Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Graeme Wood. Wood is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he usually covers geopolitics and international affairs. His work ranges from a profile of Richard Spencer, the American white nationalist public figure with whom he went to high school with, to the Islamic State. He is the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. Wood grew up in Dallas, Texas, and graduated from Harvard College. He also studied at the American University in Cairo, Indiana University and Deep Springs College.

Today Razib talks to Wood about his piece in The Atlantic, Germany’s Anti-Extremist Firewall Is Collapsing. Wood addresses the economic malaise of contemporary Germany, in particular, the former East Germany, and how that is impacting the national cultural climate. More concretely, they consider why the right-wing Alternative For Deutschland (AFD) party is so popular, and its transformation from an anti-EU party to an anti-migrant party. Wood emphasizes that Germany has become a highly polarized society when it comes to ethnicities, with very cosmopolitan cities, but small towns in rural eastern provinces where he recalls feeling like possibly the only non-white face at the local beer hall (his father is a white American while his mother is ethnically Chinese). Razib muses whether German multiculturalism as an ideology has allowed for more, not less racism, while Wood reflects on his multi-decade experience visiting the nation as an outsider.

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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.

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

For paid subscribers, Journal Club #1:

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

Today’s paper is Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain. It comes out of Dan Bradley’s group in the Department of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin and appeared in the January 28, 2025 issue of Nature. The first author is Lara Cassidy.

Among historic European peoples, the Irish boast some of the most extensive collections of cultural lore outlining their mythological origins, on par with the Greeks and Romans. This is largely because just as in the Mediterranean, Christianity came gradually to Ireland, and was adopted piecemeal, bottom up, in an organic process. Christianity was not concomitant with Romanization and a sharp repudiation of old ways, but a new faith that was initially integrated alongside the culture’s native traditions. Christianity brought widespread literacy, but pagan Irish beliefs faded over a span of centuries, not decades, allowing for the emerging monasteries to capture these oral traditions in print. By the time Christianity finally superseded paganism, the native Irish religion and the nation’s heathen past had already been substantially recorded for posterity.

Works like Lebor Gabála Érenn ("Book of Invasions"), the Ulster Cycle and the Fenian Cycle preserve what the pagan Irish believed about their distant past, but also reflect their worldview. Although Christian Irish monks compiled these works, clearly interpolating their own mores into ancestral legends, that archived ancient material still offers priceless glimpses into unfamiliar cultural landscapes just beyond the Greco-Roman world.

The Ulster Cycle, dating to around 2,000 years ago, depicts an Iron Age society utterly distinct from the contemporary Roman world in aspects as fundamental as gender relations. Far from token characters or passive objects, in these earliest narrative stories from Celtic societies, women feature as individuals wielding substantial power, forces to be reckoned with. A major antagonist against Cu Chulainn, the Irish Achilles, was Medb, queen of Connacht. A cunning schemer, she triggers a war with neighboring Ulster when she insists upon attaining equivalent wealth to her husband. Bothered that his head of cattle outnumber hers by one, Medb sends her armies to steal a prized stud bull from an Ulster nobleman. Also famously lusty, she has several husbands, and takes lovers while married without any compunction. The Ulster Cycle’s queen of Connacht is likely connected to the legend of Medb Lethderg, the goddess of the land associated with central Ireland’s religious site Tara, where the high kings would ceremonially marry her, thus establishing their ritual legitimacy over the island.

People today might call Medb agentic; she has full power over her own future and makes decisions to advance her own interests as a powerful, independent force in politics. But among the Celts, powerful women were not limited to the realm of mythology; when the Romans invaded Britain in the first century AD, two historically notable queens met them. In the north, the Brigantes’ ruler was queen Cartimandua, who inherited her position from her father (rather than obtaining it through marriage). An early proponent of cooperation with the Romans, Cartimandua divorced her noble husband in 51 AD to marry his armor-bearer, a commoner named Vellocatus. Though the Romans reported aristocratic Brigantes disquiet at this turn of events, the entire episode underscores Briton women’s independence and freedom. Further south, ten years later, the queen of the Iceni, Boudicca, led a violent rebellion against the Romans. That she could muster and lead a great coalition of regional allies against the occupiers further reflects women’s substantial political power among the British Celts.

