Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Jared Rubin is a professor of economics at Chapman University. He works at the intersection of religion and economics. This is not an entirely obscure field, as evident in 2010’s Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion. Nevertheless, Rubin talks about how he was somewhat of an odd duck in the field of economic history due to his interest in religion. His advisor indicated that it would be difficult to find a job. Luckily, that prediction did not come true.

Most of the discussion is given over to Rubin’s 2017 book, Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not. He argues that the ideological content of Western Christianity matters in terms of the development of capitalism and liberal institutions. Though in the details the model is quite different from the sort of thesis promoted by Max Webber, Rubin does believe that ideas have consequences. In particular, we talk extensively about what a “legitimating ideology” is, and why Islam managed to check the rise of the capitalist class despite the fact that the Prophet Muhammad was himself a merchant.

Rubin’s argument dovetails in many ways with Joe Henrich’s in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.

Finally, we close out the conversation talking about the book which will be out next year, coauthored with Mark Koyama, How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth. You can’t say that they don’t have ambition.

You can find the transcript of the conversation here.

Jason Munshi-South is a biologist who studies a creature many of us have an ambivalent relationship to, the rat. His lab is at Fordham University, in the New York City area. Jason is an “urban ecologist,” so he studies the wildlife in and around cities. This is what drew him to the rat. Or, to be more frank, there was public demand for him to study rats, and he gave the people what they wanted.

We talk about:

• The black rat vs. brown rat

• The origins of the brown rat

• How do rats and mice interact

• The fact that cats don’t really scare rats

• The phylogeography and genetics of brown rats

• The genetics of the lab rat (which is a brown rat)

• The rat as a model organism

If you want to know about the genetics of New York City rats, this is the podcast for you!

Transcript: because of subscriber demand and inquiry, I have autogenerated a transcript for this episode. You can view it here. In the future I’ll be getting an editor to manually fix the obvious transcription errors.

Economics is obviously important. Recently in the US, we’ve been talking about the threat of inflation, and spending financed through debt. What does this all mean? Not only are the answers important on a macro level, but they’re also relevant to all of us.

To attack these questions I decided to talk to Karl Smith, a columnist at Bloomberg. We tackle four big topics:

1. Are we on the path toward severe inflation? (in the US)

2. Is the US headed toward a public debt crisis in the 2020’s?

3. What is the path forward for the US-China relationship?

4. Finally, Karl proposes his own understanding of the new class system in the US, divided into three groups, and how we can proceed forward in a reasonably equitable manner

First, I want to mention that readers of Unsupervised Learning may hear the doorbell from Duke (from “Duke Tales”) mid-recording. While he usually visits me evenings, Duke made a special afternoon stop, perhaps thanks to the appearance of a Tesla in the driveway.

With that out of the way, I’m very excited to present this conversation with Linda Avey, the co-founder of 23andMe, and current CEO of Precisely. Most of you probably know about 23andMe, which helped create the idea of “direct-to-consumer” genomics in the 2000’s, along with the Genographic Project and Family Tree DNA. Linda was involved in 23andMe from the beginning, and she gives us some insight into their vision, as well as the specific products and offerings that they stumbled upon. For example, genealogical relative-matching was something of a lark, despite its now-massive impact.

But we also go back to her involvement in the Human Genome Project, the early days of sequencing, and her roots in western South Dakota. Linda also candidly assesses where direct-to-consumer genomics is today, and how she evaluates its impact in comparison to her expectations in the 2000’s. Finally, we talk about the future directions with her current company, and how we can make Americans healthier.

In this conversation, I discuss “cultural evolution” with Alex Mesoudi. The very term can be confusing and perplexing to some. After all, it seems intuitive that culture evolves and changes. But here Mesoudi and I discuss the science of cultural evolution, which is today a robust and interdisciplinary field (also see my conversation with Richard McElreath). Why do cultures vary? How fast and why do they change? What is the relation between genes and cultures? All these are topics that cultural evolution as a field addresses.

The origins of cultural evolution go back to the 1970’s and 1980’s, in particular, with the research of three pairs of researchers:

• L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution

• E. O. Wilson and Charles Lumsden, Genes, Mind, and Culture

• Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, Culture and Evolutionary Process

These scholars understood cultural evolution as a branch of population biology. More precisely, they leveraged evolutionary genetic modes of thinking and models and applied them to cultural processes. Boyd and Richerson in particular have continued working in this area (see Not By Genes Alone) and spawned a whole coterie of scholars.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Mesoudi offers his opinion on topics as variegated as reductionism, the importance of theory, group selection, and the utility of memes. Also, I should mention that he’s written the literal book on the topic, Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences.

Today on this bonus episode of Unsupervised Learning I’m excited to talk to Patrick Wyman about his new book, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World.

Full disclosure, I enjoyed The Verge, and a review will be posted from me on National Review Online within the next week.

Wyman is the host of Tides of History, a podcast about history and assorted topics which I recommend to everyone (I’ve been a guest). If you’ve listened to him speak at length, you won’t be very surprised by the topics and style of writing in The Verge. The narrative does a great job balancing the academic with the engaging.

After reading his book I was curious to ask Wyman about how he wove social and economic history into a persona-driven narrative. We talk at length about the particular details of the significance of the 40-year-period he covers, and whether Martin Luther was a necessary man (as opposed to just being sufficient).

Patrick and I also tackle meta-historical questions such as the importance of “great men” versus forces-of-history, and whether the Protestant Reformation was inevitable due to technological changes. It’s a wide-ranging conversation, so if you are interested in the nitty-gritty of historical processes I think you’ll enjoy it.

