Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to human geneticist Cesar Fortes-Lima about his paper from earlier this year, Population history and admixture of the Fulani people from the Sahel. Fortes-Lima has a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, and his primary research areas include African genetic diversity, the African diaspora, the transatlantic slave trade, demographic inference, admixture dynamics and mass migrations. Formerly a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Human Evolution at Uppsala University, Forest-Lima is now an instructor in genetic medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. He is also a returning guest to the podcast, having earlier come on to discuss his paper The genetic legacy of the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples in Africa.

Razib and Fortes-Lima first contextualize who the Fulani are in the West African socio-historical context, in particular, their role as transmitters of Islam across the Sahel. They also discuss the importance of having numerous Fulani subpopulations in the publication; earlier work had generalized about the Fulani from a small number of samples from a single tribe. Fortes-Lima highlights the primary finding, in particular, that the Fulani seem to have what we now call “Ancient North African” (ANA) ancestry. That people was related to, but not descended from, the “out of Africa” population which gave rise to Eurasians. They also explore the role of natural selection in allowing the Fulani to subsist on a diet high in milk, and how the Fulani lactase persistence mutation is exact same with Eurasians rather than East Africans. Fortest-Lima also reviews some of the earlier 20th-century anthropological speculations about the origins of the Fulani, and what his results show about their affinities (or lack thereof) to groups in West Asia and the Maghreb.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jack Despain Zhou, executive director of the Center for Educational Progress (CEP). Despain Zhou is a graduate of Western Governors University, and is completing his J.D. at Temple University. A former cryptographic analyst for the US Air Force, Despain Zhou is better known as a former producer for Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog at Blocked and Reported under the pseudonym Tracie Woodgrains.

Despain Zhou’s mission with CEP is to push for individualized learning programs “where every student can advance as far and as fast as their curiosity and determination will take them.” In short, not only does CEP support tracking, but it believes that more individualized learning environments are what allow students to flourish. Despain Zhou talks about how his own life informed his interest in this topic, going from a precocious and curious toddler to a sullen elementary school student. He explained to his mother at the time how the boring, regimented one-size-fits-all mentality of the public school system removed all his passion for learning. Despain Zhou talks about how the levelling and equity oriented philosophy of the modern educational establishment is extremely unpopular, but has nevertheless taken root in ed schools and therefore has advocates among both teachers and administrators. He makes the case that CEP’s advocacy is needed given the educational theorists’ intense and passionate fixation on keeping students of all talents at the same level; this is a case where Despain Zhou argues common sense is far superior to esoteric research for which there is truly no robust evidence.

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Your time is finite. Your phone and the internet stand ready to help you squander it. Here are my latest picks for spending it well instead. Feel free to add more in the comments.

Bastille Day, on July 14th, marks a crucial turning point in what became known as the French Revolution, the tumultuous years that saw the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of the Republic. In the 19th century, Britain and its daughters surpassed France in political, military and economic importance, but even since then, the “Eldest Daughter of the Church” has continued to exert an outsized cultural and social influence. This was clear in the Belle Époque, the 40-year peace between the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 and World War I. Auguste and Louis Lumière screened the first public films in Paris in 1895, Pablo Picasso pioneered Cubism in Paris amid its fervid international art scene in the 1910s and the Eiffel Tower opened in 1889. In the 21st century, French intellectuals remain relevant, and have significantly shaped the Anglo-American world that became the new global culture.

Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, published in 2000 when the author was 93 years old, is a tour de force, swan song and magnum opus that leans both on Barzun’s learned erudition and lived experience. In Paris, Barzun’s parents hosted assorted literary and artistic luminaries in their home, in particular pioneers in modernism and Cubism. After his family relocated to the US in 1919, Barzun studied at Columbia University. He eventually became an academic and a fixture in America’s literary scene. Barzun’s personal experiences with major cultural figures in Europe and the US inform the later chapters of From Dawn to Decadence, injecting a touch that shifts his narrative away from a detached academic treatise. The erudition and decades of learning show through early on, as he reflects on Petrarch’s impact on the rise of the vernacular and the efflorescence that we now call the Renaissance. In psychometrics, most results show that fluid intelligence, pure ability to engage in abstraction and analysis, peaks in around age 25. But crystallized intelligence, knowledge and recall of that knowledge peaks after age 50. Reading From Dawn to Decadence allows you to partake in decades of learning.

If From Dawn to Decadence is Barzun’s attempt to describe the arc of Western creativity and artistic production over the last five centuries, Dan Sperber’s Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach unpacks a project bent on modeling the general phenomena that drive cultural variations and universality. Sperber, a former director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is an anthropologist who helped integrate psychology and Darwinian theory into a system that explains how culture emerges and evolves. While many American cultural anthropologists focus on interpreting specific cultural variations, Sperber and researchers trained in what is sometimes called the “Paris School” flesh out the dynamics internally and externally that might drive that variation in the first place. Explaining Culture outlines the “epidemiology of representations,” that is, culture can be thought of as the expression of ideas that reproduce like contagion within the structure of the human mind. For example, musical forms rooted in percussion may have a wide distribution across human societies because the human auditory system is already pre-adapted to absorb this sensory input in a pleasurable manner for evolutionary reasons. In this, he moves beyond the structuralist anthropology outlined by an earlier generation of French anthropologists, in particular Claude Lévi-Strauss, that marginalized causal explanations in favor of the plain acceptance of deep structural elements in human cultures as unquestioned priors.

One of Sperber’s younger French colleagues, Pascal Boyer, was part of an informal salon that gathered at the elder anthropologist’s house. While Explaining Culture takes the 50,000 foot view, Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought zooms in on one of the most pervasive phenomena, or structures if you will, of human cultures. Religion Explained describes the shocking diversity that we know from anthropology, but collapses them down to large categories subject to analysis via cognitive science, ultimately caused by evolutionary pressures that result in a human psychology susceptible to supernaturalism. Religion Explained does not purport to explain a specific religion, like Christianity or Voodoo, but it explains the general features of religion that seem to be universal and invariant, driven by common selection pressures that have produced a brain shared across our whole species.

While Boyer focused on the expansive phenomenon of religion, Stanislas Dehaene, based out of the Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale, uses many of the same tools to understand numeracy in The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics. Dehaene illustrates how deep numeracy is as a trait, by showing how rats and pigeons, two model organisms commonly deployed in psychology, share some of our same intuitions. A key feature of our numeracy is the distinction between our gestalt numeracy and our mathematical skills which emerge out of our general intelligence. When you see four marbles, you recognize four marbles. This is deeply hard-wired into our brains by evolution, where we need to recognize groups of animals all around us. Large numbers of predators mean we should run; large numbers of other humans you recognize mean stay. In contrast, when we see 27 marbles we have only a rough sense of quantity; our innate recognition fails. Here we must make recourse to our general intelligence, and count manually. These two elements of our cognition, our hard-wired and fast recognition capabilities, along with our learned, slow but flexible analytical skills, allow us to build a vast cultural-intellectual edifice that is arguably the purest expression of the human ability to think abstract mathematics.