These trends persisted beyond antiquity. In 848 AD, Kenneth mac Ailpin became king of the Picts, in spite of his upbringing in the western Gaelic kingdom of Dal Riata, where he was already the hereditary ruler. One argument for mac Ailpin’s legitimacy in assuming the Pictish throne, finally uniting most of Scotland under one man’s rule, was that his maternal lineage traced to the Pictish royal line, and that the Picts traditionally inherited the throne matrilineally. This is exceptional in human societies, the overwhelming majority of which are patrilineal. But it would have aligned with women’s relatively high status in Celtic culture.

But dissenting voices have long wondered whether all these legendarily powerful Celtic women were fully factual, or perhaps more a matter of Greco-Roman and Christian observers deploying a self-serving topos. Maybe these classical observers were motivated to see in northwestern Europe’s tribal societies a primitive world that needed to be brought into the mainstream of civilization. Under this reading, ancient authors' observations about women’s prominent role in a culture are unlikely to have been purely neutral judgements, but more a convenient proof of barbarian deviancy and peculiarity, in stark relief to the unquestioned patriarchal basis of their more advanced societies.

This is why Cassidy et. al’s January 2025 Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain is so illuminating; it brings to bear the best tools of modern science, ancient DNA, genomics and statistical analysis, investigating historical and anthropological questions to an incredibly detailed and thorough extent. Using mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), Y chromosomes, ancestral analysis and reconstruction of pedigrees, the paper finds evidence of matrilineal and matrifocal social arrangements across Iron Age Britain in the centuries before Roman conquest, where kinship groups of high status women were the central nodes around which these societies were structured.

From the perspective of ancient DNA, a major challenge in characterizing the Iron Age in Europe has always been cremation’s widespread prevalence. Unlike burials, cremations first destroy most DNA wholesale and then scatter what precious few intact strands might survive. But happily for researchers, one tribe in ancient southwest Britain, in the modern region of Dorset, the Durotriges, practiced inhumation, bequeathing posterity a rare trove of potential data. Cassidy et al. were able to obtain 57 genomes from Durotrigian burial sites.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes Leighton Akira Woodhouse back to the podcast for his third visit. Woodhouse is a journalist and documentarian based in Oakland, California. He grew up in Berkeley, and was a doctoral student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. After leaving academia he contributed to outlets like The Intercept, UnHerd and The Nation, before starting his own Substack, Social Studies. He hosts Le Pod with Lee Fang.

Woodhouse was a major left-wing critic of the excesses of woke culture, and now he has turned his skeptical eye upon the regnant MAGA cultural political complex. In posts like MAGA Globalism and Neoliberalism is Back! Woodhouse observes how the Trump administration seems to have turned its back on the “working-class politics” espoused by J. D. Vance in favor of the sort of free-market libertarianism preferred by tech oligarchs like Elon Musk. Razib outlines the divisions in the Trump administration between Steve Bannon and the tech-globalists around Musk, and how these divisions explain online discord. Woodhouse though argues that Trump has clearly sided with Musk, allowing the government to be captured by monied interests that will profit from the military-industrial complex. He also argues that MAGA in power shows the same tendency of the woke movement in terms of clamping down on free speech now that the Right is ascendant. Woodhouse argues that the Right is now using the same tools of cultural hegemony that the woke Left used before 2024. He argues that institutional politicization today is very similar to the dynamic he saw before 2024 on the part of the woke Left.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Kevin Klatt, a metabolism researcher, dietitian and science communicator. Klatt holds a BA in biological anthropology from Temple University and a PhD in Molecular Nutrition from Cornell University. Before a current appointment as a research scientist at UC Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Baylor College of Medicine. Klatt’s primary platform to communicate about nutrition, health and molecular biology is his Substack. He is also an associate editor at the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Recently Klatt has been writing about the “MAHA” pivot, “Make America Healthy Again,” driven by RFK Jr.’s appointment as head of Health and Human Sciences. Razib and Klatt talk about new directions driven by RFK Jr.'s focus on preventative health and skepticism of pharmaceuticals. Klatt points out that the past two decades have seen a massive shift away from funding nutritional studies, in contrast to the massive budgets of big pharma. He argues that we now really find ourselves without enough information to outline a public health policy given the underfunding of nutritional cohort studies. If MAHA is going to be a serious movement, it needs to drive a reallocation of funds. Razib and Klatt also touch on the cultural shift over the last decade on the Right, where something like “raw milk” switched from being coded as left-wing to being squarely right-wing. They also consider mounting skepticism of mainstream medicine, including vaccination, that seems to be associated with MAHA and in particular RFK Jr. Klatt also addresses the role that GLP-1 drugs are having in driving down obesity rates in the USA, and how pervasive their use might be in the near future.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, friend of the podcast, Charles Murray returns to chat with Razib again. Murray has been a public intellectual and scholar since the 1970’s. He is the author of Losing Ground, The Bell Curve, Human Accomplishment, Real Education, Coming Apart and What it means to be a libertarian and Human Diversity, among others. Born in 1943 in Newton, Iowa, Murray has a BA from Harvard, an MA and PhD from MIT, and did a 1960’s stint in the Peace Corps in Thailand. He has held positions at the American Institutions for Research, the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.

