Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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For 2025, I’m trying out a new occasional feature for paying subscribers, the Unsupervised Learning Journal Club: I’ll offer a brisk review and consideration of an interesting paper in human population genomics.

In the spirit of a conventional journal club, at the end of each post, interested subscribers can vote on next papers to review. 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 first two editions were on plague and the genetic evidence for matrilineal Celts.

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

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

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’s paper is Ancient DNA reveals the origins of the Albanians. It comes out of Alexandros Heraclides’ lab at the School of Sciences, European University Cyprus, in Nicosia, Cyprus. and appeared as a preprint at bioRxiv on June 7th, 2023. The first author is Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou.

In 271 AD, the Roman Empire consisted of three constituent political entities. In the west, the old provinces of Gaul and Britannia were ruled as the “Gallic Empire,” formed when the usurper Postumus seized them from the forces of Emperor Gallienus. In the east, Queen Zenobia, a noble from the city of Palmyra, led the old provinces of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and the heart of Anatolia, as the Palmyrene Empire. The Roman Empire proper: Iberia, Italy, the Balkans and western Anatolia, plus all of North Africa west of Egypt still remained the largest and most powerful state in western Eurasia, but at that juncture, it felt like the Mediterranean was on the verge of disintegration. Inevitable as this eventual rupture might have been, circumstances conspired to forestall it by three centuries, until the armies of Islam swept decisively across the southern and eastern shores of what the Romans called the Mare Nostrum, “Our Sea.” In the meantime, “the Crisis of the Third Century” instead proved a temporary reprieve as a series of strong rulers promoted through the ranks of military officers held the Empire together by sheer force of will.

But these saviors of Romanitas did not come from Rome’s old aristocracy; in fact the vast majority hailed from the Roman province of Illyria, roughly today’s Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania. This frontier region, in a strategically key position between the west’s expansive Latin-speaking provinces and the venerable eastern territories dominated by Greeks, Egyptians and Syrians, furnished the lion's share of Rome's rulers between 268 AD and 578 AD. The ancient Greeks referred to all the native tribes of the region as Illyrians, hence the Roman-era province’s name. The Illyrians remain culturally and linguistically mysterious to us. When the Illyriciani came to power in the late third century AD, culturally Illyria remained mostly an extension of the Latin-speaking west, with the exception of some Greek-occupied areas in its southern and eastern fringes. But the toponyms and evidence from given names indicate that pre-Roman Illyria was occupied by an Indo-European-speaking people whose languages were only very distantly related to Latin or Greek.

Their languages were likely ancestral to Albanian, which owes half of its lexicon toGreek and Latin, but whose structure resembles neither. Further stymying efforts to better characterize what Illyrians natively spoke is a millennium-long gap in source material; scantily recorded in the first place, Illyrian languages drift out of the historical record entirely during the Roman period, while the Albanian language is nowhere mentioned until 1284 AD, with the oldest document written in Albanian dating to only 1462 AD. Some scholars have argued that Albanian is not even indigenous to the western Balkans, but actually the language of Thracians (ancient Bulgarians) who migrated in the late Roman and post-Roman periods. If true, this would undermine the idea that Albanians and their culture are indigenous to the western Balkans, making them relative arrivistes like their Slav neighbors, whose own tenure dates back only 1,400 years.

Neither linguistics, history nor archaeology has been able to settle the questions around Albanian origins or their connection to the ancient Illyrians who once occupied the western Balkans. Now, 2023’s Ancient DNA reveals the origins of the Albanians brings paleogenomics to bear on the problem, subjecting a massive, multi-millennia dataset from the region to powerful analytic techniques, and concluding that Albanians, and their Illyrian ancestors before them, shared deep roots in the region back to the early Bronze Age and the ‌Yamnaya-descended populations from the Pontic steppe.

The figure above plots modern and prehistoric samples relevant to the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age ancestry of the western Balkans, converting genetic distances into geometric ones. It registers individuals genetically shifted toward Yamnaya herders from the Pontic steppe (which lies to the northeast of the Balkans) arriving to the region in the early Bronze-Age (starting approximately 2500 BC). Before that, the region that became ancient Illyria, the southern part of which Albanians inhabit today, was occupied by agriculturalists descended overwhelmingly from the Anatolian farmers who began expanding westward into the Balkans over 9,000 years ago. And notably, the Indo-Europeans who arrived after 2500 BC seem directly descended from the Pontic steppe Yamnaya, as opposed to representing a Yamnaya daughter culture, like the Corded Ware of Poland and Belarus, the direct ancestors of most of Europe’s Indo-European peoples. A large fraction of the western Balkan post-2500 BC samples carry Y chromosomes belonging to the Yamnaya-specific haplogroup R1b-Z2103. This is as opposed to Corded Ware or Bell Beaker, two daughter Indo-European groups who expanded across Eastern and Western Europe respectively, bearing R1a in the former case and R1b-L21 in the latter. Of various potential donor populations to the Bronze and Iron-Age western Balkan samples that could account for their genetic makeup, the Yamnaya from the Pontic steppe are better fits than Corded Ware individuals, who would have arrived from the forests to the northeast, picking up a telltale signature of Eastern European heritage along the way.

This 2023 result, focusing on the western Balkans and the puzzle of Albanian origins, anticipated a more recent finding we examined earlier this year: Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages. This latter preprint shows that the pattern clear in Albanians and the west Balkans applies to the Greeks and Armenians as well: those Indo-European languages descend directly from that of the Yamnaya, instead of being mediated by a Corded Ware daughter language.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Matt Welch. He co-founded the Prague-based newspaper Prognosis in the early 1990’s and later worked as an opinion section editor for the Los Angeles Times. From 2008-2016, Welch served as editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, where he currently holds the position of editor-at-large. He co-authored The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America and wrote McCain: The Myth of a Maverick. Today, Welch co-hosts The Fifth Column podcast with Kmele Foster and Michael Moynihan.

Razib and Welch first go back to his days in Eastern Europe, and how they shaped his views on foreign policy, making him somewhat heterodox for someone whose primary political inclinations favor libertarianism. Welch discusses how wild, hopeful and chaotic the 1990’s were in the former Eastern Bloc after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of Communism. He also argues that these nations had strong historic and contemporary geopolitical reasons to fear the former Soviet Union, and so pushed for the eastward expansion of NATO. Razib makes the Russian case that its turn away from the West in the 2000’s was in response to America’s strategy of encirclement, but Welch dismisses this as Russian revisionism. He believes that at the end of the day Soviet-era elites retained an imperial attitude toward Eastern and Central Europe rooted in a centuries-long assumption of Russian hegemonic status in the region.