Michel Foucault is our planet’s most frequently cited intellectual according to Google Scholar, with his most cited work of all being Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Foucault considered himself more of a historian of ideas than a philosopher, and Discipline and Punish tries to show that in the late 1700s, the West shifted toward a rationalized system of citizen-control that could lead to an almost totalitarian level of state sovereignty over individual humans. Foucault’s argument is that the prison is simply the most extreme expression of the power of the society over the individual, and that insights from the systematization and industrialization of the carceral state illustrate the nature of contemporary institutions we might perceive to be more innocuous, from factory workplaces to schools.

Even in English translation, Foucault’s work persuades the naive reader; he was a thinker of great erudition and analytic power. But criminologists have argued that the rhetoric about power suffocates any serious domain-specific analysis, crowding out any broader understanding buttressed by actual supporting evidence from economics or legal history or taking into account major technological changes. Some scholars argue that the intrusiveness Foucault ascribes to power relations throughout his work was not even possible across most societies before the advent of the totalitarian state, which followed the communications revolutions of the late 19th century, allowing state surveillance nationwide, and a far more effective bureaucracy. Foucault was, arguably,, a sophist. No one doubts his brilliance, but his works tend to promote views with which specialists into whose fields he parachuted take issue on empirical grounds.

Foucault’s most decisive influence has arguably been to nudge large factions of academia's focus toward cynically marshalling intellectual power to ascend social hierarchies via persuasion, force of will and erudition, with the true goal personal status, not any good-faith attempt at objectively understanding the world. Discipline and Punish is a stark exercise in deploying intellectual power to serve particular self-interested human ends, rather than necessarily to illustrate empirical phenomena.

After a 1971 debate with Foucault on the nature and roots of justice, Noam Chomsky commented that the French intellectual seemed “completely amoral,” consistently reducing ethical considerations to simply the elucidation of power structures. This is the path that much of the humanities academy has since taken, setting aside considerations of truth and beauty to discern and deconstruct the workings of only power relations. For all his brilliance, Foucault’s naked self-interest in deploying his intellectual gifts collapsed a whole world of ideas down into the narrow workings of power and oppression and left his less talented intellectual heirs with a far poorer world, stripped of wonder and celebration of the genius of human creativity.

The Enormous Longhouses of the Linear Pottery Culture (video). Archaeologist and historical fiction author Dan Davis has a new video out about the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK), the first farmers of Northern Europe. These were the people who built longhouses during the Neolithic, at the time the largest structures in the world. The LBK people pushed agriculture north into Scandinavia, and their genes still flow through the veins of almost all Northern Europeans.

6 Months of MAHA. It is a worthy goal to make America healthy again, but too often the driving forces behind MAHA cling too tightly to their alternative worldviews in kneejerk opposition to mainstream therapeutic medicine, when its many wins include everything from the drastic decline in mortality we owe to mass vaccination to the far longer average lifespans enjoyed in recent generations thanks to advancements in treatments for congenital diseases like cystic fibrosis or HIV. Strange that militant enthusiasts of raw milk and psychedelics in therapy are now steering the ship.

Welcome to Dallas: The City That Just Can’t Stop Expanding. You may not like it, but this is what abundance looks like. Dallas is not the most aesthetically pleasing, chic or trendy city, but it’s affordable. It’s the heart of an America that still knows how to grow economically.

The stationary bandits of New York City-Urban governance needs reform, not whatever the Cuomo/Mamdani debate is. Large urban areas, America’s economic dynamos, are sitting ducks for rent-seekers who just want to pull money out of the system for their own profit. New York City’s transportation system apparently literally does not have an “org chart,” meaning that they don’t know who works for them as a whole. A lot of city jobs exist solely to provide sinecures, not services.

In Los Angeles, Iranian Jews Dream of an Iran They Could One Day Visit. Persian Jews are proud of their culture, synthesizing a serious devotion to Judaism with a pride in Persian history and identity. But American Persian Jews are also some of the most vociferous critics of the Islamic Republic of Iran given its patronage of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

Will Austin Survive the Driverless Car Revolution? Right now, Waymo and Tesla’s Robotaxi are competing on the streets of Austin, but I am seeing many Zoox test cars around town too. Driverless cars do well in Austin because there is very rarely snow or ice on the roads, the state of Texas is very keen on keeping regulatory hurdles as low as possible and a large number of tourists downtown means demand for car services remains eternally high. The future is here, and it does look and feel like the future.

Whole-genome sequencing in Galicia reveals male-biased pre-Islamic North African ancestry, subtle population structure, and micro-geographic patterns of disease risk. This paper confirms that for some reason Galicia is the region of northern Spain where there is a lot of North African ancestry, but places its arrival two to three generations before the Islamic conquest. I believe the first result is correct, but am skeptical of the second, where these sorts of estimates can be sensitive to the parameters you have in the model and less robust than you might think. High numbers ofBerber soldiers seem to have settled in Galicia during the early centuries of al-Andalus.

Whole-genome ancestry of an Old Kingdom Egyptian. Scientists have completed the sequencing of an individual's genome from Egypt's main dynastic period, a time when the Nile Valley’s complex civilization was developing under the aegis of a unitary state. They find the ancestry is mostly North African, but with a substantial minority component that seems to derive from Mesopotamia. This buttresses diffusionist arguments that Mesopotamian features in early Egyptian culture were due to migration.

Genetic affinities between an ancient Greek colony and its metropolis: the case of Amvrakia in western Greece. Continuity and mixture both seem to have defined early Greek colonizations. Amvrakia is on the Adriatic coast, near the border with Albania, ancient Epirus, while its mother city, Corinth is 150 miles to the east, near where the Peloponnese meets the rest of the Greek mainland. Nevertheless, the genetics of its initial years seem to reflect its people’s transplanted nature, before they finally later mixed with the regional substrate.

Hidden structure in polygenic scores and the challenge of disentangling ancestry interactions in admixed populations. Basically predictors are “trained” on populations that are somewhat homogeneous, and the consumer predictions delivered are superior for individuals who better match the training populations. In admixed individuals this is clearly a problem, so a fair amount of statistical research goes into improving the predictions. These sorts of papers aim to resolve issues relating to the generalizability and portability of the predictive models across populations, though the authors also reiterate that most of the predictors are already pretty good even trans-ethnically.

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall.

