RKUL: Time Well Spent 5/05/2025
edición de cinco de mayo
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?
It’s no accident that in political philosophy and theory, we continue to debate to what extent man is egalitarian or hierarchical by nature, and therefore how to structure and organize a society accounting for these biases. As much as socialists might wish to believe otherwise, all complex societies seem to have a top-down structure of power with rulers above the governed. There is a reason that anarchists are perceived to be utopians. But hierarchy still has its limits and natural checks, everywhere from primate societies to human empires. As the late Frans de Waal observed in Chimpanzee Politics, among our great ape relatives a tyrant’s reign is often abruptly and brutally curtailed when a coalition of beta males who chafed at his excesses agree that he has overreached. The violent deaths of many Roman Emperors at the hands of usurpers illustrate the fine line in our species between long-suffering subordinate and fed-up rebel. Stable societies require a balance between equality and hierarchy. This reality is rooted in our very instincts, and born out by the lessons of history. A world without winners and losers is sterile, but brutal winner-take-all competition too often unleashes savage violence with costs to the society’s long-term stability.
Before Peter Turchin became a very well known pundit, celebrated for his prediction of chaos in 2020, he was a quantitative ecologist who turned his focus to historical questions, and in particular to modeling how societies emerged, became complex and then decayed and fell. Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall came out 22 years ago, but in it Turchin introduces a new way of thinking about history, pioneering the field of cliodynamics. Translating models from ecology into human history, like logistic growth, Turchin demonstrates how to formally describe the rise, apogee and decline of states and societies because of internal variables like social cohesion and the variable fraction of the population that are aspiring elites. Lurking within the differential equations and simulations are insights about the necessity of a balance between hierarchy and egalitarianism. Large polities are hierarchical, but excessive oppression ultimately leads to rebellion and collapse.
The same year Turchin published Historical Dynamics, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson wrote Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Though the book was ostensibly about the evolutionary framework for religion as a social and cultural adaptation, it was also Wilson’s attempt to resurrect a functionalist understanding of culture in anthropology, a tradition that goes back to Emile Durkheim. Similar to Turchin, Wilson in Darwin's Cathedral argues societies should be thought of as social organisms, and that as such, they are more or less adapted to their environments. A classical illustration from the book is Balinese water temples, which nominally serve a religious function, but also coordinate water resources across many farms. Darwin's Cathedral illustrates how human societies and human nature are not best understood by reducing everything to singular impulses or dynamics like “will to power” or “to each according to their need.” Our nature is complex, and the social institutions we develop to maintain peace and establish harmony are similarly multifaceted, with elements that might occasionally work at cross-purposes.
Focused on the organizing unit of fundamental importance in the Western political tradition, Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism argues that religion is essential. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the Bible, and in particular the New Testament, sees clearly that there is a powerful clarion call toward equality before God within the Christian tradition, and Siedentop develops the thesis that political and legal equality in the West cannot be understood except as an inference derived from the conceptual framework of religious equality. Christianity as adopted by Rome did not usher in an age of egalitarianism; slavery was still practiced and there were still rulers and the ruled. But Christianity smoothed the sharp edges of the ancient world’s brutality for the least of the Empire’s subjects. Siedentop also argues that development of egalitarianism inside the Roman Catholic Church’s hierarchy, where priests from peasant backgrounds could in some cases rise to positions of ultimate power over clerics from the nobility, was essential as a model and prototype for the norm of blind justice and merit irrespective of social background or legal status. Because of the Church’s independence from political power after the fall of Rome it could experiment and evolve in ways that likely would have been impossible under direct governmental control. These legal and institutional innovations, like canon law’s influence on civil law, eventually spread to secular governments, finally becoming normative in early modernity.
Kyle Harper’s From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity also articulates this vision of individualism being the path to egalitarianism. In pre-Christian Rome, Harper notes that sexual abuse of slaves was taken for granted, and not viewed as immoral. Honor and shame governed society; the Emperor Elagabalus was mocked for his homosexuality not because he was engaging in homosexual behavior itself, but because as a high-status individual he took the “passive” role. Harper shows how Christianity changed the moral focus, demoting relational elements from being supreme to morality, instead making all Christians subject to the same ethics before God. The Church and its moral campaigns illustrate the paradox of a hierarchical organization coercively imposing moral norms that resulted in greater egalitarianism, with less sexual abuse of inferiors by superiors, and protections afforded to women. But with these protections came new responsibilities and expectations of sexual purity imposed downward in the social hierarchy.