Next, retreating from abstruse foreign policy, Razib and Welch discuss the early days of the blogosphere, in 2001/2002. Then, Welch coined the term “warblogger,” and envisaged a scenario where post-partisan citizen-journalists would play an essential role in the information ecosystem of the 21st century. He discusses his disappointment with the reemergence of partisanship within the blogosphere, as well as the disappointments of post-9/11 interventionism. Welch also talks about the Tea Party, and its connection, and ultimate disconnect, from libertarianism. They also discuss how the Tea Party energy was eventually transferred to the ideologically heterodox and often anti-libertarian Trump movement.

Finally, Welch talks about his latest primary venture, the successful The Fifth Column podcast. Razib asks if the current age of podcasting is analogous to the early blogosphere. Welch talks about how organically and gradually The Fifth Column came into being, and the growing pains with greater professionalization. He also addresses their future on The Fifth Column, with a new shift toward video, while continuing the informal and candid nature of the discussions.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib comments on a new paper in Nature, Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara reveals ancestral North African lineage. Here is the abstract:

Although it is one of the most arid regions today, the Sahara Desert was a green savannah during the African Humid Period (AHP) between 14,500 and 5,000 years before present, with water bodies promoting human occupation and the spread of pastoralism in the middle Holocene epoch1. DNA rarely preserves well in this region, limiting knowledge of the Sahara’s genetic history and demographic past. Here we report ancient genomic data from the Central Sahara, obtained from two approximately 7,000-year-old Pastoral Neolithic female individuals buried in the Takarkori rock shelter in southwestern Libya. The majority of Takarkori individuals’ ancestry stems from a previously unknown North African genetic lineage that diverged from sub-Saharan African lineages around the same time as present-day humans outside Africa and remained isolated throughout most of its existence. Both Takarkori individuals are closely related to ancestry first documented in 15,000-year-old foragers from Taforalt Cave, Morocco2, associated with the Iberomaurusian lithic industry and predating the AHP. Takarkori and Iberomaurusian-associated individuals are equally distantly related to sub-Saharan lineages, suggesting limited gene flow from sub-Saharan to Northern Africa during the AHP. In contrast to Taforalt individuals, who have half the Neanderthal admixture of non-Africans, Takarkori shows ten times less Neanderthal ancestry than Levantine farmers, yet significantly more than contemporary sub-Saharan genomes. Our findings suggest that pastoralism spread through cultural diffusion into a deeply divergent, isolated North African lineage that had probably been widespread in Northern Africa during the late Pleistocene epoch.

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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.

Recently on social media, a debate broke up about the “Great Man Theory” of history, explicitly pioneered by Thomas Carlyle, but implicitly subscribed to in some form by many lay people. Online, the debate was between Nate Silver and a number of academic historians, the latter of whom find the theory wrong-headed and outmoded. But ‌for many regular people, it seems entirely plausible; how can you deny that Isaac Newton’s brilliance transformed our understanding of Celestial Mechanics? Set against this are historians who focus more on broad social and economic forces less reliant on individuals and more on aggregate historical events that drive general trends, from Marxist historical materialism to the multi-disciplinary Annales school.

Of course, both dynamics, the individual and social, are relevant. The evidence is that Napoleon Bonaparte was a classic great man, brilliant and courageous, the fact of whose presence, given his command of tactics and logistics military historians have calculated increased the probability of his armies winning by some 30%. But a general like Bonaparte could only have risen to power and prominence in a particular historical-cultural context. He was, after all, an ethnic minority from the lesser nobility of a newly annexed island. Enlightenment rationalism had made late 18th-century France far more open than a century prior, when the young Bonaparte’s talents might well have gone unnoticed.

Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon: A Life, a massive 2015 biography of the French general, illustrates this persuasively. The young Bonaparte was the right man at the right time. Roberts’ narrative clarifies that the young Corsican was a prodigious talent, undertaking extensive intellectual feats whether at peace or at , penning unpublished novels and corresponding with such brilliant contemporaries as the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace. At the military academy, Bonaparte excelled in the quantitative sciences then revolutionizing the art of war, when the physics of Newton’s mechanics were applied to the artillery field. Though the France of his youth was still a monarchy deferential to the nobility of blood, in his 20’s it underwent a revolution that overturned the old social order, throwing open opportunities for the arriviste.

But the man has to meet the moment. Though most are aware of Bonaparte’s failed Russian campaign, he won 50 of the 60 battles in which he fought, and his armies inflicted 1.5-2 times as many casualties on his enemies as they suffered in turn. From 1805-1807, France under his rule defeated Austria, Prussia and Russia, in sequence. While many military leaders are known for their tactical and strategic acumen, Bonaparte was famously an organizational genius. Recognizing that “an army marches on its stomach,” he offered the prize that stimulated the invention of canned rations.

Revolutionary France’s victories in the last decade of the 18th century were not Bonaparte’s alone; France won the War of the First Coalition against the entire range of European powers because it was the first nation-state to mobilize its entire population for war. But the later wars of conquest and hegemony in the first decade of the 19th century were driven in large part by the Corsican general’s brilliance. The decade-long French Empire (1804-1814) was likely the product of Bonaparte’s brilliance and ambition, as he and his fellow citizens established military, political and cultural hegemony over the European continent. It was during this period that Europe’s legal systems were reformed, resulting in the Napoleonic Code, that Jews were first liberated from their ghettos and that old institutions like the Holy Roman Empire were finally abolished. It is clear from Napoleon: A Life that a single great man’s accomplishments laid the seedbed for later social and cultural revolutions decades beyond, from 19th-century nationalism to the assimilation of Jews like Karl Marx into the mainstream of European culture.

Bonaparte’s life is rich with texture, detail and significance even to those reading about him in 2025, thanks, in large part to his extensive correspondence. But many figures in the distant past never truly loom into detailed focus even when we clearly perceive their great impact and that their actions shaped the lives of those more vividly rendered. This is likely the case of the late Republican dictator, Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, whose tyranny was both a warning and a model for later Roman strongmen from Pompey to Julius Caesar. Arthur Keaveney’s Sulla: The Last Republican attempts to shed light on a shadowy figure who would serve as a bogeyman for future generations. A wastrel from a patrician family fallen on hard times, the young Sulla came into an inheritance through marriage with an older woman, and leveraged his new opportunities by becoming such a brilliant general on the battlefield that the conservative faction in the Senate soon looked to him as their savior against reformers attempting to alter the Roman Republic’s basic structure.