More than four years after their last conversation, and seven years after his official retirement, Murray reflects with Razib on where he sees America going in the next decade, and what has surprised him about the last 25 years. Razib asks what it is like to be a long-standing “Never Trump conservative” and a libertarian in Trump’s populist America. They also discuss the end of the “awokening” that began in the mid-2010s, and whether Murray’s long exile from notice and acknowledgement from mainstream opinion-leaders and tastemakers is at an end. Murray also addresses the ideological fractures he sees on the right, and how America will deal with the last generation of mass immigration that has altered the US’ demographic balance. They also discuss how taboo it still is to talk about group differences in cognitive performance, and whether America will be able to face the reality of demographics and the social consequences thereof in the 21st century.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Titus Techera, a Romanian living in Budapest, but commenting extensively on American and European culture. He is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation, International Coordinator of the National Conservatism Conference and is a primary contributor to the Substack PostModernConservative. Techera also hosts a podcast for the American Cinema Foundation.

Razib first talks to Techera about the 2024 Romanian presidential election that was overturned by the courts over accusations of Russian interference. Techera explains the social and cultural context of the candidate initially declared victorious against a backdrop of Romanian society’s typical stock characters. Techera also discusses the tension between having a nation-state with a distinctive character and becoming part of the broader EU project that is attempting to forge unity across 27 countries.

He then addresses what a “Postmodern Conservative” is in the context of the arts. Perhaps most importantly, PostModern Conservatives take the 20th century and the modernist period seriously; they are not simply reactionaries who want to return to the 19th century. Conservatives who value the arts and culture cannot simply roll the tape back; they have to engage with what has come before. Razib and Techera also consider how inferences from the sciences, like the rejection of the “blank slate,” might influence the arts. They also discuss their disagreements about the latest Dune films, Techera prefers David Lynch’s attempt to adapt the book in 1984 to Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 version.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Nathan Lents about his new book, The Sexual Evolution: A Provocative Look at Sexual Behavior Through the Lens of Evolution. A professor at John Jay College in New York City, Lents earned a Ph.D. in Pharmacological and Physiological Sciences in 2004 at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, and did his postdoctoral fellowship in cancer genomics at NYU Medical Center. Lents’ research ranges from the evolution of molecular mechanisms to behavioral ecology. He is also the author of Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals and Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes.

Lents reached out to Razib after hearing his podcast with Conn Carroll, about his book Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy. Lents felt that Carroll overemphasized the role of monogamy during humanity’s long forager phase, and more precisely, failed to distinguish social monogamy and genetic monogamy. As noted in The Sexual Evolution, many socially monogamous species, like most birds, engage in enough extra-pair copulation so that genetic fidelity is considerably lower than 100%.