Hiding in plain sight: uniting Denisovans’ famous DNA with a set of mysterious physical remains:

Fifteen years ago, a humble genome sequence revealed a never-before detected human lineage. The Siberian cave, Denisova, where DNA was extracted from unidentified trace hominin remains, lent its name to this newly discovered people. Called “Denisovans,” everything we have so far gleaned of them has come from the slow accretion of data in a mere handful of genomes that have come to light since, including that of a 13-year-old teen girl given the unimaginative nickname “Denny,” who lived 90,000 years ago and astonishingly happens to have had a pure Denisovan father and a pure Neanderthal mother. The 2010 discovery of this class of hominids, accomplished by genome sequence alone, occurred in tandem with the sequencing of Neanderthals, published six months earlier; together they revealed that all humans outside of Africa harbored some ancestry from this long recognized people, whose fossils were first discovered more than two centuries ago. But the Neanderthals were not the only now extinct contributors to the genomes of modern humans; comparisons between various human populations and Denisovans have shown that an average of some 5% of people’s ancestry in New Guinea, thousands of miles from Siberia, actually derives from Denisovans. Further comparing the genomes of Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans, we’ve seen that our ancestors parted ways with the Neanderthals’ and Denisovans’ ancestors about 600,000 years ago, and that Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged from one another about 400,000 years ago.

A new feature for paying subscribers this year, the Unsupervised Learning Journal Club briskly reviews notable new papers or preprints. At the end of each edition, I invite subscribers to vote on papers/preprints for future editions. The sixth and seventh Journal Clubs have just come out, and you’re in time to vote for the eighth’s paper.

From The wandering Fulani: children of the Green Sahara:

In March 1903, in the market square of Sokoto, capital city of an empire approaching its centenary, the last vizier of the improbable Sokoto Caliphate officially submitted to British rule. This act came in the wake of a series of brutal defeats by the European colonial power as it pushed northward from its coastal redoubts, bristling with modern weapons to which the locals had no answer. British forces promptly elevated a new puppet caliph to the role, but the more momentous event was the end of an audacious African imperial project that had been materially and permanently reshaping the Sahel for the previous century. The dawning age of European colonialism would unceremoniously carve up the entire continent, but the chapter closing at that moment had indelibly marked the Sahel alone. A century earlier, the fist of conquest came not from a far off continent, but from the arid wastes to the north; armies marched under the banner of a self-proclaimed caliph, and his fanatical followers swept across the Sahel’s sun-baked plains. The waves of conquest and conversion they unleashed would leave a legacy of eventually binding together much of modern Nigeria, Mali, Niger and Cameroon, uniting disparate kingdoms and tribes ostensibly under the domineering aegis of a strict Islamic faith, helmed by a preeminent ruler, the Caliph, or “Commander of the Faithful.”

And from the newly released Genghis Khan, the Golden Horde and an 842-year-old paternity test:

Although it was said that Genghis Khan never questioned his son's paternity, his irascible second son, Chagatai, did, sowing discord within the ruling clan. Because of this conflict between his two eldest, Genghis Khan tapped his ‌third son, Ogedei, habitual peacemaker between his two elder brothers, to be his direct heir. From the Mongol capital in Karakorum Ogedei kept a close watch on the lands that were coming into his rule via the conquest of China. These eastern territories were the most populous and richest portion of the Genghiside domains. Further west, Chagatai would inherit the great cities of Central Asia, from Samarkand to Kashgar. The youngest son, Tolui, died campaigning in China before coming into his inheritance, the Mongol homelands, in keeping with tradition that confers upon the lastborn son their herds. To the firstborn Jochi and his heirs were then granted the vast northwestern lands, the most expansive of the domains, but also the poorest. They were also the furthest removed from Eurasian civilization’s rich hearths, which stretched in a vast arc from Anatolia to Iran, through South and Southeast Asia and up toward China. But Europe was within the ambit of the Mongol armies that coalesced into the Golden Horde, which ranged as far as the Adriatic and the forests of Poland, but that continent was only just recovering from the Roman Empire’s collapse, and its wealthiest regions were the furthest from the pasturelands that could sustain the vast Mongol herds.

The first five editions:

Brave new human: counting up the de novo mutations you alone carry, Wealth, war and worse: plague’s ubiquity across millennia of human conquest

Where Queens Ruled: ancient DNA confirms legendary Matrilineal Celts were no exception

Eternally Illyrian: How Albanians resisted Rome and outlasted a Slavic onslaught

Homo with a side of sapiens: the brainy silent partner we co-opted 300,000 years ago

For free subscribers: a sense of the format from my coverage of two favorite 2024 papers:

The other man: Neanderthal findings test our power of imagination

We were selected: tracing what humans were made for

All my podcasts go ungated two weeks after their Substack release. So I encourage subscribers on the free plan who’d like to automatically get them to subscribe to that podcast stream (Apple, Stitcher, and Spotify). If you want to listen on YouTube, please subscribe.

Here are podcasts since the last Time Well Spent:

• Nikolai Yakovenko: the $200 million AI engineer

• David Van Ofwegen: a peripatetic philosopher across Eurasia's antipodes

• Claire Lehmann: after the Intellectual Dark Web

• Nathan Cofnas: Judaism's group evolutionary strategy and hereditarianism defended

My own domain also has all my links and updates: https://www.razib.com, including links to the few different podcasts I’ve contributed to or run, my total RSS feed, and my more mainstream or print articles when I remember to post them, my Twitter, the occasional guest appearance, etc.

• DM me

• Facebook message me

• Some of my past pieces for Palladium Magazine, The New York Times, Slate, Quillette and Nautilus.

Comments are open to all for this post, so if you have more reading/listening suggestions or tips on who I should be talking to or what you’ve been waiting to read about, put them here.

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This year I’m trying out an occasional feature for paying subscribers, the Unsupervised Learning Journal Club where I offer a brisk review and consideration of an interesting paper in human population genomics.

In the spirit of a conventional journal club, after each post, interested subscribers can vote on papers for future editions. I’m open both to covering the latest papers/preprints and reflecting back on seminal publications from across these first decades of the genomic era.

If your lab has work we might like or you otherwise want to suggest a paper for me to cover, feel free to respond to this email or comment on this post.

The previous editions are:

Wealth, war and worse: plague’s ubiquity across millennia of human conquest

Where Queens Ruled: ancient DNA confirms legendary Matrilineal Celts were no exception

Eternally Illyrian: How Albanians resisted Rome and outlasted a Slavic onslaught

Homo with a side of sapiens: the brainy silent partner we co-opted 300,000 years ago

Brave new human: counting up the de novo mutations you alone carry

The wandering Fulani: children of the Green Sahara

Free subscribers can get a sense of the format from my ungated coverage of two favorite 2024 papers:

The other man: Neanderthal findings test our power of imagination

We were selected: tracing what humans were made for

Today we’re reviewing a recent preprint that actually has bearing on an open question in Central Asian history: Genomes of the Golden Horde Elites and their Implications for the Rulers of the Mongol Empire (2025). It comes out of Naruya Saitou’s group at National Institute of Genetics, Mishima, Japan, and appeared on BioRxiv on June 17th, 2025. The first author is Ayken Askapuli, Department of Integrative Biology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In 1697, Peter the Great became the first Tsar in a century to leave Russia. He traveled incognito to Western Europe to see how the more advanced continental nations ran their affairs. Since the Tsar was 6 foot 8 (over 2 meters), his identity was an open secret in the nations where he traveled. The “Grand Embassy,” as the mission was called, is more important as an historical marker than an actual fact-finding foray for the way it illustrates the new Tsar’s desire to reorient Russia towards the west. Thus began the centuries-long internal debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles about whether their nation should orient itself toward the West or continue to identify as the core of a separate civilization, the two wolves within the Russian soul that continue to grapple to this day.

