Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Abdel Abdellaoui is a researcher in the Netherlands who works in the intersection of psychology and genetics. He’s a pretty active figure on social media, and because of his subject matter interests, he has become embroiled in a few controversies. When scientists talk about genetics and psychology, behavior genetics, the public listens and offers opinions.

Over the course of our conversation, I discuss how he got into behavior genetics, and what the lay of the land in the Netherlands is like for academic science. We also discussed the Netherlands’ Twin Registery, and how useful it’s been for behavior genetics in that nation, as well as the plethora of data available to researchers in 2021.

Abdellaoui’s 2019 paper, Genetic correlates of social stratification in Great Britain, stirred a bit of controversy, and I asked him why people thought it supported eugenics. We also discussed a recent preprint that he was a coauthor on, Natural Selection in Contemporary Humans is Linked to Income and Substitution Effects.

Gabriel Rossman is a sociologist at UCLA. The author of Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation, Rossman takes a deeply analytic toolkit to questions such as why 2005’s “My Humps” became a viral hit. The last 1/3rd of the podcast is devoted to discussing a recent paper that he is an author on, Network hubs cease to be influential in the presence of low levels of advertising.

But first, we discuss other topics. Recently Rossman has been seeing a change in the intellectual and political climate in modern sociology, with a shift from the positive to the normative. We explore the disjunction between public perception of the field (very left-wing), and the reality of it (much more empirical and rigorous), and how the two are slowly converging.

After a short digression on Napoleon Chagnon, I also asked him about how “knotty” our social networks are. How is it that some people seem to know many other people?

Eventually, we do discussion advertising, influencers, and a reconsideration of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point twenty years on.

Listeners to some of my podcasts on human evolution often tell me, in a friendly enough manner, that the jargon is often tough going. To be frank I can actually empathize with this. It is difficult for me to keep up with all the paleogenetics, let alone the ins and outs of paleoanthropology. What’s the difference between ergaster and heidelbergensis? Are Denisovans a species? Where in Africa did modern humans emerge? There are dozens of questions like this.

This is why I often touch base with Dr. Chris Stringer, an eminent paleoanthropologist who also happens to be incredibly accessible.

Chris is the author of many books and hundreds of papers on human evolution. He is also vocal on Twitter. Since he is not shy about offering his opinion and assessment, I reached out to him to get his take on the past one million years of human evolution as it stands now. Chris was also an author on a recent paper, The Origins of Modern Human Ancestry, which serves as an excellent starting point for the discussion on this episode of Unsupervised Learning.

We discuss:

- What is Homo erectus?

- Were Denisovans one species?

- Where is “Out of Africa” in 2021?

- How many species were present in Southeast Asia ten years ago?

- Lots about the origins of anatomically modern humans

Tom Booth is an English archaeologist who has had great timing in his career, as he’s been riding the massive wave of ancient DNA findings out of Britain over the past decade.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6520225/

Nick Patterson is a computational biologist at the Broad Institute. A collaborator with David Reich for nearly 20 years, Nick has traversed the world of genetics from its medical domain to the realm of anthropology and ancient DNA.

But before he was a geneticist Nick had varied lives, including a stint with the British government, as a cryptographer, and a quant for Renaissance Technologies. We also discuss his background in dark post-World War II England, and how it shaped him.

Normally I post a photograph of the guest for the podcast. But in the case of Matt Ridley, I am making an exception. Rather, I’m highlighting his 1999 book, Genome: The autobiography of a species in 23 chapters. This book is incredibly influential for the generation of genomicists who came of age in the 21st century. Written in the late 1990’s when the genomics revolution was barely off the ground, Ridley’s elegant prose anticipated how exciting this field was going to be for many of us. Genome captured lighting that was bolting into the future.

On this podcast, Ridley and I talk about

• The genesis of Genome

• Which chapters hold up, and which do not

• The success (or lack thereof) of his past and future books

• The relevance of evolution to everything

• Why Francis Crick is going to get “cancelled” at some point

• If he’s still a happy Thatcherite

• Britain’s response to COVID-19

• The origin of COVID-19 (his next book project)

Lee Jussim is a social psychologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Known outside of his field as a major critic of stereotype threat, Lee is involved in online science communication and the replication crisis. A major internal critical of his own field, Lee and I discuss:

- His experience after Hurricane Sandy

- What he actually believes is true in social psychology

- The relationship between political uniformity and results in social science

Cathy Young is a writer who contributes to Reason, Newsday, and Arc Digital. Born in the Soviet Union, she immigrated to the United States as a teen in the 1980s. Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood and Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality.

In December she wrote The Guillotine Mystique: The French Revolution has long inspired progressive radicals ready for change at any cost for Reason. She has even started the French Revolution Nerdblog.

Chad Orzel is a spherical object…actually, no. He’s a physicist. More precisely, a physics professor at Union College, in Schenectady, New York.

He’s the author of four books:

• Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects

• How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog

• How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog

• Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist

This week’s guests made time to chat at a moment’s notice over the last 24 hours as the luckiest of us are just beginning to get back to normal life (though many here remain without water even after power was restored). This is very much a rough draft of history, not my usual evergreen type of content. I’m learning something new daily and I hope you’ll get something out of it, too.

My guests:

• Jon Stokes, a deputy editor at The Prepared. Jon talks about how and why even he was caught flat-footed, even though he has long been a prepper.

• Gareth Highnam, a scientist in Austin who managed to lose not one but two roofs over his head in a single day, thanks to condo sprinkler systems bursting.

• Marina Roberts, of Austin DSA and Homes not Handcuffs, talks about how the crisis has impacted the large population of homeless in the metro area.

• Lisa Mahapatra, a tech worker who recently relocated to Austin from California talks about what it’s like being a new homeowner in a new city in the grips of a local disaster.

• Finally, I caught up with two friends for a discussion of power grids, supply chains, and American decline: Josiah Neeley, an Austin-based energy analyst at R Street, and of the Urbane Cowboys podcast, and Byrne Hobart, a recent Brooklyn-to-Austin transplant who writes The Diff, a finance and economics Substack.