his back to the wall forced him to develop personal and political skills that he spent the rest of his life leveraging, the small cities of the ancient Near East that hugged the coast of today’s Lebanon were forced by their forbidding mountainous backdrop to look outward to the Mediterranean for sustenance and survival. The mercantile orientation of the cities of ancient Phoenicia: Tyre, Byblos and Sidon, was a function of their lack of hinterland. Felling cedars in the mountains to the east, the ancient Phonecians built great ships that took them to Egypt, Cyprus and Greece, and even further afield. In 814 BC, colonists from Tyre established a beachhead in North Africa, laying the foundations for what would one day become the wealthiest and most powerful Phonecian city of all, Carthage. Jack Miles’ Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, focuses heavily on the Punic Wars between 264–146 BC because that is the period for which ancient sources abound; after Carthage’s final defeat, the Romans destroyed their great rival’s internal records.

But Miles’ narrative examines the vast imperium of a city-state whose inheritance was the Mediterranean, reaching eastward to old Tyre and west to the very Straits of Gibraltar, even founding another Carthage in Iberia (modern day Cartagena). The Punic Wars paint Carthage as Rome’s negative image, but Miles highlights the fact that, Carthage’s power, like Rome’s waxed over the centuries of declining Etruscan and Greek influence in the Western Mediterranean. And he covers how they organized themselves as an oligarchic republic not dissimilar from their Roman rivals. Carthage’s ultimate failing might be that their ruling elite’s economic pragmatism was no match for the fanaticism of the Roman ruling class, who saw only the binary of victory or defeat.

Thought

Egypt Fears Syria’s Revolutionary Fervor Could Be Contagious. Unlike Syria, Egypt is not ruled by an ethno-religious minority, so I suspect fears of instability are overblown. But to be fair, 111 million Egypts lived packed together in a hot, crowded country with few economic prospects. At some point, something will have to give.

The mistake of the century - Americans badly underestimated the growth potential of the CCP. Frank Dikotter argues one issue is that Americans underestimate or dismiss the CCP’s genuine commitment to socialism.

Universities That Target Their Students’ Free Speech Should Have To Pay A Public Price For It. Midwit busybody administrators without any meaningful brief are responsible for this sort of thing. These are not people who ever sought the life of the mind, their highest goal is to police those who crave it.

Make America Ageless: Trump’s Health Picks Take Longevity Movement Mainstream. Ozempic is arguably the first major successful anti-aging drug. We may be looking at a new dawn in the fight against mortality and morbidity.

Greenland’s leader wants independence from Denmark as Trump hovers over Arctic island. Greenland’s population, about 57,000 is only a few thousand more than there are free subscribers to this humble Substack. That’s just not enough people to viably govern a territory larger than Alaska as an independent nation.

Germany’s Economic Model Is Broken, and No One Has a Plan B. Russian energy is getting more expensive or unavailable and the China export market is cooling down. Germany made a few wrong macroeconomic bets.

Data

Ancient DNA elucidates the migration and evolutionary history of northern and southern populations in East Asia. The north-south division appears by 19,000 years ago, but one modern dynamic has been hybridization between the two populations in the historical period, as has occurred in much of China.

Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain. This interesting pattern may be associated with the spread of Brythonic-speaking Celts into the British Isles from Gaul.

Ancient DNA reveals reproductive barrier despite shared Avar-period culture. This is a totally surprising result. The Avars were a Turkic people who migrated from Mongolia to Central Europe 1,500 years ago, and it seems that some of their subjects adopted their culture but remained totally segregated from the migrant elite in the Balkans. No one understands how the mating markets were kept so distinct.

Inference of human pigmentation from ancient DNA by genotype likelihood. Basically Europeans keep getting lighter and lighter, from 45,000 years ago down to the historical period.

The genetic origins and impacts of historical Papuan migrations into Wallacea. There is some sense that Australo-Melanesian people were the indigenous populations of maritime Southeast Asia, but these data indicate that Papuans have been migrating westward, into eastern Indonesia, for millennia, replacing indigenous foragers.

