Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back Gregory Clark, a past guest on this podcast. When he last talked to him, Clark had just been disinvited from giving a talk whose results he has now turned into a paper, The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022. Until recently an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, Clark is now teaching at the University of Southern Denmark. His previous books include The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility and A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

Today Razib and Clark discuss his shocking finding that a simple model predicated on genetic relatedness explains the status distribution across many centuries in England. Clark finds that even where wealth is passed from father to offspring (expected in a patriarchal society), occupational status is inherited equally from mother and father, as expected in a genetic framework rather than cultural framework. Another surprising result from Clark’s dataset is that the rate of social mobility has been unchanged across 400 years in England, despite massive cultural and political shifts. He also finds high rates of inheritance of social status in many other societies, with the highest in the Indian subcontinent.

Razib asks Clark how it could be that the data shows such consistently similar rates of social status mobility across periods as different as Victorian England or post-World-War-II Britain. Clark also addresses why he did not work on a model that integrated cultural inheritance; in short, those models were more complex and seemed far less satisfying than his two-parameter equation. He also addresses the social media furor in response to his paper, and his defense against the charge that he’s a eugenicist.

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

Related: The Indian caste system: origin, impact and future, The character of caste and Passing the civilizational purity test: India's 3000-year caste straitjacket.

Unsupervised Learning tends to steer clear of topics “ripped from the headlines,” but the occasional exception must be made. Today, Razib talks about the intersection of religion, caste and American law and policy with Sundar Iyer and Sudha Jagannathan. Jagannathan, an MBA, is now a board member of the Coalition of Hindus of North America, after working in technology and sales in the Bay Area for 30 years. Iyer is a technology entrepreneur, advisor and angel investor, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science. But this conversation is not about technology. It's about a “current event” that took over Iyer’s life for the better part of the past three years. In the year 2020, California regulators sued Cisco Systems for “for internally enforcing the caste hierarchy.” Iyer was one of two individuals named in that case. For most of the 2020’s so far, Iyer’s life was turned upside down, before the California Civil Rights Department dismissed its case against him (though it continues to pursue Cisco).

When the this issue first emerged in the news, some blogs, group chats and email lists surfaced points that should have made anyone skeptical that Iyer was a casteist: he is an atheist who does not identify as Hindu, and his personal views on social issues are quite liberal. These facts are in the public record because twenty years ago, long before he was in the public eye, Iyer wrote about his perspectives in a blog post expressing his strident atheism and rejection of caste. Now Iyer is speaking out about what he experienced, and how progressive cultural and political institutions are being weaponized by activists pursuing narrow, self-interested aims. As a successful entrepreneur, Iyer has the resources to fight to clear his name, and stand up for the objective truth against what he sees as the manipulations of the media and activists. Jagannathan also offers her own perspective as a devout Hindu who is from a “lower caste” background who takes issue with comments made in the mainstream media about her religion and culture, where the caste system is conflated with Hinduism and Indian identity, and assertions are made that the caste is a fundamental part of her faith.

Though this episode focuses on the institution of caste and the experience of Indian Americans specifically, it is more broadly about the significant tradeoffs of embracing simple solutions in a complex world. The social justice movement and the American elite political class are fundamentally egalitarian, currently ever alert for oppressors and the oppressed. In the process, innocent individuals get swept up in witch hunts, as activists attempt to find causes worthy of their attention and outrage. Iyer’s experience is not unique, insofar as many, many, Americans have fallen under the narrowed eye of crusading Human Resources departments, bent on transforming workplace disputes into socio-political dramas. The ultimate question is whether an exceedingly diverse America can proceed forward as a dynamic economy and culture despite the burden of ever-present litigation and workplace conflict created when our elites fixate on what divides us, rather than what unites us.

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

We’re about a generation into the “age of genomics,” or as it’s sometimes termed the “post-genomic era.” Today Razib talks to John Logsdon, a professor of biology at the University of Iowa, about what genomics has wrought in relation to our understanding of evolution, and what evolution has taught us about the structure and nature of the genome. In 2014, Logdson and Sarah J Hanson contributed a chapter entitled “Genome Evolution” to the Princeton Guide to Evolution. Razib uses this mid-2010s review to scaffold his discussion with Logdson about where we are in 2023. But first, he asks what the exact difference between genetics and genomics is. It is sometimes said that quantity has a quality all its own, and Razib and Logdson discuss the different analytic challenges of analyzing the evolutionary trajectory of a single gene, a task up the alley of classical genetics, and describing the evolution of the whole genome of an organism like a human, with thousands of genes.