Keaveney’s book is a slim 248 pages, because unlike Caesar, Sulla left no memoirs of his battlefield victories, and unlike Augustus, he did not patronize the great poets of his age. Much of what we remember of Sulla is recorded by his enemies, because ultimately, he was a failure, and the actions of the “last Republican” would seal the fate of the institutions he was attempting to revive. Sulla stated that "No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.” This was born out by the brutality of his proscriptions against his enemies when he took dictatorial power. Sulla came to restore the old order, but ultimately he left the Republic fatefully scarred. The young Julius Caesar, scion of a family firmly aligned with the reformist faction in the late Republic, fled Rome at the height of Sulla’s reign of terror. Caesar never forgot the wrongs inflicted upon his family and friends when his enemies had regained the power of the Roman state. As dictator, Sulla curtailed plebeian power, restored the privileges of the Senate and saw to the elimination of what he deemed enemies of the state. In traditional fashion, Sulla retired to his country estates, leaving the Republic in the expert hands of others. But his dictatorial reign became the template for future radicals, who would ultimately tear down the Republic and replace it with an Empire.

If Sulla was the path-breaker for his young enemy, Caesar, the first Umayyad Caliph, Mu’awiya, was the Augustus of Islam. Though the fifth Caliph, Mu’awiya was arguably the Islamic ruler who laid the foundations of the system of rule that would define the civilization in the centuries to come. Mu’awiya established the hereditary principle for succession, consolidated conquered territories and sponsored continued military victories. But little in English focuses specifically on his life, in large part because later Muslims viewed him much more skeptically. It was under Mu’awiya that large-scale persecution of the Shia faction began, so modern Shia Muslims regard him as an unparalleled tyrant. But Sunnis too take a dim view of the fifth Caliph, because much of that sect’s worldview coalesced under the successor dynasty of the Abbasids, who, as grounds for their uprising, inveighed against Umayyad immorality and corruption.

But Hugh Kennedy’s The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In devotes considerable time to Mu’awiya, his life, his genius as an administrator and his competence as a warrior. Kennedy’s narrative depicts a figure both rational and ambitious, who managed to wrest control of the Muslim community away from the family of the Prophet Muhammad himself. The fifth Caliph in fact seems to be a historically liminal figure, as much a warrior of Greco-Roman Late Antiquity as one of early Islam. Under Mu’awiya, the superstructure of the Roman and Persian Empires that the Arabs conquered remained intact; Greek was the Caliphate’s administrative language during Mu’awiya’s 19-year reign, from 661 to 680 AD. Islam’s legal and institutional structures that were so distinctive in later centuries, from sharia law to madrasas, did not exist under Mu’awiya. The early Umayyads, in fact, worshipped within the great Church of Damascus. It was turned into an exclusively Muslim house of worship 25 years after his death.

Nevertheless, the early Umayyads established the foundations of the civilization that would become the Dar al-Islam. Though later Islamic scholars would look dimly upon Umayyad claims of Arab supremacy, it was Mu’awiya and his successors who established the prestige of he Arabic language; its Fertile Crescent and North Africa adoption would eventually transform Arabs from an obscure ethnicity to a people whose language was spoken from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia. Umayyad Arabicization was almost certainly a necessary precondition for Abbasid Islamization. Though Mu’awiya suffers from a reputation of impiety, his undisputed military prowess and political acuity solidified the Arab conquests and guaranteed the Caliphate’s permanence.

Mu’awiya’s lot as founder of a regime that would long outlast his fame and reputation, is not uncommon. The Tokugawa Japan that kept the islands under tight control and isolation from 1600-1850 was built on the victories of its founder, Tokugawa Ieyasu, but also on the accomplishments of his two predecessors and allies, Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Their complex, sometimes fraught relationship is one of the central themes of Taiko: An Epic Novel of War and Glory in Feudal Japan. Though Eiji Yoshikawa wrote it during World II, Taiko reads like an extremely detailed historical novel with no contemporary relevance to the 1930s when it was written. The first third of the novel chronicles the rise and fall of Oda, an irascible minor ruler who in 1560 decides to challenge a far more powerful rival in battle against the advice of his generals, and succeeds. Oda’s victory could have opened the path toward prestige and a safe grasp on power, but he instead uses it as an opening to re-fashion feudal Japan. His campaigns against the myriad rulers across the islands ultimately result in total victory, as he becomes the first great unifier of a previously decentralized regime.

Oda’s impact is that his wars destroyed the old order of Japan that had existed over the previous 200 years under the Ashikaga Shogunate. Rather than become the first among equals, Oda sought total power. His campaigns leveled the structures upholding late feudal Japan, and laid the foundations for early modern Japan. Oda attacked the power of the Buddhist temples, kneecapping an independent force that could check the nobility. His greatness, like that of many rulers, was more a product of the social forces he unleashed in destabilizing the old equilibrium, than of his short-term political or military victories.

One of the consequences of the reorganization of Japanese society and politics triggered by Oda Nobunaga’s consolidation of power in the 16th century was the nearly megalomaniacal ambitions of his successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He invaded Korea, and harbored ambitions of conquering China. Ultimately, Toyotomi failed because though Ming dynasty China was in decline after two centuries in power, it still commanded East Asia’s largest armies, backed by the demographic heft of the Han people. The foundation for this massive polity dates back two centuries, to the conquests of a man born Zhu Yuanzhang to a peasant family in 1328 under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, but who would go on to found the Ming dynasty and reign from 1368-1398 as the Hongwu Emperor. In many cases China’s great dynasties take on a personality that reflects their founder; the Tang were‌ aristocratic, while the Qing never entirely shed the ethnic identity of their Manchu founders. The Ming, like the Han, were founded by a peasant, and its generally xenophobic populism likely reflects Zhu Yuanzhang’s own dispositions. A substantial section of F. W. Motte’s Imperial China, 900–1800 is devoted to his rise and Zhu’s improbable conquest of the world’s most populous country in the 14th century.

Zhu, like the Ming dynasty itself, was a balance between reinvention and loyalty to his origins. During his reign as Hongwu Emperor he imposed a Confucian despotism that would serve as a role model for the next six centuries of Imperial China. For much of his time as a rebel against the Mongols he was part of the Red Turban movement that espoused religious millenarianism. The Chinese elite imperial culture looked dimly on utopian religious movements led by charismatic figures given their capacity to foment division and exacerbate underlying instabilities, a fact underscored by Zhu’s suppression of extremist Buddhist sects during his tenure as emperor, but before he ascended to the throne he rode those religious energies to victory after victory. His life trajectory, from starving peasant to Buddhism monk to rebel general in a millenarian movement, illustrates the essentiality of reinvention and flexibility for those who come from nothing but grasp for everything. During his three decades in power as Hongwu Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang refined a template that would later become a literary topos in the West for an oriental despot whose word was law and whose interests were by definition those of the empire he ruled. The Ming dynasty survived despite continuous Mongol assaults, Japan’s rise to become a rival, and the arrival of warlike Europeans to East Asian waters. Perhaps this can all be attributed back to the hard-headed nature of its socially insecure founder, who created an Asian despotism with deep cultural roots and a state that harnessed all the resources of the vast Han nation.