Razib and Lents then go back to first principles, talking about the origins of sex, and its persistence in the face of the two-fold cost of reproduction in dimorphous organisms. They discuss why specialized males and females exist in complex organisms as distinct as flowering plants and humans. Lents also discusses the reviews empirical literature on homosexual behavior, variation in sex differences across many classes of organisms and the application of evolutionary thinking to our understanding of the human past. Then they discuss the relevance of evolutionary biology for understanding the human present, and our current debates about marriage, sex and gender. Finally, they consider the differences between sex and gender, and the idea that both can be conceptualized in a nonbinary fashion.

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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.

American mathematician Claude Shannon is credited with introducing the idea that if it is a surprise, that constitutes information. If what you expect to happen always happens, you never walk away any more enlightened than you arrived. Though our world hums along with predictability and regularity, surprises now and then highlight or bring to our attention new realities we weren’t even considering, forcing us to update our mental models accordingly. In the past week, the Chinese company DeepSeek has proven that when it comes to AI-models, it can do more with vastly less, a surprise that has overnight driven complete recalibration of common assumptions about what is possible in the AI technological space.

History is littered with these sorts of surprises. From the vantage point of 100,000 BC, we might have expected the locus of human civilization to emerge somewhere in Africa. From the vantage of 2500 BC, we might have bet on the Near East. And in 700 AD, smart money would have placed it in China. And so on. History is packed with such surprises because it’s impossible to account for every variable. If we’re following along, life involves a constant updating of mental models with new data. Any source of future brilliance beyond the shortest time horizons, whether individual thought, innovation or societal greatness, is, as a rule, poorly predicted by past brilliance.

In the Iliad, Homer enumerates the ships that descended on Troy from each of Greece’s many kingdoms. Odysseus, from far western Greece, brought just 12 ships to the expedition. Agamemnon, the most powerful Greek ruler, helmed 100 ships from Mycenae. Peloponnesian Argos, ruled by the hero Diomedes, contributed another 80. Those were the great powers of the age. Meanwhile, Athens, ruled by the sons of Theseus, sent 50. This is not exactly a trifling number, but neither was it a top tier contribution, a fact which reflects Bronze-Age Athens being a city of only middling importance, a status that endured down to the early centuries of Classical Greece.

But some time after 500 BC, Athens, inauspiciously situated in the heart of dry and austere Attica, rose to become the most culturally vibrant city in the world. Christian Meier documents this unique development in Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age. Today, it’s hard to avoid taking past Athenian brilliance for granted, whether in the form of homegrown thinkers like Plato or Socrates, or the foreigners who flocked to the world’s intellectual heart like Aristotle, Anaxogorus and Protagoras. But prior to Athens’ fifth-century rise, most of the seminal philosophical minds of Greek antiquity flourished in Ionia, across the Aegean, or even in parts of the Greek west, like Italy, home to Parmenides. Though Athens remained something of a “university town” down into the Roman period, Meier’s narrative shines a light on an exceptional and glorious century where cultural, economic and military brilliance was focused for four generations on a previously undistinguished Greek polis.

If barren Attica was an unlikely seedbed for the birth of Western philosophy, late 19th-century small-town southern India would likewise seem an improbable candidate to produce one of the world’s most talented intuitive mathematicians. Robert Kanigel’s The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan documents the strange life of the Indian mathematician whose uncanny facility for numbers seems to have been both innate and unparalleled (he attributed his talents to the gods). Lacking any formal training, Srinivasa Ramanujan, by day a clerk in Madras, patiently re-derived much of Western mathematics by himself. He attempted to share his findings with those around him, which only elicited perplexity. Eventually he made contact with the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy (he of the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium), who recognized his genius and brought him to England. Through Hardy, Ramanujan was introduced to the world of academic mathematics. He lived in England for five years, became the second Indian inducted into the Royal Society, and the first to become a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He died from ill health in 1920 at only 32, having already made contributions to mathematics that remain notable more than a century later (the 1970’s rediscovery of one his misplaced notebooks sparked incredible excitement among number theorists).

