Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Rob Henderson is one of the most interesting young thinkers active today. A writer with an engaging Twitter account and must-subscribe newsletter, he is perhaps most well known today for his popularization of the concept of “luxury beliefs.”

My conversation with Rob occurred in the midst of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. I was looking for his perspective on the world, and the reality of American decline, because his own life story is so unique, and yet so American. Given up for adoption by a Korean mother with drug addictions, Rob was raised by a Korean American lesbian in relative poverty in Red Bluff, California. Red Bluff is in the heart of California’s conservative and poor Central Valley. A very different California than the dreams of out-of-staters.

John Hawks is a paleoanthropologist who has been a researcher and commentator in the fields of human evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology for over two decades. With a widely-read weblog, a book on Homo naledi, and highly cited scientific papers, Hawks’ voice is essential to understanding the origin of our species.

In this episode, Hawks talks about how he stumbled onto paleoanthropology, and his work in the 2000’s, where he was at the center of debates between various camps within the field. Then we discuss his shift into genetics as a tool for exploring the big questions in human evolution.

Finally, Hawks and I also address his recent foray into the controversies in the field of ancient DNA, where he has taken a stand against some of the prominent laboratories he believes are destroying specimens needlessly.

Related: My discussion with Hawk’s Ph.D. advisor, Milford Wolpoff, from the spring of 2018.

On January 22nd, 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States of America declared abortion legal in all 50 states when it decided Roe vs. Wade. This landmark decision was arguably one of the two biggest cases in relation to social policy in the US in the 20th century (the other being 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education).

Though abortion has been on the back-burner as an issue over the past decade or so, for most of the whole period after Roe vs. Wade it has dominated and shaped cultural politics in the US. In the 21st century, America has a pro-choice party (the Democrats) and a pro-life party (the Republicans).

To make sense of how this came about, I talked to Ramesh Ponnuru, a columnist at Bloomberg, an editor for National Review, and fellow at AEI. Ponnuru is also the author of Party of Death, and a social conservative who has written and thought about the history of the pro-life movement, and where it is will go into the future.

In this podcast Ponnuru and I discuss:

• How the Democrats and Republicans “flipped” positions on abortion rights

• Ronald Reagan’s signing of a law decriminalizing abortion in the late 1960’s

• Accusations of sexism and racism against the pro-life movement

• The contrast between the trajectory of attitudes toward gay marriage and abortion among young people (and society as a whole)

• The decline in rates of abortion since the 1970’s

• The relationship of prenatal testing to abortion in America

• Finally, prospects for the future of the pro-life movement, and whether the Supreme Court will overturn Roe vs. Wade in the near future

For this episode of Unsupervised Learning, I talked to Richard Hanania of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.  

Alina Chan is a post-doctoral fellow at the Broad Institute. Since the spring of 2020 Chan has been prominent in online (and “offline”) discussions as to the nature of the origins of SARS-Cov-2. Her argument is that there needs to be more openness to alternative possibilities of the origin of SARS-Cov-2. She is a co-author on two preprints related to SARS-Cov-2:

SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence?

Single source of pangolin CoVs with a near identical Spike RBD to SARS-CoV-2

Armand Marie Leroi is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body and The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. An evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London, Leroi has tackled race and eugenics, as well as published on the cultural evolution of music and the neutral theory of evolution.

In a wide-ranging conversation, we discuss his attempts to tackle the concepts of race and eugenics as a public intellectual, his exploration of cultural evolution, and finally, the impact of the rise of “woke culture” has had on free inquiry in the United Kingdom

Leroi is one of those intellectuals who should be better known, with his wide-ranging and always cogent commentaries on genetics, culture, and policy.

Dr. Jeremy Kamil is a virologist in the LSU system. He is one of the people I have encountered over the last year whose opinion I’ve learned to take to heart. Not because Jeremy holds forth from on high, but because he doesn’t. As you will hear in this conversation, he is candid about how little he truly knew at the beginning of 2020. A world transformed by COVID-19 has also seen a world of pundits and commentators rewriting history, testifying to their foresight. Masks are useless until they’re not.

Razib talks to political analyst David Shor.

Razib talks to archaeologists Eric Cline about his book 1177, and the end of the Bronze Age.