For most, Peter the Great is an exemplar of the handful of famous Russian rulers who demanded that their subjects join the community of European nations, as opposed to viewing themselves as a civilization apart, liminal between the East and West. The Tsar reputedly even demanded that his nation’s cartographers include European Russia in any maps nominally of the European continent. But ‌in his own genealogy he exemplified the Russian people’s complex antecedents, and in particular its ruling class. As a Romanov, on his paternal line, Peter descended from conventional Russian nobility. But the Tsar’s mother, on the other hand, had a more exotic background; Natalya Naryshkina was from a family of nobles descended from a 15th-century Crimean Tatar named Mordko Kurbat Naryshko. His descendants, the House of Naryshkin, accepted Orthodox Christianity, and so were fully integrated into the Russian aristocracy. The old Western European quip that Russians were just Tatars if you scratched the surface was not entirely wrong about its ruling class, even for most Western-oriented members like Peter.

To begin to wrap your mind around Russia, it helps to go back to Kievan Rus, and Vladimir the Great’s 988 AD conversion to Christianity, which marked the heretofore backward and tribal peoples of Europe’s far eastern fringe’s entrée into civilization. Kievan Rus became Christian Europe’s bulwark against the various Turkic people menacing the continent, the last outpost of the civilization that saw itself as heir to Rome. But Peter’s Russia was not purely a product of Kievan Rus, whose rulers intermarried with the reigning dynasties of early medieval England, Norway and France.

But to really understand its history, culture and even its elite, recall that for centuries the Russian principalities were extensions of the empires of the steppe, subject to the powers that ruled the lands Westerners called Tatary. Though the term Tsar of all the Russians has Classical roots in the title Caesar, the Russian rulers only took up that mantle in 1547, centuries after the formative experience of the Grand Princes of Moscow, as vassals to rulers of the Golden Horde, the territory ruled by the descendents of Genghis Khan’s eldest son, Jochi. What the Russians term the “Tatar Yoke,” the period between the mid-13th and mid-15th centuries during which their rulers were subordinate to and paid tribute to Jochi’s descendants, transformed Russia from a state on Europe’s eastern edge, to a civilization intent on spanning Eurasia from the Baltic to Siberia.

But the Golden Horde was not just some bit player in Russia’s historiography. It was for centuries at the heart of affairs all across Eurasia, playing a central role in the politics of Iran and the Levant, supplying the manpower that made Egypt’s Mamelukes a formidable military power at the nexus of Africa and Asia, and guarding over the Silk Road trade routes that would tie China to Europe.

When Genghis Khan divided his domains before his death, bequeathing Jochi the territory that became the Golden Horde, vast, empty lands stretching from Siberia to the fringes of Central Europe, the terms of distribution seemed almost a punishment. A possible explanation for this was always the lingering cloud over his first-born’s paternity; Genghis Khan’s wife Bortai was kidnapped by the Merkid tribe, when he was leader of a Mongol faction. This was revenge: Genghis Khan’s own father had kidnapped his mother, Hoelun from her Merkid husband. During her captivity, Bortai was given in marriage to the younger brother of Hoelun’s original husband, and nine months after her kidnapping, Genghis Khan’s forces managed to free her from the Merkids. She returned heavily pregnant, forever casting a shadow over Jochi’s paternity (indeed his name means “guest” in Mongolian).

Although it was said that Genghis Khan never questioned his son's paternity, his irascible second son, Chagatai, did, sowing discord within the ruling clan. Because of this conflict between his two eldest, Genghis Khan tapped his ‌third son, Ogedei, habitual peacemaker between his two elder brothers, to be his direct heir. From the Mongol capital in Karakorum Ogedei kept a close watch on the lands that were coming into his rule via the conquest of China. These eastern territories were the most populous and richest portion of the Genghiside domains. Further west, Chagatai would inherit the great cities of Central Asia, from Samarkand to Kashgar. The youngest son, Tolui, died campaigning in China before coming into his inheritance, the Mongol homelands, in keeping with tradition that confers upon the lastborn son their herds. To the firstborn Jochi and his heirs were then granted the vast northwestern lands, the most expansive of the domains, but also the poorest. They were also the furthest removed from Eurasian civilization’s rich hearths, which stretched in a vast arc from Anatolia to Iran, through South and Southeast Asia and up toward China. But Europe was within the ambit of the Mongol armies that coalesced into the Golden Horde, which ranged as far as the Adriatic and the forests of Poland, but that continent was only just recovering from the Roman Empire’s collapse, and its wealthiest regions were the furthest from the pasturelands that could sustain the vast Mongol herds.

Many interpreted Jochi’s dispatch to the western steppe as his father exiling him in a sense. While descendants of Genghis Khan’s three younger sons would eventually contend for the grand prize of becoming the Great Khan over all the other branches of the family, the Jochids held themselves apart, perhaps conscious of the cloud that hung over their lineage.

As implied in its title, Genomes of the Golden Horde Elites and their Implications for the Rulers of the Mongol Empire, speaks directly to the issue of Jochi’s paternity. Though it does not settle the question, it nudges the needle persuasively in one direction, finally getting us closer to what in premodern lifetimes without even our most primitive testing methods could only ever have been a matter of guesswork and speculation.

Four individuals, distributed across four mausoleums in northern Kazakhstan (the core of the Golden Horde’s territories), yielded the novel data in the preprint. Three were male, one female. One of the tombs is known locally as “Jochi’s mausoleum,” and its rich appointments and opulent grave goods suggest very high status individuals inhumed before the Mongol elites’ extensive 14th-century Islamization of the Golden Horde (as in Christianity, grave goods are not typically the norm in Islam). The three samples: CKZ001, CKZ002 and CKZ003, are male; CKZ004 is the female one. CKZ001 has been radio-carbon dated to the 18th century, while the other three individuals yielded dates 1286-1398 AD, so at least several generations after Jochi’s 1227 death. The read-depth of the genomes of the individuals from CKZ001 to CKZ004 are, in order, 14.6, 3.9, 0.80 and 3.9. These values give the expected number of times a narrow region of the genome was re-read by a sequencing machine; so by definition, the variant calls on CKZ001 are much more confident than on CKZ003. Compared to a 1,240,000- position SNP-array, a high-density array widely preferred in population genetics labs, the authors managed to pull out 1,149,000 SNPs for CKZ001, over a million for both CKZ002 and CKZ004, and even 636,000 for CKZ003. This is more than enough data for population-genomic analysis, which has a much lower confidence threshold for any given SNP than medical-grade work (where read-depth of 30 is the gold standard).