While Ramanujan was singular, Istvan Hargittai’s The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century surveys the contributions of a cohort of five extraordinary physicists born around the turn of the 20th century in the Austro-Hungarian city of Budapest, who would go on to shape emerging fields from nuclear energy to computing. Under the thumb of the venerable Habsburg dynasty, the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary by the time of their birth was already being termed the “sick man of Europe,” easily dispatched by Prussia in an 1866 war and soon to be consigned to play junior partner to the new nation-state of Germany. And yet despite the Habsburg monarchy’s military feebleness and economic mediocrity, the Empire’s cities: Vienna, Budapest and Prague, retained immense cultural richness.

Hargittai’s narrative focuses on Theodore von Kármán, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller. All were sons of the Austro-Hungarian Jewish bourgeoisie, thoroughly integrated into the society of the day, and exceptionally loyal to the Habsburg monarchy. Two, von Neuman and von Kármán, notably came from families that had even been ennobled for their prominence and contributions to law, education and finance. Budapest’s secular Jews had a peculiar status as simultaneously consummate insiders and determined outsiders as a matter of choice. Religiously alienated from the Christian Magyar ethnic majority, and having adopted the second language of the Empire, Hungarian, rather than German, the Jews of Budapest represented an absolutely singular community within the cosmopolitan world of Mitteleuropa. Whereas the German and Hungarian elites might serve in government or the military, haute bourgeoisie Jews like John von Neuman were shunted off to the academy or industry, but it was there that they were able to fully leverage their talents.

If the Hungarian Jews came into their own in the shadow of Europe’s most decrepit monarchy, the Dutch helped invent modernity under conditions of perpetual war. At least according to Lisa Jardine in Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory. A small, densely populated nation barely above sea level, for 80 years between 1568 and 1648 the Netherlands fought for independence against a Habsburg Empire at its imperial apogee, as Phillip II of Spain attempted to suppress his Low Country subjects’ Protestantism. Though the southern provinces ultimately remained under Habsburg rule, and were brought back to Catholicism (becoming Belgium), the northern provinces obtained their independence and became the Protestant Netherlands. Nevertheless, generations of war against far larger powers forced the Netherlands to adapt, innovate and extemporize; religious toleration and a commercial orientation were necessary for Dutch survival. The Dutch East India Company became the world’s first international corporation, and Jardine argues that many 17th-century Dutch economic innovations would be profitably assimilated by the English in the 18th. If the United Kingdom became Europe’s preeminent modern power in the late 18th century, deploying navy and merchant traders together as a dual force, such an approach came only through emulation of a model pioneered by the Dutch.

Whereas the Netherlands was the story of a European underdog that survived and even flourished, the tale of Temujin in Frank McLynn’s Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy is one of adversity along the ascent to the peak of human power. Born a minor noble among the nomadic Mongols in 1162 AD, the young Temujin’s father died when he was eight, and his tribe abandoned him and his family to the wilderness. Temjuin hunted squirrels in the forests of northern Mongolia to survive, and at one point was captured by enemies and enslaved. But far from letting these events crush him; by adulthood Temujin was gradually accruing followers, and harnessed the loyalty of his soldiers against all the peoples of Mongolia, conquering tribe after tribe.

But Genghis Khan’s biographers who compiled his life in The Secret History of the Mongols just after his lifetime note that Temujin’s early experiences stamped him: he emphasized personal loyalty over pedigree or blood connection. Inexorably defeating his rivals likely owed to the emphasis he put on competence over lineage, and Temujin extended and expanded this rationalist outlook to manage his military forces right up to his death. His victories were so absolute that his followers proclaimed him Genghis Khan, or “Universal Ruler.” McLynn’s narrative sidesteps sentimentality, reporting, for example, the contemporary finding that the Mongol genocides in Central Asia were so extensive that wilderness reclaimed vast swaths of land that had been pastures and fields, triggering a global cooling. But Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy highlights the reality that Temujin’s rise to power was no coincidence, his was a great talent honed by his early life’s vicissitudes.

