Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Penn State astrophysicist, Steinn Sigurdsson. Sigurdsson was a one-time colleague at the ScienceBlogs website in the twenty-aughts with Razib, where he ran the astrophysics-themed Dynamic of the Cats blog. At its peak, ScienceBlogs had nearly 100 writers who commented on topics as diverse as agriculture, Creationism and cosmology. Originally from Iceland, Sigurdsson's professional accomplishments have been wide-ranging, from serving as scientific director of arXiv to directing an institute focused on exobiology. Razib first asks him about the history of arXiv, which goes back over 30 years. It was the preprint server that blazed the bath for bioRxiv in biology, medRxiv in medicine and PsyArXiv in psychology. Razib asked Sigurdsson if preprint servers lead to open science, and if they will do away with peer preview. Do they affect the winner-take-all dynamics that apply to scientific publications? Razib and Sigurdsson also discuss the threat and promise of papers generated with AI methods like "large language models" pioneered by Google and popularized by OpenAI, and that have finally caught up to human-level fluency within the last 9 months with ChatGPT.

Then Razib queries Sigurdsson on numerous astrophysical topics. Is the universe going to expand forever? (Probably, and that expansion is speeding up.) Do we understand most of the matter and energy in the universe? (No.) Sigurdsson also discusses in detail the fact that now in 2023 we have confirmed black holes empirically in a manner that couldn't have been imagined a generation ago. Additionally, Razib has to confront the possibility that physics might abandon causality, and even open the door to magic, within the twisted maze of their equations in order to make sense of the universe. Finally, they discuss the probability of other life in the universe if our solar system is representative, the probability of intelligent life, how many planets there are in the universe and the possibility of Dyson (or Musk?) spheres in our solar system in the future.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back Gregory Clark, a past guest on this podcast. When he last talked to him, Clark had just been disinvited from giving a talk whose results he has now turned into a paper, The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022. Until recently an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, Clark is now teaching at the University of Southern Denmark. His previous books include The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility and A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

Today Razib and Clark discuss his shocking finding that a simple model predicated on genetic relatedness explains the status distribution across many centuries in England. Clark finds that even where wealth is passed from father to offspring (expected in a patriarchal society), occupational status is inherited equally from mother and father, as expected in a genetic framework rather than cultural framework. Another surprising result from Clark's dataset is that the rate of social mobility has been unchanged across 400 years in England, despite massive cultural and political shifts. He also finds high rates of inheritance of social status in many other societies, with the highest in the Indian subcontinent.

Razib asks Clark how it could be that the data shows such consistently similar rates of social status mobility across periods as different as Victorian England or post-World-War-II Britain. Clark also addresses why he did not work on a model that integrated cultural inheritance; in short, those models were more complex and seemed far less satisfying than his two-parameter equation. He also addresses the social media furor in response to his paper, and his defense against the charge that he's a eugenicist.

We're about a generation into the "age of genomics," or as it's sometimes termed the "post-genomic era." Today Razib talks to John Logsdon, a professor of biology at the University of Iowa, about what genomics has wrought in relation to our understanding of evolution, and what evolution has taught us about the structure and nature of the genome. In 2014, Logdson and Sarah J Hanson contributed a chapter entitled "Genome Evolution" to the Princeton Guide to Evolution. Razib uses this mid-2010s review to scaffold his discussion with Logdson about where we are in 2023. But first, he asks what the exact difference between genetics and genomics is. It is sometimes said that quantity has a quality all its own, and Razib and Logdson discuss the different analytic challenges of analyzing the evolutionary trajectory of a single gene, a task up the alley of classical genetics, and describing the evolution of the whole genome of an organism like a human, with thousands of genes.

They then move on to various issues relating to the architecture and evolution of the genome that are of deep interest and curiosity to researchers but rarely surfaced to the public. Why do bacterial genomes have so much less "junk" than those of complex organisms, like humans? Why is the relationship between organism complexity and genome size still so uncertain? How has evolution impacted the "molecular machinery" of the genome (like promoters)? And what is the difference between those scientists who use genomics to understand evolution and those who attempt to understand the evolutionary forces that shape the nature of the genome?

By inspecting where we are on many specific issues relating to evolution and genomics, Razib and Logdson begin a sketch of how the emergence of genomics has changed evolutionary biology, as the entire genetic maps of vast numbers of species are now at our fingertips. The discussion finally concludes with future possibilities in the next few decades, as the post-genomic era moves from a revolution to a background condition, a banality.