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, in the wake of Elon Musk’s xAI Grok chatbot turning anti-Semitic following a recent update, Razib catches up with Nikolai Yakovenko about the state of AI in the summer of 2025. Nearly three years after their first conversations on the topic, the catch up, covering ChatGPT’s release and the anticipation of massive macroeconomic transformations driven by automation of knowledge-work. Yakovenko is a former professional poker player and research scientist at Google, Twitter (now X) and Nvidia (now the first $4 trillion company). With more than a decade on the leading edge computer science, Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the large-language-model revolution that was a necessary precursor to the rise of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, as well as hundreds of smaller startups. Currently, he is the CEO of DeepNewz, an AI-driven news startup that leverages the latest models to retrieve the ground-truth on news-stories. Disclosure: Razib actively uses and recommends the service and is an advisor to the company.

Razib and Yakovenko first tackle why Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is offering individual pay packages north of $200 million, poaching some of OpenAI’s top individual contributors. Yakovenko observes that it seems Meta is giving up on its open-source Llama project, their competitor to the models that underpin OpenAI and ChatGPT (he also comments that it seems that engineers at xAI are disappointed in the latest version of Grok). Overall, though the pay-packages of AI engineers and researchers are high; there is now a big shakeout as massive companies with the money and engineering researchers pull away from their competitors. Additionally, in terms of cutting-edge models, the US and China are the only two international players (Yakovenko notes parenthetically that Chinese engineers are also the primary labor base of American AI firms). They also discuss how it is notable that almost three years after the beginning of the current booming repeated hype-cycles of artificial intelligence began to crest, we are still no closer to “artificial general intelligence” and the “intelligence super-explosion” that Ray Kurzweil has been predicting for generations. AI is partially behind the rise of companies like Waymo that are on the verge of transforming the economy, but overall, even though AI is still casting around for its killer app, big-tech has fully bought in and believes that the next decade will determine who wins the future.

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Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to David van Ofwegen, a philosophy teacher based in Thailand. Razib and Ofwegen first met by chance while he was traveling in the US in 2003. A Dutch national, educated at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and then the University of Hawaii, specializing in the philosophical underpinnings of Social Darwinism, Ofwegen has been based in Thailand for the last 15 years.

Razib and Ofwegen’s initial connection was over their shared interest in the turmoil in Europe post-9/11 and the 2002 assassination of the right-wing Dutch politician Pim Fortyun. They discuss what has happened in the Netherlands over the last generation, with both immigrant assimilation into Dutch society, and the assimilation of Dutch society to immigrants. Ofwegen reflects on returning to a homeland where he encounters bartenders who don’t speak Dutch, only English, and youth culture where white Dutch affect the accents of Moroccan immigrants. He also observes that in his hometown of the Hague, it is as common to hear Arabic or Turkish on the streets as Dutch. This is in contrast with the countryside outside of the large cities, which remain overwhelmingly white and native-born. Ofwegen also notes that global multiculturalism has had an impact on the practice of some Dutch customs, in particular the traditions surrounding Black Pete (Zwarte Piet), a character in Dutch Christmas celebrations that is wildly offensive to American sensibilities, given the longtime convention of blackface. Ofwegen argues that the Netherlands is becoming less Dutch and more global, homogenizing into a node in the pan-American cultural sphere.

They also discuss the contrasts between Thailand and the Netherlands, and what it is like living outside the developed world. Though in nominal terms the GDP per capita of Thailand is about 10% of that of the Netherlands, Ofwegen does not feel that his adopted homeland is particularly underdeveloped or behind the times. Bangkok in particular is fully in the modern world, with all the comforts and technologies we avail ourselves of in the West. Ofwegen also observes that while the poor in the West live in deprived ghettos, in Thailand, the poor are usually rural peasants who own their own property. Nevertheless, he is clearly a guest. Though married to a Thai native and with a child who has Thai citizenship, he is legally an expatriate of the Netherlands. He notes that the same is true of Thailand’s large Burmese and Cambodian populations. The Thai have a very clear idea of their nation and its identity, in contrast to the more globalized vision common among Western elites.

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This year I’m trying out an occasional feature for paying subscribers, the Unsupervised Learning Journal Club where I offer a brisk review and consideration of an interesting paper in human population genomics.

In the spirit of a conventional journal club, after each post, interested subscribers can vote on papers for future editions. I’m open both to covering the latest papers/preprints and reflecting back on seminal publications from across these first decades of the genomic era.

If your lab has work we might like or you otherwise want to suggest a paper for me to cover, feel free to respond to this email or comment on this post.

The previous editions were:.

Wealth, war and worse: plague’s ubiquity across millennia of human conquest

Where Queens Ruled: ancient DNA confirms legendary Matrilineal Celts were no exception

Eternally Illyrian: How Albanians resisted Rome and outlasted a Slavic onslaught

Homo with a side of sapiens: the brainy silent partner we co-opted 300,000 years ago

Brave new human: counting up the de novo mutations you alone carry

Free subscribers can get a sense of the format from my ungated coverage of two favorite 2024 papers:

The other man: Neanderthal findings test our power of imagination

We were selected: tracing what humans were made for

This time we’re reviewing a recent paper some readers have been requesting I cover since it came out: Population history and admixture of the Fulani people from the Sahel (2025). It comes out of Carina M. Schlebusch’’s group at Uppsala University, and appeared in The American Journal of Human Genetics on February 6th, 2025. The first author is Cesar A. Fortes-Lima, whom I interviewed about his paper on the Bantu expansion in 2023.

In March 1903, in the market square of Sokoto, capital city of an empire approaching its centenary, the last vizier of the improbable Sokoto Caliphate officially submitted to British rule. This act came in the wake of a series of brutal defeats by the European colonial power as it pushed northward from its coastal redoubts, bristling with modern weapons to which the locals had no answer. British forces promptly elevated a new puppet caliph to the role, but the more momentous event was the end of an audacious African imperial project that had been materially and permanently reshaping the Sahel for the previous century. The dawning age of European colonialism would unceremoniously carve up the entire continent, but the chapter closing at that moment had indelibly marked the Sahel alone. A century earlier, the fist of conquest came not from a far off continent, but from the arid wastes to the north; armies marched under the banner of a self-proclaimed caliph, and his fanatical followers swept across the Sahel’s sun-baked plains. The waves of conquest and conversion they unleashed would leave a legacy of eventually binding together much of modern Nigeria, Mali, Niger and Cameroon, uniting disparate kingdoms and tribes ostensibly under the domineering aegis of a strict Islamic faith, helmed by a preeminent ruler, the Caliph, or “Commander of the Faithful.”