If Temujin finding his back to the wall forced him to develop personal and political skills that he spent the rest of his life leveraging, the small cities of the ancient Near East that hugged the coast of today’s Lebanon were forced by their forbidding mountainous backdrop to look outward to the Mediterranean for sustenance and survival. The mercantile orientation of the cities of ancient Phoenicia: Tyre, Byblos and Sidon, was a function of their lack of hinterland. Felling cedars in the mountains to the east, the ancient Phonecians built great ships that took them to Egypt, Cyprus and Greece, and even further afield. In 814 BC, colonists from Tyre established a beachhead in North Africa, laying the foundations for what would one day become the wealthiest and most powerful Phonecian city of all, Carthage. Jack Miles’ Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, focuses heavily on the Punic Wars between 264–146 BC because that is the period for which ancient sources abound; after Carthage’s final defeat, the Romans destroyed their great rival’s internal records.

But Miles’ narrative examines the vast imperium of a city-state whose inheritance was the Mediterranean, reaching eastward to old Tyre and west to the very Straits of Gibraltar, even founding another Carthage in Iberia (modern day Cartagena). The Punic Wars paint Carthage as Rome’s negative image, but Miles highlights the fact that, Carthage’s power, like Rome’s waxed over the centuries of declining Etruscan and Greek influence in the Western Mediterranean. And he covers how they organized themselves as an oligarchic republic not dissimilar from their Roman rivals. Carthage’s ultimate failing might be that their ruling elite’s economic pragmatism was no match for the fanaticism of the Roman ruling class, who saw only the binary of victory or defeat.

Egypt Fears Syria’s Revolutionary Fervor Could Be Contagious. Unlike Syria, Egypt is not ruled by an ethno-religious minority, so I suspect fears of instability are overblown. But to be fair, 111 million Egypts lived packed together in a hot, crowded country with few economic prospects. At some point, something will have to give.

The mistake of the century - Americans badly underestimated the growth potential of the CCP. Frank Dikotter argues one issue is that Americans underestimate or dismiss the CCP’s genuine commitment to socialism.

Universities That Target Their Students’ Free Speech Should Have To Pay A Public Price For It. Midwit busybody administrators without any meaningful brief are responsible for this sort of thing. These are not people who ever sought the life of the mind, their highest goal is to police those who crave it.

Make America Ageless: Trump’s Health Picks Take Longevity Movement Mainstream. Ozempic is arguably the first major successful anti-aging drug. We may be looking at a new dawn in the fight against mortality and morbidity.

Greenland’s leader wants independence from Denmark as Trump hovers over Arctic island. Greenland’s population, about 57,000 is only a few thousand more than there are free subscribers to this humble Substack. That’s just not enough people to viably govern a territory larger than Alaska as an independent nation.

Germany’s Economic Model Is Broken, and No One Has a Plan B. Russian energy is getting more expensive or unavailable and the China export market is cooling down. Germany made a few wrong macroeconomic bets.

Ancient DNA elucidates the migration and evolutionary history of northern and southern populations in East Asia. The north-south division appears by 19,000 years ago, but one modern dynamic has been hybridization between the two populations in the historical period, as has occurred in much of China.

Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain. This interesting pattern may be associated with the spread of Brythonic-speaking Celts into the British Isles from Gaul.

Ancient DNA reveals reproductive barrier despite shared Avar-period culture. This is a totally surprising result. The Avars were a Turkic people who migrated from Mongolia to Central Europe 1,500 years ago, and it seems that some of their subjects adopted their culture but remained totally segregated from the migrant elite in the Balkans. No one understands how the mating markets were kept so distinct.

Inference of human pigmentation from ancient DNA by genotype likelihood. Basically Europeans keep getting lighter and lighter, from 45,000 years ago down to the historical period.

The genetic origins and impacts of historical Papuan migrations into Wallacea. There is some sense that Australo-Melanesian people were the indigenous populations of maritime Southeast Asia, but these data indicate that Papuans have been migrating westward, into eastern Indonesia, for millennia, replacing indigenous foragers.

The distribution of highly deleterious variants across human ancestry groups. Basically, because really harmful mutations are going to be selected against, they will be “evolutionarily young.” This also means that they are not usually differentiated at the scale of continental-ancestry groups, races, but are found in extended-family groups in many populations.