Abandoning DEI won’t fix academia’s left-leaning problem - Creating a balance of viewpoints on campuses requires more than discarding diversity statements. Megan McArdle lays out the structural problems with recruiting conservatives into academia in the wake of widespread repeals of DEI. Even if conscious selection based on ideology is banned, conservative self-selection will continue. Academia has a reputation as a liberal bastion, so conservatives opt for other professions, and therefore further depriving many fields of any chance at viewpoint diversity that might aid them in understanding/modeling the world better, not to mention an ability to relate to the broader public.

Which Identity is More Important: Race, Gender, or Religion? Gen Z is the least identitarian generation. Interesting in light of all the propaganda about identity they have been exposed to. Republicans care more about religion, less about race, Democrats more about race, less about religion.

The founding myth of progressive economics. My memory of the time, the period after 2008, aligns with Matthew Yglesias’ in this piece: it was just really hard to prosecute individuals for criminal offenses during the financial crisis. Historical truth matters, and sometimes it is easier to nail it if you lived through it and remember it well (anyone under 35 was pre-college in 2008, so many pundits who were not teen news junkies lack much personal memory to rely on).

Neanderthals may have eaten maggots as part of their diet. Seems plausible; many foragers eat maggots because they are high in both protein and fat and easy to harvest off decaying carcasses. More interestingly, anthropologists are now arguing that Ice Age humans like Neanderthals probably ate a fair amount of partially rotten meat like modern Arctic people still do because it was the only way not to get protein poisoning.

Estimates Imply That Burden of Tariffs Could Fall Heavily on Consumers. The ad hoc nature of the administration’s tariffs is terrible for long-term economic stability. This is the geopolitics of tactics, not strategy.

Adaptive Increase of Amylase Gene Copy Number in Peruvians Driven by Potato-rich Diets. This literature has been going back and forth; basically, amylase breaks down starch while you are chewing. But this jumps out: “Indigenous Peruvian Andean populations possess the highest AMY1 copy number globally.” Having a bigger, more diverse, sample size really helps.

The rise, decline and fall of clades. The emergence, diversification and extinction of species is the classic evolutionary dynamic that motivated Charles Darwin’s original work, and this paper uses empirical data in combination with a new model to understand the patterns of diversity we see around us.

Population-scale analysis of inheritance patterns across 858,635 individuals reveals recent historical migration patterns across the North Sea from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. Really great application of large numbers of genomes and more fine-grained analytic techniques to answer recent historical questions about demographics and gene flow.

randPedPCA: Rapid approximation of principal components from large pedigrees. A lot of pedigree construction software gets very computationally expensive. This PCA-based method seems to be a cheaper way to make the same inferences.

Redefining the timing and circumstances of cat domestication, their dispersal trajectories, and the extirpation of European wildcats. I thought it was well established a solid decade ago that domestic cats arrived in Europe during the Roman period.

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall, most recently a pair of pieces about Tibetans’ unique adaptations and unconventional path to enduring influence.

Soft power from the rooftop of the world:

The youngest Indian innovation in Buddhism, the Vajrayana tradition, which leaned on concomitant changes within Hinduism, came to maturity in an India populated by magicians of all religions bent on manipulating the forces of the universe via esoteric mental gymnastics. Tantric-influenced Buddhist monks and priests offered not just philosophical wisdom to their flocks, but magical powers. Medieval Tibet’s lamas, proud philosopher-kings who reigned as autocrats from fortified monasteries, were also wizards whose incantations and spells struck fear in their enemies and psychologically fortified their allies. Today, the Tibetan lamas’ Buddhism offers a glimpse of what might have been in India had it not been for Islam’s rise and Buddhism’s attendant expungement there. The Vajrayana adepts who fled north, just as their faith winked out of existence in their homeland, did more than transmit a fossil religion; in Tibet, Vajrayana Buddhism got a new lease on life, and would eventually vie with Mahayana sects, as well as Islam and Christianity all across northern Asia’s breadth.

A different kind of heart: Tibetans’ genetic uniqueness and enduring cultural sway:

More than a millennium ago, the Tibetan Empire, and after its fall, less officially, Tibetan elites, adopted and preserved a Vajrayana tradition on the edge of extinction by inviting Indian monks north of the Himalayas to translate their texts and impart their knowledge. Even as Buddhism fell extinct in the south, in Tibet the esoteric Vajrayana tradition continued, as centuries of translation projects and preservation turned the mountain redoubt into a repository of ancient wisdom. Though it is often said that Indian Buddhism went extinct, Tibet’s incredibly influential religion arguably represents the trajectory Indian Buddhism was already set on when its story was cut short. Though Vajrayana Buddhism’s soft power may bend, over the millennia it has proven incredibly robust in the face of persecution and political chaos. Even with the stern eye of the totalitarian Chinese state trained on suppressing the religion in the Tibetan homeland, the people remain steadfast in their devotion to the faith, their lamas, and their identity, uncowed torch-bearers for a tradition that withstood the predations of India’s Muslim empires, converted the fierce Mongol armies and captured the imaginations of believers across both the East and West.

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 my guests since the last Time Well Spent:

• Zineb Riboua: realism in foreign policy in 2025

• Mark Lutter: charter cities and the urban future

• Andrew Song: cooling the planet with technology

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 UnHerd, National Review, The Manhattan Institute, Quillette, and The New York Times

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 hope to read about in 2025, put it here.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Andrew Song, co-founder of Make Sunsets. An NYU graduate with a degree in economics, Song was a member of the Y Combinator class of winter 2016. Before becoming a founder, Song worked at firms involved in data analytics and artificial intelligence. A repeat attendee at the Founders Fund “Hereticon” conference, Song’s company has been profiled IEEE Spectrum, The New York Times and NPR.

Razib and Song first talk about the current state of climate, or more precisely, climate change and anthropogenic global warming. Song argues that the emission-reduction strategy has fundamentally failed, and global warming is inevitable absent a drastic strategy shift. Enter geoengineering, the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth. In the context of global warming Song proposes that humans engage in proactive efforts to cool the world. His company, along with a similar Israeli startup, proposes to introduce particulate matter into the stratosphere to reflect back some of the sun’s radiation. Razib asks Song what the reaction has been, given that the atmosphere is a public resource, and how he proposes to eventually make it a revenue-generating business through government contracts. More generally, Razib and Song talk about other geoengineering projects, including Augustus Doricko’s dream of increasing precipitation through his Rainmaker firm.

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In 1915, nine lamas arrived in St. Petersburg, Russia, to inaugurate the Datsan Gunzechoinei Buddhist temple there. Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II, had approved its construction in the empire’s then capital. Erecting a temple on Europe’s northeastern fringe as the 20th century dawned may sound odd, but Buddhism had actually been one of the Russian Empire’s official religions since 1741. Hundreds of thousands of the Tsar’s subjects were devotees of the Vajrayana tradition; from Kalmyk Mongols tending their herds on the Volga to Tuvan Turks ascending Siberian peaks every summer to reach upland pastures.