Note: Logsdon mentioned HHMI molecular genetic videos. Here is an excellent example:

Yesterday, Razib discussed Richard Hanania's The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics with the author. Today, Unsupervised Learning hosts a wide-ranging discussion with Christopher Rufo on his book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. While Hanania's focus is law and politics, Rufo looks at intellectual history and culture. If you follow his prolific output on social media or in City Journal, you know Rufo is an indefatigable culture warrior, but in America's Cultural Revolution he outlines in a book-length narrative the ideas and people he believes have driven the "Great Awokening" of the 2010's and 2020's.

Though Razib and Rufo first discuss his past life as a filmmaker, and in particular, Diamonds in the Dunes, a 2014 documentary about a baseball team in Xinjiang, most of the conversation revolves around the historical figures of the mid-to late-20th century that set the stage for the rise of woke culture and critical race theory. They begin with the elder statesmen of 1960's radicalism, Frankfurt School critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. The exposition of Marcuse's life is Rufo's entrée into a discussion about "Cultural Marxism" that has defined much of his public profile over the last few years. Rufo elucidates the connection between radical academics and violent activists in the streets in the late 1960's, and how it connects to protests in the 2010's. He also traces the genealogy of many modern institutions back to 1960's radicalism, including Marcuse's personal connection to the field of "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" (DEI) through his wife, who pioneered its practices and terminology. Razib and Rufo also discuss the checkered life of one of Marcuse's star students, Professor Angela Davis, whose involvement in violent terrorism in the 1960's is curiously ignored by her academic supporters. Skipping much closer to the present, Rufo talks about political and social radicalism he witnessed in 2020 in Seattle and the events later in Portland, as the Pacific Northwest came to embrace "America's Cultural Revolution."

Finally, Razib asks Rufo for his take on the state of contemporary politics, and the path forward. Though the vast majority of America's Cultural Revolution focuses on the past, Rufo has embraced an active role in current politics, especially the conflict over New College in Florida. Shifting from a Left-Right frame, Rufo reflects on tensions within the ostensibly anti-woke Right, and the future of the American republic and its critics both from on the far Left and far Right.

On the third episode of the Intellectual Brown Web (IBW) Razib, Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell (and her own Substack), Shadi Hamid of The Washingon Post (plus Wisdom of the Crowds and his own Substack) and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept (and his own Substack) discuss the effects of the Hamas atrocities and the now impending Israeli invasion of Gaza on both geopolitics and American culture. Haider and Khan address why they are finally discussing the Israeli-Palestine conflict, which both have ‌long avoided. In contrast, Hamid and Hussain who have both long taken a scholarly and journalistic interest in the issue, now find themselves deeply engaged once more. Hamid in particular addresses what he sees as the eliminationist rhetoric coming out of some Israeli and American quarters in reaction to the terrorist actions, while Hussain argues that the coming divide will be between the West and the Global South. All four discuss whether 2023 will be similar to 2001, with a massive pivot in American culture and foreign policy forced by Islamist terrorism (conclusion: probably not, but there will be changes).

They also discuss the massive impact of the conflict in American culture already in just the last few days, in particular its relevance to cancel culture and the strident unapologetic anti-Israel reactions of radical Left activists. Hamid puts the spotlight on billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who is attempting to assemble a list of Harvard students who are members of organizations that backed a pro-Palestinian letter so he can have the option of not hiring them. For the last half a decade Hamid has been a vocal opponent of cancel culture, and he objects to its resurgence in a new form, as well as the turning away from avowed principles by old allies against wokeness. Hussain and Haider respond that most people are truly not principled, and appeal to elevated universal ideals solely it is in their interest.

Khan, Haider, Hamid and Hussain finally discuss the relationship of American Jews with the American Left, and prospects for a coalitional crackup, as well as the future of the relationship between Jews and Muslims in the US. Khan brings up the divergence between academia and the rest of American society, with universities and many faculty members remaining silent in marked contrast to the official response to other recent high-profile political events, while Hollywood and corporations have strongly taken Israel's side.

They finish the conversation by reasserting the need for open discussion, free speech and an understanding and acceptance of human dignity, no matter one's ethnicity, religion and nationality. Though these principles are violated on all sides, Haider emphasizes that ‌there still need to be principles, lest every discussion and debate collapse into a power game of all against all.

Related: A Special Place in Hell: Israel at War, Israel, Gaza, and the Double Standard on Cancel Culture, Who is Responsible for the War in Gaza? and Hamas is dragging Israel toward the abyss.