The distribution of highly deleterious variants across human ancestry groups. Basically, because really harmful mutations are going to be selected against, they will be “evolutionarily young.” This also means that they are not usually differentiated at the scale of continental-ancestry groups, races, but are found in extended-family groups in many populations.

My Two Cents

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall. Two recent pieces both delve into Europe’s deep genetic past.

When civilization control-alt-deletes: prehistoric Europe’s false dawn and long reboot:

Perhaps the moral of the last prehistoric civilization’s end is a greater humility about our ignorance of other unrecorded arcs, other rises and falls still hidden from us, beginnings like Egypt’s Old Kingdom with its pyramids, and ends like the 12th-century BC late Bronze-Age’s spectacular collapse into darkness. Who knows what lost golden ages lie beyond our ken? What Promethean fire roared at the heart of prehistoric camps, only to dim and falter, its forgotten glories the stuff of improbable legend? What golden ages do we only vaguely suspect, we distant, distracted descendents, busy questing after our own age’s idea of greatness?

We are what we speak: Indo-European phylogenetic and linguistic trees concur:

Going forward, we have the tools to outline the story of the Indo-Europeans’ diversification down to the historical period. The expansion and branching of the Indo-European people’s various lineages before 1000 BC offer too little material for linguistic analysis to weigh in on. Both syntax and lexicon are available only for a few languages, with too many intermediate tongues fallen extinct. Still, discerning pattern and structure across languages has so far offered tantalizing hints of further demographic splits after the Corded Ware’s westward migrations out of their Eastern European homeland 5,000 years ago. And true insight, with the granular detail we long for, may finally emerge with deeper ancient DNA analysis.

Today we are supercharging ever larger ancient DNA datasets with increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques to fully elucidate the relatedness and relationships of peoples past and present. And from these findings emerges a massively detailed family tree of Eurasian demographic history: a mute biological tree whose eloquently faithful linguistic shadow has been awaiting their union for nearly 240 years.

Unsupervised Learning Journal Club

I am trying out a new occasional feature for paying subscribers this year, an Unsupervised Learning Journal Club, where I briskly review a paper or preprint of note. At the end of each edition, I invite readers to vote on papers/preprints for the future editions. This month, a couple of my proposed papers appear here above in the Data section. First up: a 2024 paper on plague’s ubiquity across our species’ history. An excerpt:

Wealth, war and worse: plague’s ubiquity across millennia of human conquest:

Only in the last few centuries have we as a species truly begun to grapple with disease, to battle it, and even emerge victorious. Though pestilence was always with us, the advent of large villages and even cities, along with trade as an accelerant, meant that new pathogens optimized to exploit density and sedentism could arise and flourish at our expense. An interconnected world of densely populated villages was ripe for plague, a sitting target as compared to the Paleolithic regime that saw scattered small bands of mobile foragers spread thinly across vast landscapes. Agriculture was the great human innovation that put our species on the fast track to economic specialization and growth, the key foundation upon which complex civilization rests. But at the same time, it was also always a Pandora’s box, unleashing novel plagues our hunter-gatherer ancestors had never confronted. For the people of Neolithic Europe, a greatness painstakingly achieved over millennia was to be their undoing; once they leveled up to great productive, cooperative urban clusters, that hard-won achievement itself would mercilessly offer them up by the millions for a silent, mass culling.

Free subscribers can get a sense of the format from my ungated coverage of two favorite 2024 papers:

• 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 my guests since the last Time Well Spent:

• Daniel McCarthy: American conservatism after Trump (and before)

• Brian Chau: welcoming the AI-age and DeepSeek

• Tade Souaiaia: the edge of statistical genetics, race and sports

• Shadi Hamid: pessimism on Palestine but hope in America

• Conn Carroll: Sex and the Citizen

• Antonio Regalado: CRISPR babies 6 years later

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 Palladium Magazine, The New York Times, City Journal, National Review, Slate, Unherd, Quillette and Nautilus.

• My old podcast, The Insight

• The Khanversation, my 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.