Vajrayana derives from the Sanskrit vajra, a diamond-strong thunderbolt the storm god Indra yields, thus its alternate labels: the “Diamond Vehicle” or “Thunderbolt Vehicle.” Vajrayana is Buddhism’s third and youngest tradition, after Theravada or the “Way of Elders,” which is both the most ancient and traditional variant dominant in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, and the Mahayana tradition of China and Japan, which translates as the “Great Vehicle.” Theravada puts the onus on individual action to attain salvation, while Mahayana sects count on the power of supernatural intercessory beings, or bodhisattvas, to aid believers in attaining enlightenment. Vajrayana, meanwhile, though originally an extension of the Mahayana tradition, contends that enlightenment can be accelerated into a single lifetime through initiatory rites supervised by a teacher of confirmed spiritual lineage, often himself a reincarnated bodhisattva in the flesh (rather than an unseen spirit). These teachers are called lamas, the Tibetan word for guru, and Vajrayana is often termed “Lamaist” for their essential role. Turkic and Mongolian Vajrayana adherents also use the term lama for their religious leaders, illustrating Tibetans’ influence after incubating and nourishing this form of Buddhism for over a millennium.

Vajrayana Buddhism is India’s last great religious gift to the world, and the tradition’s lamas eventually became trusted confidants of everyone from Mongol Khans to Chinese Emperors. The religion’s subcontinental origins date to the late first millennium, crystallizing tantric traditions that peaked between 600 and 1000 AD, in a land then teeming with charismatic teachers and devotional sects. India was undergoing a religious transformation. Hindu kings were turning away from the Buddha. Chinese pilgrims to India during these centuries noted the decline of the monastic orders and the neglect of Buddhist religious sites in the religion’s homeland. The year 1000 AD marked the end of a civilizational cycle; Buddhism was gradually sliding towards senescence in the subcontinent, seemingly poised to fade into history. But ultimately, the religion collapsed with cataclysmic finality upon Islam’s arrival at the beginning of the second millennium. In 1192 AD, the Afghan warlord Muhammad of Ghor administered Indian Buddhism’s coup de grâce, defeating Indian forces at the Second Battle of Tarain, ushering in over five centuries of Turco-Muslim rule in the Gangetic plain. The Turks immediately plundered the last Buddhist universities and monasteries, overnight scattering dispossessed monks to the four corners of Asia, and almost as promptly saw to Buddhism’s elimination in its ancient North Indian core.

But as the Buddha’s teachings withered in his homeland, their practice continued to spread in the mountains and plateaus beyond the Himalayas, maturing into a new empire of faith on Asia’s very rooftop. Tibetans had first put their stamp on history after 600 AD, exploding into surrounding civilizations’ consciousness, racking up one military victory after another, crashing the gates of venerable imperial capitals. This was when the ruler Songtsen Gampo unified all the petty highland kingdoms south to north between the Himalayas and the Tarim Basin into one powerful state, fatefully laying the foundations for Tibet’s future cultural preeminence by sponsoring Buddhist monks to preach and build temples in his domains.

Over the next two centuries, Tibetan armies would occupy the Tang capital of Chang'an, defeat Chinese armies in Central Asia (aiding their Arab Muslim allies), and invade the Indian subcontinent. Tibet, at Eurasia’s geographical center, was the continent’s geopolitical fulcrum between 600 and 850 AD. But more lasting than the outcomes of the Imperial Tibetans’ political machinations and military victories was the fateful choice to pluck South Asian Buddhism from the edge of extinction, transplanting it wholesale. At the height of Tibet’s temporal power in the 8th century, Tantric Buddhism found political patronage in the north, just as the number of adherents began declining in India when South Asia’s rulers were switching their allegiance to new, assertive sects of Hinduism. Drawn by the offer of patronage, two Indian monks, Padmasambhava and Śāntarakṣita, journeyed north of the Himalayas, sowing the seeds for the oldest school of Tibetan Buddhism, the Nyingma. In Tibet, they imparted their tantric knowledge to the rising empire’s enthusiastic acolytes. So by the time a unified Tibet began shattering into dozens of petty principalities in the 900’s, Vajrayana Buddhism was firmly enough ensconced that it continued to spread among the people, unifying Tibetans culturally against the backdrop of an increasingly fractured political landscape.

During the Tibetan Empire in the 7th to 9th centuries AD, Buddhist practice had become widespread in China, Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia, with genuine popular appeal (as opposed to being just a faddish elite affectation, like in Tibet). Many sects, like Chinese Chan (which we tend to know better for the Zen form it later assumed in Japan), drew on indigenous philosophical traditions and by then Buddhism was no longer viewed as a foreign religion in many of the societies that had adopted it centuries prior. When Mahayana Buddhism came to Tibet from the east in the 7th century, it was as a Chinese religion and an unwelcome tool of Chinese soft power.

Not unlike Christianity in its own birthplace, and in contrast to its expansive legacy across much of Asia, Buddhism is today nearly extinct in its founder’s homeland. But this reality only dates to the second millennium AD. Buddhism was a force in northern India for over 1,500 years, from 500 BC to 1000 AD, a span that in the West encompasses everything from the rise of the Classical Greeks to the foundation of medieval European kingdoms. Those intrepid monks who braved the Himalayas in the centuries around 1000 AD preserved a distinct Indian aspect to a confession that had continued to evolve and change in its homeland, centuries after Mahayana and Theravada spread to East and Southeast Asia, decoupling themselves from subcontinental developments.

The youngest Indian innovation in Buddhism, the Vajrayana tradition, which leaned on concomitant changes within Hinduism, came to maturity in an India populated by magicians of all religions bent on manipulating the forces of the universe via esoteric mental gymnastics. Tantric-influenced Buddhist monks and priests offered not just philosophical wisdom to their flocks, but magical powers. Medieval Tibet’s lamas, proud philosopher-kings who reigned as autocrats from fortified monasteries, were also wizards whose incantations and spells struck fear in their enemies and psychologically fortified their allies. Today, the Tibetan lamas’ Buddhism offers a glimpse of what might have been in India had it not been for Islam’s rise and Buddhism’s attendant expungement there. The Vajrayana adepts who fled north, just as their faith winked out of existence in their homeland, did more than transmit a fossil religion; in Tibet, Vajrayana Buddhism got a new lease on life, and would eventually vie with Mahayana sects, as well as Islam and Christianity all across northern Asia’s breadth.