The Sokoto Caliphate’s origins were modest, its spark an 1804 rebellion against a petty tyrant that would trigger an efflorescence of Muslim revivalism and unleash a jihad against pagan peoples all across West Africa. But the fanatics also brought to heel many already Muslim peoples whom they judged lax in their commitment to the faith, expanding the empire by the 1830s so that its frontiers ranged from the deserts of Mali in the northwest to the edges of the Cameroon’s tropical forests in the southeast, a vast network of peripheral territories around a locus of power on northern Nigeria’s plains, centered on the city of Sokoto.

And yet, none of this zeal or religious commitment is what truly underwrote the century-long Caliphate’s outsized success and long-term impact in the region. To understand the Sokoto Caliphate and its origins, it helps to recognize that its base of support was not purely religious, but ethnic and cultural. It began with intrigue at the royal court of a petty king. After a zealous and perhaps pedantic Fulani cleric in Northern Nigeria ran afoul of his ruler for remonstrating against that sovereign’s patently pagan practices, the vengeful king’s rage swelled into a full-brown genocidal persecution of the cleric’s people. But thus provoked, the Fulani swiftly transformed themselves into fearsome mounted cavalry. It was they who were the swords of what became a religious crusade against northern Nigeria’s corrupt rulers who continued to revere traditional idols while still demanding praise for their piety during Friday prayers. The same dynamics of lightning mobilization and seamless transition from pastoralism to mounted warfare that had long played out in Eurasia recurred little altered here in tropical Africa, right down to their outsized might in the face of far more numerous agriculturalist opponents. It was the military acumen of the Sahel’s mobile Fulani that powered the Sokoto Caliphate’s rise, whatever the merits of its stated Islamic revivalism. The Sokoto Caliphate’s raison d’être was orthodox Islam; its imperium was built in God’s name. But a Fulani ethnic core fought the battles that built an empire rivaling those of future European colonizers in size.

African nations, with their Western-imposed boundaries, can often feel uncomfortably packed with arbitrary assemblages of ethnicities, ancient enemies forced into a supposedly shared national identity. But the Fulani wholly defy this generalization; they are an ethnicity who flow across the borders of many nations. United by a common language, pastoralist lifestyle, and shared history, the Fulani tribes’ range spans the whole expanse of the Sahel, from the shores of the Atlantic to the highlands of Ethiopia. Today, the nearly 40 million Fulani people inhabit 20 nations across West, Central, and East Africa. The 15 million Fulani of Nigeria’s north make up some 6% of its population. But their cultural and historical influence in Nigeria is far out of proportion to these numbers. The Fulani-powered Caliphate’s 19th-century expansion saw the consolidation and conquest of northern Nigeria’s Hausa kingdoms, and a deeper penetration of Islam into the region that has carried on fueling conflict and conversion to this day. It was also the basis for the emergence of a synthetic “Hausa-Fulani” ethnolinguistic identity that would become the most powerful bloc both militarily and politically in modern Africa’s most populous nation.

But the Fulani are not just another nomadic people. They speak a western Niger-Congo language, which clearly situates them within the panoply of Sub-Saharan African peoples, in contrast to Hausa, which is Afro-Asiatic, and connects those savanna farmers to the Near East. And yet it is the Fulani who traditionally have struck physical anthropologists as exhibiting traits in keeping with a Eurasian origin; they are lighter-skinned than other peoples of the Sahel, and often have features like long, narrow noses and thinner lips more common among West Asians. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller suggested in his 2001 The Mating Mind that these differences were driven by sexual selection alone, but preliminary work in 2009 using older genetic methods found that Fulani have admixture linking them to Eurasians.

Population history and admixture of the Fulani people from the Sahel is an important contribution and a leap forward in our understanding of these peoples’ population history because it applies genome-wide methods to 460 Fulani genomes drawn from across 18 regional populations. With well distributed sampling across many of the nations with Fulani populations, it is an excellent first stab at understanding the genetic variation of the Fulani as a whole; its balanced sampling choices minimize any risk of proving an unrepresentative subgroup, speaking for the Fulani of say Nigeria, or Mali alone.

Using data across 633,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) per proband, the authors compared the Fulani samples to an assemblage of modern populations selected to represent the variation present across Sub-Saharan Africa, West Asia and Europe. In line with long-standing theories positing Eurasian admixture into the Fulani, the principal component analysis (PCA), which maps genetic variation of individuals along the two independent axes with the strongest explanatory power, shows that by heritage the Fulani samples sit at a distinct remove from the West African neighbors among whom most Fulani today live. Even in central and eastern African Fulani populations, the largest ancestry component resembles that of Sub-Saharan peoples resident west of Lake Chad, in a region stretching from Nigeria to the Atlantic and Senegal (although these Fulani do show some admixture from local populations). This result is in keeping with the Fulani’s linguistic affiliations; their native dialects hew closest to those of Senegal’s Wolof.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to returning guest Claire Lehmann. Lehmann has an undergraduate degrees in psychology and English from the University of Adelaide. She was enrolled in a graduate program in psychology, but left it after becoming disillusioned with moral relativism, she went on to found the online magazine Quillette to reflect a more traditionally pro-reason and pro-evidence-based worldview. Within three years Lehmann was profiled in 2018 in The New York Times as a major figure within the nascent “intellectual dark web.”

Razib and Claire discuss the evolution and current state of Quillette, a publication founded in 2015 to counter anti-enlightenment thinking, and later a platform for many thinkers associated with the intellectual dark web. Initially anti-left and anti-post-modernist, it later became known for its stance against cancel culture and woke ideologies, albeit without ever explicitly aligning with the American right. Lehmann clarifies her publication’s classically liberal stance. They also touch on the evolution and disintegration of the intellectual dark web, the corrosive impact of woke culture on academia over the last decade, and the likely future role of AI in disrupting traditional education.

Lehmann also discusses the changing landscape of social media and public discourse, particularly the impact of Elon Musk's interventions at Twitter over the last few years. They also explore the "woke right" debate, alluding to the authoritarian tendencies emerging among ascendant conservatives, citing discussions of the topic by former Quillette contributor and editor Colin Wright and journalist Jesse Singal. Razib asks about the future of Quillette, and Lehmann talks about its new focus on long-form articles on culture, science and the arts, and addresses the magazine's pro-Israel stance, which has polarized some American readers that don’t understand why an Australia-based publication should take a strong pro-Zionist stance.