But even if legal equality has been the overall trend across history, heritable differences in status too have remained constant. At least that is Gregory Clark’s argument in his 2015 The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. He shows that in England, as in other societies like Italy and India, elite families have maintained power and status across centuries and even millennia. Nearly 1,000 years after the Normans’ 1066 arrival to England, those with Norman surnames are still overrepresented among the British elite, in particular in the military. Subsequent work has supported some of Clark’s arguments in the last few years, showing that social status seems to follow the pattern of a heritable trait. Social status of a lineage decays over time, or increases in other cases, but the overall pattern is far more stable than our intuitions about inter-generational opportunity might have us believe.
Thought
Who’s a Carthaginian? Genetic Study Revises Ancestry of Rome’s Ancient Nemesis. The original Levantine genetic imprint in western Punic societies seems to have been sharply attenuated, replaced by indigenous Sicilian or North African heritage. This shows the importance of memes, versus genes, in forming an ethnolinguistic identity (in contrast, Greek colonies remained genetically very similar to the motherland).
It Took a Century to Find This Colossal Squid. They finally recorded this squid in its native deep-water environment. Incredible, because they’ve known of its existence for a century.
Will Oakland Finally Reject Progressive Politics? No, it won’t. Barbara Lee won, and Oakland’s dysfunction will continue (meanwhile, Dan Luria across the bay in San Francisco seems to be turning things around).
Revolt of the Dandies. There is a culture war here, though not on Left-Right terms. The sartorial revolution of the 1960’s, with formality’s demotion, is now six decades in the past, and new generations begin returning to older norms.
Alien Poop Means We Are Not Alone. But Let Me Just Adjust This Model Parameter… Erik Hoel announces the paradigm shift: there is now good circumstantial evidence for life on another planet.
Data
Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors. Paper that inspired media reaction above in The New York Times, and elsewhere, about genetically distinct Punic societies.
An Eocene Origin of Passerine Birds Estimated Using Bayesian Tip Dating with Fossil Occurrences. This method of analyzing fossils in a model-based framework confirms the intuition that birds diversified (again) after the extinction of the dinosaurs, contradicting molecular results that give a more gradual and deeper diversification.
Widespread recessive effects on common diseases in a cohort of 44,000 British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis with high autozygosity. We know inbreeding is bad, but genetics helps us quantify it harm. Very relevant in Britain, where the NHS is left footing the bill.
Economic Consequences of Kinship: Evidence From U.S. Bans on Cousin Marriage. Basically banning cousin marriage disperses lineages, and sends young people in search of better economic opportunities. Inbreeding is a social ill, not just a genetic one.
A male Denisovan mandible from Pleistocene Taiwan. Finally, a Denisovan from the tropics, where most of the living Denisovan ancestry concentrates today.
Heritability of human lifespan is about 50% when confounding factors are addressed. Heritability is generally assumed to be as low as 10-20% for lifespan, but this preprint claims to have controlled for more factors, isolating the genetic signal with stronger fidelity.
My Two Cents
There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall.
Germans are from Finland, Finns are from Yakutia:
Intriguingly, the men who carried I1 were not indigenous to Scandinavia. Clues in their genes indicate that their origins lay to the east, most likely in Finland. And if not Finland itself, somewhere nearby in the eastern Baltic, perhaps Estonia. The new genetic element in Scandinavia diverged somewhat from earlier Corded Ware and Bell Beaker streams deriving from points south because it was notably enriched for Baltic forager ancestry: in other words, EEHG heritage likely from a CCC-descended population. This would align well with haplogroup I1, which is not canonically Indo-European, and had been a vanishingly rare paternal lineage before 2000 BC.
I1 descends from the broader haplogroup I, and it was other branches, especially I2, that overwhelmingly dominated among western Mesolithic forager populations across Europe 10,000 years ago. Even today all the branches of I are quite rare elsewhere. I’s unrivaled ubiquity in Western and Central Europe was broken only by the inrush of Neolithic farmers, who arrived from Anatolia 9,000 years ago, demographically swamping out the foragers. The most likely ur-heimat for these Baltic forager-enriched people to have hailed from is Finland’s lost Kiukainen culture, itself descended from Corded Ware agriculturalists and the predominantly EEHG-ancestry CCC people. The most persuasive scenario today is that after 2000 BC, a Kiukainen splinter group fatefully crossed the Gulf of Bothnia into Scandinavia proper and conquered the indigenous peoples, before going on to do the same in Norway and Denmark. When the dust cleared, the ethno-linguistic configuration still dominant in Scandinavia to this day had crystallized, from the windswept heaths of Jutland to Norway’s fjords and all along the shores of the Baltic.
