Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

I’ve known Ramez Naam since 2003 when he wrote More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. Back then he was leading a team at Microsoft, and moonlighting as a writer. Over the last twenty years, he’s changed careers, and become a full-time writer and speaker. He’s the author of three science fiction books, Crux, Apex, and Nexus.

Ramez has also written The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet.

It’s because of the last book that he’s become an expert on the future of solar technology. Ramez has been predicting the ubiquity of cheap solar power for a decade now.

In this conversation, we talk about a variety of issues he’s tackled over the past few decades, as well as my own concerns about the future of the planet. Was he too optimistic about the future of biotech in the early 2000’s? How about solar energy in 2010? I also ask him about the coming “limits to resources” prognostications that we hear about every decade or so. Are we going to run out of phosphorus?

Finally, I ask Ramez to speak on the fact that climate catastrophism has become very fashionable in elite circles, and how that affects our ability to tackle the challenges of the 21st century. Ramez Naam is the type of person you listen to closely, even if you have a disagreement with what they say.

Three years ago the Golden State Killer was arrested through genetic genealogy enabled by the new direct-to-consumer platforms. Over the past several years many more cases have been solved through new DNA techniques and database searches. But more recently, Montana and Maryland banned the practice. Six years after the original CSI went off the air, genomics and forensics have started to fuse into something new and far more powerful.

David Mittelman is a scientist who is bringing “next-generation” genomics to the field of forensic genomics with his company Othram.

We discuss the crimes he’s solved, his new website DNA Solves, and how genomic technologies are going to transform the field of forensics.

Three years ago the Golden State Killer was arrested through genetic genealogy enabled by the new direct-to-consumer platforms. Over the past several years many more cases have been solved through new DNA techniques and database searches. But more recently, Montana and Maryland banned the practice. Six years after the original CSI went off the air, genomics and forensics have started to fuse into something new and far more powerful.

David Mittelman is a scientist who is bringing “next-generation” genomics to the field of forensic genomics with his company Othram.

We discuss the crimes he’s solved, his new website DNA Solves, and how genomic technologies are going to transform the field of forensics.

James P. Mallory received in Ph.D. in Indo-European studies from UCLA in 1975 under the supervision of Marija Gimbutas. He is the author of In Search of Indo-Europeans, The Origins of the Irish, and The Tarim Mummies, and an emeritus professor at Queen’s University Belfast.

Mallory devoted much of his career to understanding the origins of the Indo-Europeans. Over the first 30 minutes of he gives a magisterial overview of the question, the field, and where we are now. Mallory begins in the 18th century, proceeds through the 19th and 20th centuries, before finally arriving in 2015 when he was asked to review Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe by Nature.

The arrival of ancient DNA transformed the whole field within just a few years, vindicating some of Mallory’s conjectures and commitments, but leaving others even more clouded. We discuss whether the Hittites and Tocharians remain “mysterious,” and how surprising it was that the Corded Ware were basically Yamnaya despite striking differences in their material culture.

Mallory also discusses the nature of data analysis in a field like archaeology, where material culture can transform overnight, and richness (the last Neolithic societies of Europe) can give way to the poverty of remains (the Corded Ware). It turns out most of what we know about the Yamnaya and Corded Ware are from their burials because that’s all they left.

It’s a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation.

Dr. Marie Favereau is an associate professor at Paris Nanterre University. Her academic work has been on the Mamlukes of Egypt and the Mongol Golden Horde. Most recently, she is the author of The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World. I recently reviewed it for UnHerd, What the Mongols did for us: The Golden Horde wasn't barbarous, it created the modern world.

Dr. Favereau and I discuss the origin of the Golden Horde, the Mongols of the northwest who ruled much of Eastern Europe for centuries, and its evolution over several centuries. I was particularly curious about various things I’ve read about the Golden Horde in relation to other branches of the Mongol Empire. Was it the poorest? Was it marginal? Was it basically a Kipchak Turkic Khanate that had a Mongol veneer?

There are many truisms that are punctured in this conversation. For example, though the Golden Horde was poor in people, it was rich in resources. On a per-capita basis, it’s quite possible the Mongols of the Golden Horde were the richest west of China. The Golden Horde exported slaves to the Middle East and controlled the fur trade that had once been the purview of Novgorod the Great.

The Golden Horde was not on the margins of world history but actually drove it. We discuss extensively the role of the Horde in shaping the orientation of Russia and Russian history. It is likely that the preponderance of the subjects of the Horde were Slavic-speaking Orthodox Christians, and the Mongols and the Princes of Moscow had a very productive relationship for centuries. The rewriting of this history has been one of the great projects of Russian nationalism over the last few centuries.

Finally, we discuss future projects and avenues of research.

Dr. Kristian Kristiansen has been at the forefront of the synthesis between archaeology and ancient DNA. That new joint field has allowed for a deeper understanding of the transition to Indo-European languages in Northern Europe 5,000 years ago. In 2015 he was a co-author on Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia, which established that there was a massive migration of the steppe people into Europe that resulted in the emergence of the Corded Ware culture, the likely predecessor of most subsequent Indo-European groups.