In September 2023, Harper Collins published Richard Hanania's The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, two months after Christopher Rufo's America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Both these books tackle the same issue: the US's Leftist cultural direction, especially since 2015, and what Matthew Yglesias termed the "Great Awokening" in 2019. Razib recently interviewed both authors, and today we release the first of two conversations over consecutive days so listeners can reflect on Hanania and Rufo's divergent perspectives on one of the major themes of American political culture in the 2020's.

First, Razib talks to Hanania, who holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from UCLA, about The Origins of Woke. Befitting his legal education, much of the book delves into the knock-on consequences of 1960's legislation, particularly the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Hanania articulates the view that "wokeness" can be defined by the idea that any variation in outcome between groups must be ascribed to discrimination and that entertainment of alternative views (for example, that groups have different aptitudes and/or preferences for specific fields) is tantamount to racism. The Origins of Woke touches upon sex discrimination and the emergence of queer identity politics, but Hanania believes that the central through-line between the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the modern woke era is the black-white racial division in the US, and the fight for racial equality before the law morphing into a campaign for total equity of outcome in all domains of life. Synthesizing his background in law and political science, Hanania argues that a combination of vague initial legal frameworks and an activist bureaucracy have enabled the sharp detour from the original drafters' intent with civil rights legislation instead into a total revolution of norms. He also points out that much of the framework for the woke revolution was put in place under the conservative Nixon administration, a pattern observed by Pat Buchanan in his 1975 book Conservative votes, liberal victories: Why the right has failed.

One of the major contentions of The Origins of Woke is that excessive focus on Andrew Breitbart's assertion that "politics is downstream" of culture has led the Right down the wrong path to de facto defeatism. Hanania discusses how the "marketplace of ideas" model ultimately fails given the Left's capture of all institutions that would arbitrate issues around the culture war. Rather, Hanania clearly believes that the path to the rollback of woke norms across the broader culture is through politics, and in particular the Republican party fully embracing its role as a reactive force against the American legal regime that was seeded in the 1960's.

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Related: The Indian caste system: origin, impact and future, The character of caste and Passing the civilizational purity test: India's 3000-year caste straitjacket.

Unsupervised Learning tends to steer clear of topics "ripped from the headlines," but the occasional exception must be made. Today, Razib talks about the intersection of religion, caste and American law and policy with Sundar Iyer and Sudha Jagannathan. Jagannathan, an MBA, is now a board member of the Coalition of Hindus of North America, after working in technology and sales in the Bay Area for 30 years. Iyer is a technology entrepreneur, advisor and angel investor, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science. But this conversation is not about technology. It's about a "current event" that took over Iyer's life for the better part of the past three years. In the year 2020, California regulators sued Cisco Systems for "for internally enforcing the caste hierarchy." Iyer was one of two individuals named in that case. For most of the 2020's so far, Iyer's life was turned upside down, before the California Civil Rights Department dismissed its case against him (though it continues to pursue Cisco).

When the this issue first emerged in the news, some blogs, group chats and email lists surfaced points that should have made anyone skeptical that Iyer was a casteist: he is an atheist who does not identify as Hindu, and his personal views on social issues are quite liberal. These facts are in the public record because twenty years ago, long before he was in the public eye, Iyer wrote about his perspectives in a blog post expressing his strident atheism and rejection of caste. Now Iyer is speaking out about what he experienced, and how progressive cultural and political institutions are being weaponized by activists pursuing narrow, self-interested aims. As a successful entrepreneur, Iyer has the resources to fight to clear his name, and stand up for the objective truth against what he sees as the manipulations of the media and activists. Jagannathan also offers her own perspective as a devout Hindu who is from a "lower caste" background who takes issue with comments made in the mainstream media about her religion and culture, where the caste system is conflated with Hinduism and Indian identity, and assertions are made that the caste is a fundamental part of her faith.

Though this episode focuses on the institution of caste and the experience of Indian Americans specifically, it is more broadly about the significant tradeoffs of embracing simple solutions in a complex world. The social justice movement and the American elite political class are fundamentally egalitarian, currently ever alert for oppressors and the oppressed. In the process, innocent individuals get swept up in witch hunts, as activists attempt to find causes worthy of their attention and outrage. Iyer's experience is not unique, insofar as many, many, Americans have fallen under the narrowed eye of crusading Human Resources departments, bent on transforming workplace disputes into socio-political dramas. The ultimate question is whether an exceedingly diverse America can proceed forward as a dynamic economy and culture despite the burden of ever-present litigation and workplace conflict created when our elites fixate on what divides us, rather than what unites us.