Lost Green Saharans: ancient DNA unearths a new race from a verdant North African interlude:
Until TKK was genotyped, the ANA were what paleogeneticist David Reich calls a “ghost population.” Like Planet X whose existence we intuit through its gravitational pull on other observable bodies, an ANA imprint was hinted at in Taforalt and many modern Saharan and Mediterranean genomes. But subtle hints take you only so far; the foundations of human evolutionary history require concrete genomes extracted from the remains of those who died millennia ago, those lucky random genetic snapshots from bygone ages. Only when we have an individual human’s genome extracted from ancient DNA does the history of a lost population become so visible to us, its light illuminating ages of prehistory that had been wholly hidden. The passage of time will likely deliver more genomes to flesh out the history of the ANA people. Was TKK part of a relict population unique for its high fraction of ANA, or actually typical of a broader set of peoples across the Sahara who for tens of millennia remained relatively untouched by both Eurasian and sub-Saharan heritage? We don’t know, but someday we will.
More generally, ANA reminds us how much we have yet to learn about the emergence of humans in the recent past. A well distributed sampling of ancient DNA now blankets Eurasia, informatively reaching deep into our past, but the subtropical and tropical zones have only ever been extremely lightly explored. Perhaps a day will come when we run out of genomes, but in the world’s torrid zones, today that is unimaginable: we’ve barely begun to look. Every new discovery brings the possibility that untold ghost populations, physically extinct, but with echoes possibly even discernible in our DNA, will join the human menagerie. Not long ago, we thought we had nailed down the full plotline of humanity’s emergence in Africa 200,000 years ago. But now we behold lost chapters buried deep in the Libyan desert, a genetic trove of unfathomed North African tribes neither black nor Eurasian, but humans on an entirely distinct journey altogether.
Unsupervised Learning Journal Club
I started a new feature for paying subscribers this year, an Unsupervised Learning Journal Club, briskly reviewing a notable paper or preprint. At the end of each edition, I invite subscribers to vote on papers/preprints for the future editions. And indeed since the last Time Well Spent, both the third and fourth topics have been selected by reader vote. I first looked at a 2023 preprint on Albanian genetic origins and then reviewed a 2025 paper exploring modern humans’ deep hybrid origins. That fourth Journal Club came out this past week, so you are still in time to vote for next edition’s paper.
Eternally Illyrian: How Albanians resisted Rome and outlasted a Slavic onslaught:
Though the core of Albanian ancestry, a composite of European farmers and Yamnaya herders, dates to the Iron Age, this paper reiterates the scale of impactful later migrations. The Roman Empire those Illyrian emperors kept afloat changed the region by facilitating migration, and its subsequent withdrawal triggered even more change. First, from the east, whether from populous Anatolia or the venerable Levant, newcomers arrived in Illyria and settled in the western Balkan cities. Then, once imperial authority collapsed in the Balkans after 600 AD, the Slav migration transformed the region, reaching even the remote Albanian highlands. Though the Roman era’s written languages were Latin and Greek, Albanian’s persistence today makes clear that in the Illyrian uplands numerous holdouts consistently resisted assimilation, whether into the Roman world or the Slavic tribes. The Empire’s decline and the abandonment of its formerly glittering cities saw spoken Latin and Greek wither after 600 AD, but the hardy peasants and herders of the deep interior remained much as they always had been, their humble lifestyle equipping them to weather Rome’s collapse. The Illyrians had been there long before both the Romans and the Greeks, and a subset of their descendants, the Albanians, far outlasted those Latin and Greek speakers when civilization gave way to barbarism, thus delivering to the very doorstep of modernity the cadences of Iron-Age dialects and the long obscure culture of Illyria.
Homo with a side of sapiens: the brainy silent partner we co-opted 300,000 years ago:
A plain reading of this result is that modern humans are a synthetic population, and our functions and features are a melange. Most of our biological processes derive from the same lineage that gave rise to Neanderthals and Denisovans. But, a minority of our heritage is a holdover from some very different and alien population that was notably distinct from the Eurasian hominins likely demographically dominant within Africa (population A). That exotic population, labeled B here, seems to have bequeathed our lineage much more of its cognitive function, and perhaps crucially earned us our self-chosen sobriquet Homo sapiens. Modern humans’ uniqueness, and our subsequent rise to prominence, may then owe significantly to a fortuitous admixture event somewhere in Africa 300,000 years ago, where a numerically superior and robust population of hominins, like the giant Nephilim demigods of the Bible, fatefully absorbed a smaller, but more cognitively adept group of humans.
Editions 1 and 2:
Wealth, war and worse: plague’s ubiquity across millennia of human conquest
Where Queens Ruled: ancient DNA confirms legendary Matrilineal Celts were no exception
For free subscribers: a sense of the format from my 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
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Over to you
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