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Fourteen years ago, a UC Berkeley team studying altitude adaptation in Tibetans developed a method to scan the genome of various modern populations, looking for outlier gene frequencies compared to related populations. First, they compared Tibetans, Han Chinese and Northern Europeans, looking for genomic regions where Tibetans were the exception, the outlier. This approach identified EPAS1, a gene implicated in high-altitude adaptation, as a likely target of positive selection in Tibetans years before it was discovered that this gene introgressed from Denisovans.

This sort of technique obviously requires a good grasp of the genome’s broader phylogenetic patterns. You need some sense of the history of the populations to infer the peregrinations of specific genes. Next, calculating the timescale of divergences between Tibetans and Han Chinese, the authors estimated the two populations split 2,750 years ago. The problem with this estimate is that it places the proto-Tibetan stream’s separation from the proto-Han one at 750 BC, at least a millennium after we know the Han already existed as a people, and centuries into their long written history. Of course, this estimate, as estimates generally do, has multiple simplifying assumptions baked in that might be incorrect. For example, Han Chinese and Tibetans were both modeled as homogeneous groups at the tips of a bifurcating tree, rather than mixed populations. If Tibetans were a mix of two populations, each with distinct historic relatedness to the Han Chinese, then the average divergence estimate may have been misleading.

And in fact the 2,750-year estimate makes more sense if we do imagine that the Tibetans as a mixed population, with one of their ancestral groups closely related to the proto-Han. If you further consider the likelihood of subsequent gene flow from Han Chinese into Tibetans over the last few millennia, the estimate fits even better. Ethnolinguistic data supports the proposition that Tibetans and Han Chinese share a close connection despite vast cultural differences and proto-Han records that memorialize proto-Tibetans as alien barbarians; scholars still support the construct of a Sino-Tibetan linguistic family. If such a linguistic connection is observed, it is almost certain that proto-Tibetans and proto-Han diverged relatively late in the Holocene. But the Denisovan provenance of EPAS1 points to the strong likelihood of a separate modern human population occupying the Tibetan uplands by the Pleistocene (since Denisovans proper disappeared about 40,000 years ago); no doubt that Tibet is hostile to human flourishing, but contrary to past scholarly skepticism, some number of our species have clearly managed to eke out an existence in its crags and valleys for millennia.

Tibetan Y-chromosomal lineages hint at an ancient and very exotic ancestral element. About 50% of Tibetan men carry Y-chromosomal haplogroup D. Worldwide, this lineage is very rare, save for in two other populations, both notably inhabiting isolated archipelagos: the Japanese and the Andamanese. In Japan, D is almost certainly a legacy of the Jomon people, whose roots in the archipelago go back more than 20,000 years. D’s three sublineages across East Asia, seem to have split by at least 45,000 years ago, suggesting descendents are part of a widespread diversification of modern humans right after our species first arrived in the region. D is very possibly a marker for a broad set of deeply divergent East Eurasian populations whose former geographical range has since been largely overwritten by the rise and dominance of agricultural peoples from the Yellow River basin and southern China.

Interestingly, when we examine their whole genome, and compare them to other populations, we see that Tibetans tend to skew more northern among East-Asian populations, despite their southernmost range grazing South Asia. The principal component analysis (PCA) above files Tibetans between Siberian Yakuts and northern Han Chinese, while the admixture analysis above also finds greater similarity between Tibetans and northern East Asians than southern ones (and unlike in the Han, we see a low but consistent West-Asian admixture into Tibetans, pointing to connections spanning western Tibet and Central Asia).

Before attempting to understand the historical antecedents of these connections, we must recall that the modern Tibetan Autonomous Region in China, successor to the nation-state of Tibet (1912-1949), is actually just one component of broader historical Tibet, Ü-Tsang. The Tibetan Empire and its successor states had wider suzerainty, extending into Amdo in the northeast and Kham in the southeast. While Ü-Tsang is over 90% Tibetan, Amdo and Kham are multiethnic, and today Tibetans are a minority in these regions. But out of China's six million Tibetans, only about half live in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, with most of the rest in Amdo (today’s Qinghai) and Kham’s eastern districts, (today’s Sichuan). Historically, Amdo and Kham were just as much Tibetan homelands as Ü-Tsang was, and their history presents a plausible path of ancient migration and admixture across the plateau.

A model to explain Tibetan affinities with northern East Asian populations like Yellow River Han Chinese and Mongolians is that the proto-Tibetans, those tribes who spoke Tibeto-Burman languages, migrated westward from the Yellow River basin and began expanding south and west from Amdo, only settling Ü-Tsang and Kham to the south later; and indeed, related Burman populations’ incongruous (given their geographic position) genetic affinity with northern East Asians, points to the migration continuing southward beyond Kham. Once in the Tibetan highlands, it is evident that the Neolithic proto-Tibetans mixed with indigenous foragers, whose roots in the region date back to the Pleistocene, and who mixed with the Denisovans more than 40,000 years ago (thereby acquiring that crucial altitude-adapted variant of EPAS1).

To this case built on modern genomic inference and a few archaic Denisovan genomes, we can now add the smoking gun of ancient DNA from large numbers of anatomically modern humans in the region. A 2023 paper analyzed 89 samples from the Tibetan plateau dating from across the past 5,100 years; it nearly closes our case. For one thing, most of the ancient samples are genetically similar enough to modern Tibetans to confirm that they were at least partly ancestral to them. Populations of the contemporary highlands have occupied the region for much of the Holocene. Their roots go back at least 5,100 years ago, the date for an individual from the Zongri site in Amdo in the northeast whose connections to modern Tibetans are clear. But in relation to non-Tibetans, the Zongri individual genetically most resembles peoples who lived in the Yellow River basin to the east well before 5,000 years ago, indicating a migration long prior to his burial. Unsurprisingly, we see no strong affinity to populations from ancient southern China, confirming proto-Tibetans’ ultimate northern provenance. But that’s not all. All the ancient and modern Tibetans are best modeled with an additional ancestry component from a “ghost” population not yet discerned in its pure form in the ancient DNA. This group is deeply diverged from other East Asians, and is almost certainly a signal from indigenous Initial Upper Paleolithic-descended foragers still inhabiting the highlands when the lowlanders intruded upon the plateau.

What dynamic explains the demographic replacement of the indigenous foragers? Today, barley is Tibet’s principal crop, but this grain arrived from the west, through Indian Kashmir, just some 2000-3000 years ago. Previously, Tibetans cultivated millet, with sites confirmed as early as 2800 BC. Though this post-dates the Tibetan-like individual from the Zongri site by three centuries, the timing is close enough to boost confidence in the hypothesis that his people’s ethnogenesis was in the westward migration of a group of millet farmers before 3000 BC. This was just one in a succession of migrations from the mouth of the Yellow River that kicked off 8,000 years ago, and progressively spread agriculture across northern China. These movements long predated the Han’s emergence, who arose via the assimilation of migrants from southern China, marking them as quite distinct from early proto-Tibetans.