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Fifteen years ago, a humble genome sequence revealed a never-before detected human lineage. The Siberian cave, Denisova, where DNA was extracted from unidentified trace hominin remains, lent its name to this newly discovered people. Called “Denisovans,” everything we have so far gleaned of them has come from the slow accretion of data in a mere handful of genomes that have come to light since, including that of a 13-year-old teen girl given the unimaginative nickname “Denny,” who lived 90,000 years ago and astonishingly happens to have had a pure Denisovan father and a pure Neanderthal mother. The 2010 discovery of this class of hominids, accomplished by genome sequence alone, occurred in tandem with the sequencing of Neanderthals, published six months earlier; together they revealed that all humans outside of Africa harbored some ancestry from this long recognized people, whose fossils were first discovered more than two centuries ago. But the Neanderthals were not the only now extinct contributors to the genomes of modern humans; comparisons between various human populations and Denisovans have shown that an average of some 5% of people’s ancestry in New Guinea, thousands of miles from Siberia, actually derives from Denisovans. Further comparing the genomes of Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans, we’ve seen that our ancestors parted ways with the Neanderthals’ and Denisovans’ ancestors about 600,000 years ago, and that Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged from one another about 400,000 years ago.

In the space of less than a year, in 2010, paleoanthropology’s model of human evolutionary history over the last few hundred thousand years was utterly transformed. Neanderthals were not just primitive dead-ends, they were part of our own heritage (subsequent work showed that Africans as well have at minimum trace amounts of Neanderthal ancestry due to members of our anatomically modern lineage back-migrating from Eurasia). But the Denisovans presented different questions: they were a wild card, unexpected and unaccounted for. More critically, while Neanderthals had long been a well-characterized fossil lineage in the paleoanthropological literature, we were left to conjure Denisovans solely from their distinctive genomic sequence. Homo neanderthalensis is a human species defined by taxonomists; Denisovans were an ad hoc label of convenience for geneticists, a sort of species in waiting.

All of that officially changed this month; in June 2025, Chinese paleogeneticist Qiaomei Fu published data finally connecting specific fossil remains to Denisovans, utilizing both mtDNA and protein sequencing methods. And so now we know that Denisovans and Homo longi, are one and the same. A rather well preserved fossil from Harbin, China, a nearly complete skull, first identified as a new species in a 2021 publication, and colloquially dubbed Dragon Man, turns out to have DNA that we can now see neatly matches the sequences extracted from Denisova cave. For fifteen years, the label Denisovan only applied in a genomic context. No longer. Denisovan physical remains were in fact in plain sight all along.

This is not entirely a surprise. Some geneticists and paleoanthropologists have long assumed that many among the wealth of the fossils languishing yet to be identified, catalogued or named in East Asian collections today were Denisovans (I said as much in a podcast with Vagheesh Narasimhan of UT Austin, when H. longi was announced four years ago). Also, since 2010, we have established that Denisovans are the ancestors of more than Papuans and other Australasians. The Negrito peoples of the Philippines have a substantial contribution from Denisovans, the same as their Papuan neighbors from New Guinea to the south. But when you set aside their majority Austronesian ancestry (a much more recent overlay), it appears their forager ancestors (today some 35% of their ancestry) carried even more Denisovan ancestry than Papuans, on the order of 7-8%. It is also clear that low, but detectable, levels of Denisovan ancestry appear today in populations across South, East and Southeast Asia, at fractions of 0.1-0.3%.

The attested presence of Denisovan ancestry across a vast triangle stretching from Pakistan to Japan to Australia argues that they were present across vast territories. Deeper analysis of the Denisovan fragments in the genomes of Asians, Melanesians and Australians suggest at minimum two admixture events with two very distinct Denisovan populations. One population is clearly related to the genomes we have from Denisova cave. These northern Denisovans mixed with the ancestors of modern East Asians. But the Denisovan ancestry in South and Southeast Asians, as well as in Melanesians and Australians, is clearly from a population with a distinct ancestry; likely one that split off from the northern subspecies as long as more than 350,000 years ago. And the plot thickens, because tentative evidence gleaned from comparing the segments carried by these populations with southern Denisovan ancestry suggests distinct admixtures here as well; one in South Asians, another in Southeast Asians (a common one with Melanesians and Australians), and perhaps even one or two further ones in the outer reaches of prehistoric Sundaland and Sahul.

In a clip posted June 17th, 2025, Tucker Carlson asked Texas Senator Ted Cruz what Iran’s population was. Cruz refused to respond, with his defenders later objecting that this was a “gotcha” question. But Carlson’s point was that someone like Cruz, who is in a position of power and supporting American military involvement in Israel’s offensive against Iran, should know basic facts about that nation. As it happens, Iran’s population is about 90 million; more than Turkey or Germany, and far more than the 27 million Iraqis who endured US occupation starting in 2003. In addition, Iran’s area is about 2.4 times that of Cruz’s home state of Texas.

These are clearly relevant details when considering any military or diplomatic entanglement, even for the most powerful nation in the history of the world. Another crucial and germane fact is that Americans are, in many ways, a deeply parochial people who take only the most cursory interest in the rest of the world despite our nation’s legion military commitments and our complex economic entanglements. A stark illustration of this reality is that more than two decades after the Iranian Revolution major news outlets were still erroneously referring to Iran as an Arab nation.

At this point, with US intervention in the Israeli-Iranian conflict, the possibility of swift and de facto decapitation of Iran’s military leadership means that the Islamic Republic’s future will probably differ starkly from its past. With its prestige and credibility in tatters, the specter of regime change in Iran suddenly feels imminent. And alongside that eventuality comes inevitable geopolitical and economic fallout given the Islamic Republic’s various alliances and antagonisms. Change in, or the collapse of, the Middle East’s second-most populous nation of nearly 100 million (after Egypt), the world's seventh largest oil-producing nation, poised as it is at the nexus of great-power politics between the US, China and Russia, would be one of the most consequential events of the early 21st century.

The first mention of Persians as a people appears in 9th-century BC Assyrian annals. Before Cyrus the Great’s 6th-century BC conquests, Persians were one of innumerable Iranian tribes occupying the territories east of Mesopotamia’s venerable civilizations. By the historical period, Persia’s core territories were located in what was formerly Elam, in the southwest of the Iranian plateau. To their northwest were the Medes, who occupied modern Kurdistan, while beyond the shores of the Caspian ranged the Parthians.

Of the pre-Islamic Iranian empires, two of the most storied, that of Cyrus’ Achaemenids who dominate so much of Herodotus’ histories and the Sassanians who nearly conquered Byzantium, had their base in the Persian-speaking homeland of Fars. Because of the Persian dynasties’ prominence, the language of Fars and its cultural identity spread far and wide in the Iranian world, which before the rise of the Turks, extended to the western edge of Mongolia, and with the Scythians into the heart of Europe. Today, a form of Persian, Dari, remains one of the major languages of both Afghanistan and Central Asia broadly, and is even the native language of the Tajik people. But this is a recent historical phenomenon, driven by the ethnographic transformations Islamic-era Turkic migrations and Mongol conquests wrought.