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall. Two recent pieces both delve into Europe’s deep genetic past.

When civilization control-alt-deletes: prehistoric Europe’s false dawn and long reboot:

Perhaps the moral of the last prehistoric civilization’s end is a greater humility about our ignorance of other unrecorded arcs, other rises and falls still hidden from us, beginnings like Egypt’s Old Kingdom with its pyramids, and ends like the 12th-century BC late Bronze-Age’s spectacular collapse into darkness. Who knows what lost golden ages lie beyond our ken? What Promethean fire roared at the heart of prehistoric camps, only to dim and falter, its forgotten glories the stuff of improbable legend? What golden ages do we only vaguely suspect, we distant, distracted descendents, busy questing after our own age’s idea of greatness?

We are what we speak: Indo-European phylogenetic and linguistic trees concur:

Going forward, we have the tools to outline the story of the Indo-Europeans’ diversification down to the historical period. The expansion and branching of the Indo-European people’s various lineages before 1000 BC offer too little material for linguistic analysis to weigh in on. Both syntax and lexicon are available only for a few languages, with too many intermediate tongues fallen extinct. Still, discerning pattern and structure across languages has so far offered tantalizing hints of further demographic splits after the Corded Ware’s westward migrations out of their Eastern European homeland 5,000 years ago. And true insight, with the granular detail we long for, may finally emerge with deeper ancient DNA analysis.

Today we are supercharging ever larger ancient DNA datasets with increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques to fully elucidate the relatedness and relationships of peoples past and present. And from these findings emerges a massively detailed family tree of Eurasian demographic history: a mute biological tree whose eloquently faithful linguistic shadow has been awaiting their union for nearly 240 years.

I am trying out a new occasional feature for paying subscribers this year, an Unsupervised Learning Journal Club, where I briskly 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. This month, a couple of my proposed papers appear here above in the Data section. First up: a 2024 paper on plague’s ubiquity across our species’ history. An excerpt:

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

Only in the last few centuries have we as a species truly begun to grapple with disease, to battle it, and even emerge victorious. Though pestilence was always with us, the advent of large villages and even cities, along with trade as an accelerant, meant that new pathogens optimized to exploit density and sedentism could arise and flourish at our expense. An interconnected world of densely populated villages was ripe for plague, a sitting target as compared to the Paleolithic regime that saw scattered small bands of mobile foragers spread thinly across vast landscapes. Agriculture was the great human innovation that put our species on the fast track to economic specialization and growth, the key foundation upon which complex civilization rests. But at the same time, it was also always a Pandora’s box, unleashing novel plagues our hunter-gatherer ancestors had never confronted. For the people of Neolithic Europe, a greatness painstakingly achieved over millennia was to be their undoing; once they leveled up to great productive, cooperative urban clusters, that hard-won achievement itself would mercilessly offer them up by the millions for a silent, mass culling.

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:

• Daniel McCarthy: American conservatism after Trump (and before)

• Brian Chau: welcoming the AI-age and DeepSeek

• Tade Souaiaia: the edge of statistical genetics, race and sports

• Shadi Hamid: pessimism on Palestine but hope in America

• Conn Carroll: Sex and the Citizen

• Antonio Regalado: CRISPR babies 6 years later

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.

• DM me

• Facebook message me

• Some of my past pieces for Palladium Magazine, The New York Times, City Journal, National Review, Slate, Unherd, Quillette and Nautilus.

• My old podcast, The Insight

• The Khanversation, my current events podcast, unaffiliated with Unsupervised Learning

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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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 any time in 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.

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 Repeated plague infections across six generations of Neolithic Farmers. It comes out of Martin Sikora’s group at the GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Copenhagen and appeared in the July 10, 2024 issue of Nature. Contributing authors include Kristian Kristiansen, Eske Willerslev and Mattias Jakobsson. The first author is Frederik Valeur Seersholm.