But Tibetan populations were not isolated in the plateau after 3000 BC. Ancient DNA samples from individuals who lived from 3000-1000 BC reflect sporadic and geographically heterogeneous pulses of admixture from adjacent lowland populations into the plateau. At the same time that the eastern populations in Amdo and Kham maintained contact with lowland East Asians, Tibetan migration into the south and west continued until their genetic profile was present in the highlands of Nepal, and overflowed west into Central Asia, attested as far afield as Ladakh, by 1000 BC. Over the next few millennia, Central and South Asian genetic signatures also appeared in Ü-Tsang, in line with the historically attested interactions between Tibetans in this region and both Indian and West Asian peoples.

Consistent with those diverse ancient contacts millennia ago, the ancient samples show clear genetic clustering within Amdo, Ü-Tsang and Kham respectively; the three regions had distinct profiles. But modern Tibetans no longer show such striking population structure. This implies that gene flow between the regions homogenized the Tibetan genetic profile just in the last 1000 years. The Tibetan Empire’s 7th-century AD emergence almost certainly kick-started that process, and then a unified Tibetan Buddhist culture on the plateau after 1000 AD further accelerated it. It was politics and culture that overcame tribal differences and the plateau’s forbiddingly vast distances, accelerating the natural evolution of a new people with a shared identity, written in both their genes and their memes.

Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Zineb Riboua, a research fellow and program manager of Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. She specializes in Chinese and Russian involvement in the Middle East, the Sahel, and North Africa, great power competition in the region, and Israeli-Arab relations. Riboua’s pieces and commentary have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, the National Interest, the Jerusalem Post and Tablet among other outlets. She holds a master’s of public policy from the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. She did her undergraduate studies in France, where she attended French preparatory classes and HEC Paris’ Grande Ecole program. Her Substack is Beyond the Ideological.

Razib and Riboua discuss the Trump administration’s theory of tariffs as a tool of foreign policy and his attitudes toward multilateral diplomacy. They explore whether any principle beyond power and dominance underlies the current administration’s approach, and consider the role of principles and values in foreign policy. Riboua elaborates a realist perspective in line with the thinking of Henry Kissinger. States have interests and abilities to execute on those interests; idealism is secondary. Riboua also discusses the fact that Trump seems attuned to how foreign politicians relate to the American domestic scene. He seems willing to punish those abroad whom he perceives to be favorable to his political enemies and reward those who are personally favorable toward him. Razib then asks Riboua about the geopolitics of her native Morocco, a relatively stable monarchy on northwest Africa’s edge that has promoted moderate Islam, a good relationship with Europe and maintained a stable democracy.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Mark Lutter. Lutter is an urban development expert known for his work on charter cities—new urban areas aimed at fostering economic growth and progress. He is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the Charter Cities Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to building the ecosystem for charter cities, as well as the CEO of Braavos Cities, a charter city development company. He holds a PhD in economics from George Mason University, and a BS in mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park. His interests span progress studies, governance, social dynamics and institution-building, with a belief that creating new cities can spark cultural and economic advancements similar to historical periods like the Renaissance or the Dutch Golden Age. He has been published or quoted in outlets like the Financial Times, The New Yorker, and The Chicago Tribune.

Lutter and Razib discuss diverse topics, from the difficulties of the Prospera project in Honduras, to the possibility of developing San Francisco’s Presidio into an Asian-style super-city. They explore the various pitfalls and possibilities faced when attempting to create new jurisdictions in developing nations in the Caribbean and Latin America, along with the major obstacles to urban innovation in the USA. Lutter outlines the economic case for charter cities, along with the normative values that undergird their creation as bastions of liberty and laboratories of cultural experimentation. Finally, they discuss the Trump administration’s openness to the idea of the “Freedom City” in the Presidio, along with local opposition to the project.

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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.

2068 years ago today, on March 15th, 44 BC, assassins murdered Gaius Julius Caesar at the Curia of Pompey. Dramatized in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the plot against Rome’s dictator was rich soil for later storytellers. One of the most notorious assassins, Marcus Junius Brutus, he of Et tu, Brute fame was a son of Caesar’s mistress, Servilia. Not only that, in a magnanimous gesture, Caesar had recently granted Brutus, like many of his co-conspirators, clemency after defeating them in one of the late Republic’s many internecine conflicts.

Caesar’s murder marked the beginning of the Republic’s end, and the start of the last great civil war that presaged the Empire, which would itself begin under Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian whom he adopted as his son and heir, and who would come to be known as Augustus Caesar. But what if Caesar had not been assassinated? How would subsequent history have differed? Caesar had been planning an invasion of Parthia, the kingdom that had arisen on the soil of ancient Persia, to avenge the death of the Roman general Crassus. Though Octavian was a political genius, it was Caesar who was the tactical savant, as evidenced by his conquering Gaul in eight years. A Rome that had crushed Persian power before the Empire’s advent would have represented a historical force whose implications are hard to actually imagine.

Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar: The Life of a Colossus places the spotlight on the Roman general’s martial achievements. This is expected; Goldsworthy’s Ph.D. research is in ancient military history. His dissertation was The Roman Army at War 100 BC – AD 200. Caesar was rich, yes. But Crassus was richer. And it’s true that Caesar won many victories at the peak of his life, in his 40’s. But Pompey triumphed in battle at the tender age of 23. Caesar’s pinnacle accomplishment was to fully subdue a domain as expansive and barbaric as Gaul, annexing it to the Republic with decisive finality. Goldsworthy outlines the Gallic campaign in exquisite detail, but also covers Caesar’s victories in the east, Macedonia’s conquest, Caesar’s relationship with Cleopatra, and therefore Egypt. By the time of his assassination, Caesar had established the Roman Empire’s outlines by both conquest and consolidation, even if the governmental apparatus that was to succeed the Republic only emerged under Octavian.

With Caesar’s passing, antiquity lost one of its greatest generals, the peer of Alexander the Great and Hannibal. Over 1,900 years after that assassination, another pivotal human being of a different stripe entirely was slain by a political enemy: Mohandas K. Gandhi, who preached peace, and gained fame for weaponizing nonviolence against oppressors. His assassination by a Hindu nationalist changed the course of Indian history, marginalizing the right-wing for a generation, and also clearing the field for Jawarahal Nehru’s program of industrialization, which Gandhi had in fact opposed. For a generation after independence, the Republic of India was committed to a program of Fabian socialism modeled on that the British Labour party proposed, wholly due to the lack of a Hindu nationalist right-wing opposition or an agrarian populism rooted in Gandhi’s artisanally-oriented economics.