More recently, he has been thinking about the exact process by which genetic replacement and cultural transformation might have occurred. Unfortunately, some of his ideas have been misinterpreted by the media, leading to the bizarre piece in The New Scientist, Story of most murderous people of all time revealed in ancient DNA.

On the podcast, we address this piece, the misunderstanding that led to it, and the blowback Dr. Kristiansen received. Of course, he also articulates the reality that as scholars one must be faithful to the data, and there is evidence of aggression and violence on the part of the Corded Ware. It just isn’t the case though that they were special or unique in this regard.

Additionally, Dr. Kristiansen talks about the fact that there are various ideologies that have attempted for decades, and continue to the present day, to co-opt his discipline, as well as new results from ancient DNA.

More generally, we talk about how ancient DNA has transformed his profession, and how it has brought to the mainstream views he and Dr. David Anthony have held for decades. Like Dr. Anthony, Dr. Kristiansen was taken aback by the magnitude of the migration, which has made him rethink some of his assumptions. His group also was instrumental in discovering that the early Indo-Europeans brought the plague, and we discuss the role it may have played in the collapse of “Old Europe.”

Finally, he outlines the theory and data that the Corded Ware were patrilineal and exogamous, and how that explains their adaptability and the maintenance of their steppe cultural traditions and identity.

David Anthony is an emeritus professor of Hartwick College and now a collaborator with David Reich at Harvard. Over the past four decades, Anthony has been involved in exploring the origin and rise of Indo-Europeans from the perspective of archaeology, most especially in his magisterial 2007 book The Horse, The Wheel, and Language.

In the 2010’s he began collaborating with geneticists. He provided many of the Yamnaya samples for 2015’s Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe. This paper vindicated Anthony’s argument that the Yamnaya spread westward into Europe in the early Bronze Age. But even he was shocked by the enormous genetic impact of these people.

We talked about the past few generations in archaeology and its attitude toward migration, as well as possible future directions, including the domestication of the horse. Anthony also mentions the intriguing working title for his next book: The Dogs of War.

45% of humans speak an Indo-European language. English is Indo-European. Hindi is Indo-European. The language of the ancient Hittites was Indo-European. This is one reason the origin and expansion of this language family is so interesting to so many.

Thomas Olander is an associate professor of Indo-European studies in Denmark. He has a deep interest in the question of when and where the Proto-Indo-European speakers flourished. In the podcast we talk about different hypotheses in terms of the “homeland problem” (Pontic steppe vs. Anatolia), the issues historical linguists have with Bayesian phylogenetics, and the impact of ancient DNA in clarifying long-stand disputes. I also push Thomas on what we do, and don’t, know, at least from his view as a historical linguist.

Mentioned:

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

In Search of the Indo-Europeans

Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say

In the winter of 2021, I noticed a minor controversy regarding ‘academic cancellation’ around Gregory Clark, an economic historian at UC Davis. Representative pieces are Glasgow University in row over decision to invite guest speaker Gregory Clark, and Why is the woke mob so scared? The Free Speech Union put together a petition, Letter to Adam Smith Business School About No-Platforming of Professor Gregory Clark Signed by Over 70 Academics, signed by numerous public intellectuals after his talk was canceled.

This was not entirely surprising. In 2014 Clark submitted a piece to The New York Times, Your Ancestors, Your Fate, which outlined some of his findings in his book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. His conclusion was that social status was far more persistent across lineages than economic historians had realized. This contention drew some sharp reactions. The Chronicle of Higher Education published a review headlined For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls.

As it happens, I know Greg a bit from my time at UC Davis, and I sent him an email and asked if he’d talk about the controversy. He agreed and cleared up the major points. The crux of the issue is that he had taken to the headline “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls” (his earlier book was A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World), and his use of the phrase “bell curve” in the talk’s title had engendered the perception he was a eugenicist.

Thankfully we did not spend most of the conversation on the controversy. Greg was more bemused than alarmed. Rather, we explored Greg’s descriptive finding, very high long-term persistence of social status across lineages, and discussed possible reasons for this, including genetic factors.

Is Greg Clark a “genetic determinist”? We discuss. You decide.

What are the relationship between Christianity, ancient paganism, and Western culture? Does mass secularization in the West presage a new pagan era? Where is “New Atheism” 15 years after its peak?

These are just some of the questions Ben Bassett and I mull over. Bassett is an archaeologist but has a deep interest in ancient history. Three years ago he wrote:

• Progress and Polytheism: Could an Ethical West Exist Without Christianity?

We also referenced Unbelievable? Is the God of the Bible a capriciously malevolent, misogynistic, sadomasochistic bully? Dan Barker vs Martin Kuhrt and The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible. Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World and Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics were also discussed.

We live in a time of religious change. Both Ben and I believe it is important to look at the last great change in Western history to get a sense of the future.