In the 1300’s, a high-stakes rivalry between the Most Serene Republic of Venice and the city state of Genoa was playing out in port cities from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. Genoa’s most far-flung colonies were a string of port cities and trading centers along the southern coast of the Crimean peninsula, south of the Pontic steppe. A western terminus of the Silk Road, these Genoese colonies were Europe’s gateway and entrepôt for the riches of the east. But more than wealth coursed out of the heart of Asia; armies of Turks and Mongols repeatedly brought the spectre of war to the busy mercantile Genoese posted at what for medieval Europeans was the known world’s furthest edge. And ultimately far worse than war: they brought their unseen and unanswerable pathogens.

There, in the port of Caffa, in 1347 the plague broke out, a silent stowaway with the armies of the Mongol Golden Horde then laying siege to the coastal Black Sea cities as a side project to the business of ravaging the Russian principalities. Over the next six years, the pestilence that first engulfed Caffa would seep inexorably all across Europe, killing 25-50% of European populations, and forever transforming the continent’s culture and economics. In A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, economist Gregory Clark argues that the plague-driven population crash proved an indispensable condition for smashing the feudal bonds that had tied European peasants to the land, kickstarting an economic dynamo that, within centuries, would lead to the Industrial Revolution and drag the rest of the world into the modern age.

The Black Death, as it came to be known, heralded the High Middle Ages’ end, just as Europe had been stepping back to the fore among great world civilizations, producing minds like St. Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham and organizing centuries-long projects like the great cathedrals. But the close of Europe’s medieval chapter turned the page to a more glorious interlude in the continent’s story, the Renaissance’s creative explosion and ultimately the achievements of modernity itself. The 14th-century plague was a tragic prologue to what ultimately became a triumphant story of resilience and renaissance. Glorious rebirth though is scarcely a fait accompli for civilizations assailed by plague. A century and a half after the Black Death cut down great swaths of unprotected Europeans, unprotected Aztec, Maya and Inca populations were in turn exposed to the ravages of European pestilence like smallpox, which ripped through their societies, leaving them weakened and vulnerable to rapid European conquest, erasing much of their societies’ legacy overnight and relegating them to footnotes in Western histories.

Plague shaping the history of Europe and the New World over the past millennium is a well known storyline. Disease drives macrohistories like William H. McNeill’s 1976 Plagues and Peoples, and plays a substantial role in Jared Diamond’s 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel. And now with genomic signatures of natural selection we are finding that the role of disease in history, and prehistory as well, was even more decisive than we had thought. The genetic code of our species has been rewritten over and over in response to the selection pressures disease imposes upon us. Sexual reproduction itself may be an adaptation to the bath of pathogens in which every multicellular organism is condemned to swim. Disease has shaped our lineage for millions of years, driving our evolution, as our immune systems race to remain one step ahead. Tuberculosis was famously a pervasive ailment in Victorian England, the root cause behind “consumption,” but now we know that even Neanderthals 40,000 years ago suffered from it. A plague of smallpox heralded the end of a decades-long period of peace in the Roman Empire called the Antonine Age, while another pestilence four centuries later halted the Roman revival under Emperor Justinian.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Daniel McCarthy, editor-in-chief of Modern Age. Former editor-in-chief of The American Conservative, his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, The Spectator, The National Interest and Reason. McCarthy also helped run communications for the 2008 Ron Paul campaign and was a senior editor at ISI Books. He earned a Ph.D. in classics from Washington University in St. Louis.

First, Razib and McCarthy discuss the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, and the realignment of coalitions on both right and left, and what these realignments might presage for both parties’ future. McCarthy also outlines the long march of anti-war conservatives who organized themselves around The American Conservative in the first George W. Bush term, their eventual move into the mainstream and poll position in the discourse under Donald Trump. Razib asks about the origins of modern conservatism’s divisions, going back to William F. Buckley’s founding of National Review in the 1950’s. McCarthy also talks about Russell Kirk’s role in the development of post-World War II conservatism, which included the founding of Modern Age, a more intellectual and philosophical publication than National Review. Razib asks McCarthy how the Right will evolve in a changing America, with a diminishing white majority and a more post-Christian mainstream.

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