Cross-promotion: The six-part series on Finland is done, check it out:

• Part one: Duke Tales: shades of Finnish cultural weirdness in my own backyard

• Part two: Weirdness as a national pastime: culture

• Part three: Go West Young Siberian: genetics findings

• Part four: From deepest Siberia to Europe’s edge: more genetics

• Part five: Frontier Finns: cabins, rakes & Indians

• Part six: Finnish brains, baiting and bottlenecks: education and medical genetics

Last week we saw the debut of two new possible human “species”, one in Israel and another in China (read my post on the topic or listen to the podcast with Vagheesh Narasimhan). The team out of Israel did not explicitly name their find a new species, referring to it as the “Nesha Ramla hominin.” But it is clear reading between the lines that they believe they did discover a new species-level hominin. In contrast, the Chinese team did explicitly propose a new species, Homo longi. Whether you accept this or not, some paleoanthropologists argue that this is a problem, because this fossil fits the parameters of an older proposed species, Homo daliensis. It turns out species are a more knotty matter than we might think.

With this is in mind I thought it was appropriate to post my conversation with John S. Wilkins, a philosopher of science whose specialty is the history of the idea of species (see his book, Species: The History of an Idea). He’s spent decades thinking about this concept, which spans thousands of years.

This conversation surprised me because it turns out that the ancients weren’t as unsophisticated as I’d thought, and some of the sillier ideas of Creationists in relation to speciation are actually rather recent innovations. We also tackle the fact that geneticists and other biologists often have disagreements on what a “species” is, and whether it’s a useful concept in the end (perhaps?).

If you are an American and don’t think discussions about what a species is matters, think of the Endangered Species Act. It turns out that a lot can ride on a “name.”

Last week two new hominin fossils were published in the scientific literature, and extensively reported on in the media. “Dragon Man”, discovered in Harbin, China, and dating to 140,000 years ago is claimed to be a new species that is the closest to the modern human lineage. Meanwhile, the hominin discovered at Nesha Ramla in Israel dates to 120,000-140,000 years ago, and it seems most similar to Neanderthals (though its tools are no different from modern humans to the south and west in Africa).

I’ve given some thought to the implications of these results, and how to interpret them. But I wanted to get the sense of another geneticist, my friend Vagheesh Narasimhan. I’ve talked to Vagheesh before in relation to his blockbuster paper, The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia. My goal for this podcast was to “nerd out” on human evolution from a genomics perspective, and see if he had the same impressions that I did of these papers.

We discussed population structure in Denisovans, the importance of ancient DNA and proteins, whether the “Out of Africa” theory even makes sense, as well as new work on methylation patterns in the genome and predicting physical characteristics. I did bring up statistical power in “skull science,” and both of us expounded on why DNA, in particular, is so powerful as a method of inference in comparison to traditional morphology.

It was an hour spent slashing back and forth across these two papers and circling around from a genetic perspective.

Both of us agreed that we can’t conclude Dragon Man is closest to modern humans.

Past paleoanthropology podcasts:

• Chris Stringer: 1,000,000 years of human evolution

• Chris Stringer on paleoanthropology in 2020

• Chris Stringer and The Human Revolution

• Multiregionalism is Dead...Long Live Multiregionalism!

• A conversation with John Hawks: a life in paleoanthropology

• John Hawks on Neanderthals: part 1, part 2

• Lee Berger and the Dawn of "Big Data" in Paleoanthropology

Richard Hanania is the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI). He also runs a Substack and a podcast that are “must-read/listen.” Richard is perceived as something of a contrarian, so I wanted to ask him about Israel and its role in American politics because he has opinions on that topic somewhat outside of the mainstream.

But since I scheduled this podcast he’s “blown up” due to a piece he wrote, Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law. Eliciting responses from the Right and Left, this is the sort of work that has made Richard’s name. He goes where angels fear to tread. His profile has certainly gotten higher since I got to know him several years ago. He was recently on the Tucker Carlson show.

On this podcast we talk about:

• The incessant attention given over to the Israel-Palestine conflict in the USA

• His thesis that in relation to “wokeness” culture is downstream of politics

• The inevitability of Chinese dominance in the 21st century

• The mass hysteria in reaction COVID-19

• What it’s like running a “Think Tank”

By popular demand, Samo Burja is my first repeat guest on this podcast. You’ve been asking for him, so when he wrote a great piece in Palladium Magazine, Why Civilization Is Older Than We Thought, I had to ask him back on. Much of the piece is specifically about Göbekli Tepe, an ancient site in Turkey that predates the Neolithic, dating to 11,600 years ago.

Burja focuses on how our preconceptions shape how we understand the world and interpret data. For example, at first, archaeologists thought that the site must date to the Byzantine period, 1,000 years ago, based on the nature of the monumental objects. Their artistry and grandeur seemed beyond the ability of ancient people, let alone Paleolithic ones.

The bigger picture is that perhaps we misunderstand our Paleolithic past because we assume that Pleistocene hunter-gatherers were similar to relict populations in the Kalahari, the Congo and the Andaman Islands. The reality is that during the Pleistocene, hunter-gatherers occupied the rich, fertile lands now occupied by farmers. Their societies and cultures may have been much more sedentary than we can imagine today. Burja suggests that the elements of agriculture and complex society may be much older than we today assume. They might even go back to the beginning of modern humans outside of Africa, 50,000 years ago.

Get ready to challenge your priors!