Ramachandra Guha’s two volumes on Gandhi, Gandhi Before India and Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948, are both thorough and accessible for readers innocent of the Mahatma’s biographical arc. Guha’s narrative spans the time from when young Gandhi, a Westernized lawyer was arguing for Indians’ civil rights in South Africa (where he spent two decades from age 23-44) to the abrupt end of his life, by which time he had articulated his theory of nonviolent resistance, focused his life around his Hindu spirituality and made the case for social reform of a traditional decentralized economy. Gandhi was a peculiar figure, a man who denounced the convention of untouchability, but could still celebrate the caste system’s power to dampen the hyper-individualistic competition he saw in the west. Though in the last decades of his life he dressed like a Hindu mendicant, Gandhi studied law in London at the Inner Temple, where future British Prime Ministers Clement Atlee and Margaret Thatcher also earned their qualifications. Though his vision of peaceful resistance has far outlasted his life, he took his meticulously detailed but utopian prescriptions for the Indian polity to the grave with him. Unlike the ideas of the Hindu nationalists who were attacked and banished from public life immediately after his assassination, Gandhian economics and political thought never made a comeback.

In Gandhi’s final year in South Africa, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. This famously furnished the spark for the Great War, what we now call World War I. Franz Ferdinand’s death unravelled a delicate balance, knocking into‌ motion a series of byzantine interlocking alliances that threw together two sides, the Entente of France, Great Britain and Russia versus the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The war’s conclusion marked the end of the old Europe, the close of the long 19th century; it saw the dissolution of the Czars’ Russian Empire, the end of the Habsburgs’ Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman dynasty’s fall. Franz Ferdinand was a relatively modern, forward-looking heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Without his assassination, a more peaceful and gradual shift in the balance of power is easily imaginable. Perhaps the Great War might not even have happened, and the deep chasm we perceive between the long 19th-century’s sunset finally in 1914, and the super-charged, post-armistice decades of modernizing after 1919, might not even mark our conception of our past and our progress.

Philipp Blom’s 2010 The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 documents the idyllic age before, the decade+ at the Belle Epoque’s tail end, while Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War: Explaining World War I pins blame for the conflict that would destroy a civilization on a tragic British misperception of the actual scope of German ambitions. The Vertigo Years overlaps with the first great age of globalization, when British naval power imposed a regime of free trade and commerce on the open seas, and the US had not yet shifted from debtor developing nation to the world’s premier geopolitical power. This was an age when Communism was still a utopian vision, and such fertile modern fields as psychology and sociology were just taking first baby steps. Europe in the decade before the war was finally moving beyond the Victorian age of steam, but many of its external forms, whether fashion or government, remained relics of the past century.

Ferguson’s treatment is not so much an examination of the Great War’s mechanics, as a consideration of the conditions and structural factors that triggered it. He argues that British involvement in what was a fundamentally continental conflict was needless. German ambitions were not global, but local. The Kaiser was no Hitler, and the German political class were not Nazis. Today it is common to view World War I only as prologue to World War II, but Ferguson’s narrative argues it was a contingent conflict, driven by a host of diplomatic confusions and ideological blinders. The specific act of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was simply the final fatal step in the series of events that led to the clash between European powers.

How to Make Superbabies. Many academic scientists will tell you this post is nonsense, but they often underestimate the long-term possibilities of technology because of unexpected discoveries. I foresee the skeptics being surprised by the next few decades’ advances, as is so often the case in science; for my money, voices like Steve Hsu will probably be closer to the mark. At 9,000 words, the piece might seem like a chore, but I found the ideas worth engaging with, because it charts a possible, even probable, path forward. The specific details may not all be born out, but enough of it will surely come to pass that it matters.

In Huntington Beach, Politics on a Plaque. Red cities in blue states and blue cities in red states can offer such juicy reporting, because there is a lot of signalling driven by simmering frustration. But in the end, the cities always have to face the reality of the state in which they are situated. These political shifts within cities are more a barometer of the national mood of political polarization driven by culture wars rather than precursor to any genuine local policy changes.

The Uses and Abuses of ‘Social Construction’. To some extent everything is social construction; the model of the atom you see on posters is social construction. The issue is whether your social constructions are instrumentally useful in understanding reality or just ideological fictions.

To Save Academia, Hire Conservatives. This is a very long and detailed piece, but a major point is that academics need enough ideological diversity to connect to the broader public funding them. The response to the piece though has been petty outrage and rejection, so I’m not optimistic.

We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It. A beautiful appreciation for the luxuries of the modern world by my friend Charles C. Mann.

Tracing the Spread of Celtic Languages using Ancient Genomics. Preprint uses extremely subtle methods to differentiate across very genetically similar ancient populations in Europe in order to ascertain the origin of the Celtic-speaking groups in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age.

Humans in Africa’s wet tropical forests 150 thousand years ago. The key point here is that some anthropologists believe living as foragers in the rainforest is only feasible for humans if they engage in trade with agriculturalists. But 150,000 years ago, no agriculturalists had yet existed, so that theory is definitively falsified. Whether these were the ancestors of modern humans though is a different question.

Whole-genome sequencing analysis of anthropometric traits in 672,976 individuals reveals convergence between rare and common genetic associations. The vast majority of genetic variants remain at low frequency, but population-wide variation often lingers given the smaller number of common variants. Whole-genome sequencing of many individuals is necessary to understand low-frequency variants. Here they show that most heritability is due to common variants, and low frequency variants appear in the same regions of the genome as common variants.

A century of theories of balancing selection. A good review of the century-long attempt to understand how natural selection could maintain genetic diversity.

Ancient human extinction risk: Implications from high-precision computation and fossil evidence. Controversy has swirled about the feasibility of detecting bottlenecks as old as 1 million years through the human genome, so this preprint is worth reading closely; it promises to resurface as the center of an unresolved debate.

I am trying out a new occasional feature for paying subscribers this year, an Unsupervised Learning Journal Club, where I review a paper or preprint of note. At the end of each edition, I invite readers to vote on papers/preprints for the future editions.. The first two editions have been on plague and the genetic evidence for matrilineal Celts:

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

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

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

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 my guests since the last Time Well Spent:

• Graeme Wood: Germany's turn to the right

• Leighton Woodhouse: against the rise of the anti-woke cancel culture and MAGA

• Kevin Klatt: Nutrition, health, MAHA and GLP-1

• Charles Murray: 50 years on the public scene

• Titus Techera: Postmodern Conservative in a post-national Europe

• Nathan Lents: Sex, truths and gender wars

Some of you follow me on my newsletter, blog, or Twitter. But my own domain also has all my links and updates: https://www.razib.com.

There you’ll find links to the few different podcasts I’ve contributed to or run, my total RSS feed, links to more mainstream or print articles when I remember to post them, my Twitter, the occasional guest appearance, etc.

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• Some of my past pieces for Palladium Magazine, UnHerd, The Dispatch, The New York Times, City Journal, National Review, Slate, Unherd, 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 hope to read about in 2025, put it here.

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