Ancient Iran's pre-Islamic diversity is still somewhat reflected in the modern nation, though. Only a slight majority of Iranian citizens are ethnic Persians. The second largest group, Turkic Azeris, at around 20%, far outnumber the population of Azeris to the north who give the nation-state of Azerbaijan its name. Despite the cultural and linguistic prominence of Persian, numerous other Iranian ethnolinguistic groups still flourish today in Iran: Kurds and Luris in the west, Gilakis and Mazanis in the north, and Baloch to the east.

This ethnolinguistic diversity superficially resembles that of Iraq, where Shia Arabs form the slight majority, ahead of large populations of Sunni Arabs and Kurds, as well as Christian Assyrians, Yezidi Kurds and Turkomans. One of the major political revolutions of modern Iraqi history has been the marginalization of the Sunni Arab ruling class in favor of the Shia Arab majority. Even though these resemblances in terms of diversity might strike some as a warning for the future of a post-regime-collapse Iran, they actually mask deep and informative differences.

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Mohammed Khamenei, has an Azeri Turk father. Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s current President, is himself Azeri. The last Shah of Iran was majority Azeri; he had an Azeri mother, as did his own father. The last Shah’s wife was also the daughter of an ethnic Azeri general. This genealogical trivia underscores the commonplace integration and investment of ethnolinguistic minorities in the current Iranian nation-state. More precisely, since 1000 AD every ruling dynasty in Iran with the exception of the Mongols and the short-lived Zands of the late 18th century has been of Turkic origin. Though Persian civilization is ancient, the broad structures and interests that dominate the modern Iranian nation-state arguably have their origin in 16th-century Safavid Iran, which was established with Shah Ismail's 1501 conquest.

Ismail and his dynasty were ancestrally of diverse origins: Kurdish, Greek, Georgian and Turkic. But in the 15th century, the Safavids, who led a Sufi order, had become assimilated into the Azeri Turkic culture of eastern Anatolia and northwest Iran. Of more enduring consequence than his ethnicity, Ismail established Shia Islam as the religion of his dynasty, and by extension, his imperial domains. This set the Safavids apart from their Ottoman Turkish rivals to the west, and later the Indian Mughals to the east, both of whom were staunchly Sunni. It also established a religious uniqueness for what had been a predominantly Sunni Iran.

The Safavids forcibly converted Iran to Shia Islam over the course of two centuries, bringing about the situation today where over 90% of the population adheres to that sect of the religion. The discrimination minority Kurds and Baloch suffer in the Islamic Republic today owes more to their Sunni identification, than to their language or ethnic identity. It is no coincidence that the Islamic Republic’s Shia-based religious nationalism seems to have had greater traction than the Pahlavi dynasty’s attempts to forge a secular Iranian nationalism along the lines of Atatürk’s Turkey. The Ottoman Empire’s collapse, the Armenian genocide and the great ethnic exchange with Greece in the 1920s, left the Republic of Turkey ethnically 75% Turkish, with only a large Kurdish minority. In contrast, an Iran that is 50-60% Persian is a nation-state that can rely upon its dominant ethnicity to furnish a unitary culture for the ruling class, while never the demographic heft to serve as the foundation for populist ethnic nationalism.

Some states have very recent origins.This is famously true of much of Sub-Saharan Africa, where nation-states are cobbled together from various assorted ethnicities, borders arbitrarily to appease European powers locked in long-forgotten colonial rivalries. But it is also true of European nation-states like Germany and Italy, whose ethnic-national identities predated and preceded their political form that first emerged in only the 19th century. Despite cultural, linguistic, and in Germany religious (Protestant vs. Catholic) differences, no one worries that Germany and Italy are teetering on the edge of collapse, even if a millennium of political history predating the mid-19th century was fractious in both cases. The Democratic Republic of Congo may have been the creation of European colonialists, but Italy and Germany were present within the stone from which modern political movements carved them.

Probably literally because of their phonetic similarities, naive American observers might worry that Iran's collapse risks resembling that of Iraq two decades earlier. But despite these two nation-states being Middle Eastern, Muslim and multi-ethnic, they remain deeply qualitatively different, not least in their early modern histories. Europeans created Iraq from Ottoman provinces that Iranian dynasties had long threatened. It was and is artificial and novel as a political entity despite Iraq's inheritance of ancient Mesopotamia's geographical expanse. Modern Iran, in contrast, is very much the heir of Safavid Persia, with most of its ethnicities unified by a common religion that marks them off from other Muslims. Persians and Iran’s ethnic minorities genuinely share a common history across the centuries. The Islamic Republic is not like Germany or Italy. Although likewise a state that reflects a shared national ethnicity, it is perhaps more like contemporary Spain, a multiethnic polity that emerged organically from a succession of earlier states. The basis for the modern Spanish state was arguably the unification of the monarchies of Castile and Aragon under Ferdinand and Isabella, the generation before Shah Ismail conquered Iran. Like the Safavids, Spain’s Habsburg monarchs religiously unified their realms, but left its ethnic diversity intact, even if unified by a dominant Castilian language.

Revolutionary Iran arose at a particular time and place, near the tail end of the Cold War. It conceptualized itself as a “third force,” leading a Third World movement outside of the capitalist and communist blocs alike, unified by the fires of nascent Islamic revivalism. Soviet Communism is now just a memory, while the demographic engine powering political Islam’s late 20th-century revival lies in abeyance (Iran’s plummeting total fertility rate today is approaching the US’s and lower than France’s). But the Islamic Republic of Iran remains with us, a holdover of 20th-century passions, still in the long shadow of political and social forces that have long since exhausted themselves, inveighing against the “Great Satan” ad nauseum. The Supreme Leader of Iran ascended to power when George H. W. Bush was leading the US and Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union. His worldview was fundamentally shaped by the geopolitics of the 1970s. Israel’s recent attacks have exposed his regime to be riddled with Mossad operatives, suggesting the institutional apparatus is today kept running by functionaries who no longer have any faith in the system. The best analogy for the Islamic Republic is probably the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era. Most of the populace no longer believes in the ideology, but the institutional machinery keeps moving.

If the regime falls in the near future, the most likely scenario is not the collapse of the nation-state; Iran, as an institution, has roots centuries deep. Rather, it is the chaos of 1990s Russia, when elites scrambled and jockeyed for position within an entirely novel configuration of power, and kleptocrats swarmed to divvy up the remaining spoils of the planned economy. The Iranian regime’s end is almost certainly inevitable. The question is not if, but when.

Whether or not you already took the Iran quiz before reading this piece, feel free to test the state of your Iran knowledge (again) now!

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