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What is caste? This is a question many Americans have been asking since the publication of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (an Oprah's Book Club selection). On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks at length about the historical, cultural and genetic aspects of caste. He explains the genetic origins and impacts of the practice in the Indian subcontinent, and how that contrasts with "caste" in other societies like feudal Japan. Razib also explores how caste, a European-origin word, came to bracket a sociological phenomenon that includes two related concepts, varna and jati, and how the former is abstract while the latter is concrete.

Caste in the Indian subcontinent has massive social and political implications. Razib talks about the demographics of caste, and how this is relevant to considerations of equity in a nation-state originally founded on socialistic principles. In the subcontinent, caste is not simply a Hindu phenomenon but extends to Muslims and Christians. And in a subcontinent of nearly 2 billion people, caste expresses itself in varied ways depending on region.

Finally, Razib ponders the future of the institution. If diasporic communities like Mauritius and Guyana are any guide, caste has a dim future. With urban jati exogamy rates increasing constantly over the last generation, Razib predicts that in the 22nd century caste in the subcontinent will be viewed as a outmoded practice continued only by a few communities. Caste is a question that is relevant to both the past and the present, but the forces of modernization will eat away at its foundations going forward.

Today, Razib revisits The Horse, the Wheel, and Language with David Anthony, emeritus professor at Hartwick College and collaborator with David Reich's ancient DNA research group at Harvard University. Anthony and Razib survey the last two years in terms of questions regarding the domestication of the horse, the spread of the wheel, and Yamnaya steppe herders' language; subjects of his 2007 book. They also discuss the exponential growth in our understanding of the paleodemography of Bronze Age Eurasian nomads since 2015's publication of Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe, a study for which Anthony provided many of the samples.

Razib asks Anthony how his understanding of the rise of Indo-Europeans has or has not changed, in the wake of new data and novel interpretations over the last two years. Anthony reiterates the broad outlines he has been proposing for decades: the Yamnaya nomads of the Bronze-Age Eurasian steppe were the proto-Indo-Europeans, full stop. He also addresses those who argue for the Corded Ware culture of East-Central Europe being considered a sister, as opposed to a daughter, culture of the Yamnaya. Anthony points out that analysts in Reich's group have discovered individuals who are apparent relatives between the Yamnaya and Corded Ware, indicative of a close and tight bond. Like the Danish archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen, Anthony believes that the pastoralist people who invaded Northern Europe 5,000 years ago should be thought of as fundamentally Yamnaya. He also addresses those skeptical of Yamnaya origins, positing perhaps some discomfort with the idea that modern people descend from warlike nomadic groups.

Finally, Razib presses Anthony about new theories regarding more detailed structure of early Indo-European migrations. Does he accept the contention that most Indo-European groups descend from the Corded Ware, while Armenians, Greeks, Tocharians and Illyrians descend from the Yamnaya directly? What more elements to the narrative are going to be added beyond the broad assertion that the Yamnaya were the proto-Indo-Europeans?

Related podcasts: David Anthony: the origin of Indo-Europeans, Thomas Olander: the origin and spread of Indo-European languages, James P. Mallory: finding the Indo-Europeans and Kristian Kristiansen: the birth of Northern Europe.

Selected publications:

• The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe

• Population genomics of bronze age Eurasia

• Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

• The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes

• Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages

Today, Razib talks to Erik Hoel, host of the Substack The Intrinsic Perspective and author of The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science. An academic neuroscientist by training, in The World Behind the World Hoel outlines the emergence of modern neuroscience, and where it went wrong in terms of the field's researchers' focus. But first, Hoel discusses human understanding of the mind, and how it has changed over time. He gives his take on Julian Jayne's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and explains that it is unlikely that consciousness emerged after the Bronze Age as posited in the book. Instead, The World Behind the World argues that the differentiation between the inner world and the outer world, the intrinsic perspective of literature and psychology and the extrinsic perspective of physics and biology arose with the Classical Greeks 2,500 years ago. Hoel also observes that a modern perspective on one's inner world and psychological complexity so evident in Greco-Roman texts rapidly fades again after the fall of Rome and the regression during the Dark Ages, when literacy declined and text became refocused exclusively on the functional external world, whether it be tax records or agronomy manuals.

The World Behind the World is a book-length argument fleshing out Hoel's contention that understanding consciousness is, and must be, at the heart of neuroscience. Though studies of the biology and chemistry of axons and glial cells make sense from a reductionistic perspective, Hoel makes a convincing case that contemporary neuroscience models fail to understand how the brain works. The World Behind the World suggests modern neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic, like biology before evolution or physics before Newtonian mechanics: merely a collection of fascinating observations and detailed mechanisms. Hoel maintains that a true neuroscience theory with consciousness as its center and organizing principle is necessary to understand how the intrinsic world emerged and functions.