They then move on to various issues relating to the architecture and evolution of the genome that are of deep interest and curiosity to researchers but rarely surfaced to the public. Why do bacterial genomes have so much less “junk” than those of complex organisms, like humans? Why is the relationship between organism complexity and genome size still so uncertain? How has evolution impacted the “molecular machinery” of the genome (like promoters)? And what is the difference between those scientists who use genomics to understand evolution and those who attempt to understand the evolutionary forces that shape the nature of the genome?

By inspecting where we are on many specific issues relating to evolution and genomics, Razib and Logdson begin a sketch of how the emergence of genomics has changed evolutionary biology, as the entire genetic maps of vast numbers of species are now at our fingertips. The discussion finally concludes with future possibilities in the next few decades, as the post-genomic era moves from a revolution to a background condition, a  banality.

Note: Logsdon mentioned HHMI molecular genetic videos. Here is an excellent example:

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For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

Yesterday, Razib discussed Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics with the author. Today, Unsupervised Learning hosts a wide-ranging discussion with Christopher Rufo on his book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. While Hanania’s focus is law and politics, Rufo looks at intellectual history and culture. If you follow his prolific output on social media or in City Journal, you know Rufo is an indefatigable culture warrior, but in America's Cultural Revolution he outlines in a book-length narrative the ideas and people he believes have driven the “Great Awokening” of the 2010’s and 2020’s.

Though Razib and Rufo first discuss his past life as a filmmaker, and in particular, Diamonds in the Dunes, a 2014 documentary about a baseball team in Xinjiang, most of the conversation revolves around the historical figures of the mid-to late-20th century that set the stage for the rise of woke culture and critical race theory. They begin with the elder statesmen of 1960’s radicalism, Frankfurt School critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. The exposition of Marcuse’s life is Rufo’s entrée into a discussion about “Cultural Marxism” that has defined much of his public profile over the last few years. Rufo elucidates the connection between radical academics and violent activists in the streets in the late 1960’s, and how it connects to protests in the 2010’s. He also traces the genealogy of many modern institutions back to 1960’s radicalism, including Marcuse’s personal connection to the field of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) through his wife, who pioneered its practices and terminology. Razib and Rufo also discuss the checkered life of one of Marcuse’s star students, Professor Angela Davis, whose involvement in violent terrorism in the 1960’s is curiously ignored by her academic supporters. Skipping much closer to the present, Rufo talks about political and social radicalism he witnessed in 2020 in Seattle and the events later in Portland, as the Pacific Northwest came to embrace “America’s Cultural Revolution.”

Finally, Razib asks Rufo for his take on the state of contemporary politics, and the path forward. Though the vast majority of America's Cultural Revolution focuses on the past, Rufo has embraced an active role in current politics, especially the conflict over New College in Florida. Shifting from a Left-Right frame, Rufo reflects on tensions within the ostensibly anti-woke Right, and the future of the American republic and its critics both from on the far Left and far Right.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

In September 2023, Harper Collins published Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, two months after Christopher Rufo’s America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Both these books tackle the same issue: the US’s Leftist cultural direction, especially since 2015, and what Matthew Yglesias termed the “Great Awokening” in 2019. Razib recently interviewed both authors, and today we release the first of two conversations over consecutive days so listeners can reflect on Hanania and Rufo’s divergent perspectives on one of the major themes of American political culture in the 2020’s.

First, Razib talks to Hanania, who holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from UCLA, about The Origins of Woke. Befitting his legal education, much of the book delves into the knock-on consequences of 1960’s legislation, particularly the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Hanania articulates the view that “wokeness” can be defined by the idea that any variation in outcome between groups must be ascribed to discrimination and that entertainment of alternative views (for example, that groups have different aptitudes and/or preferences for specific fields) is tantamount to racism. The Origins of Woke touches upon sex discrimination and the emergence of queer identity politics, but Hanania believes that the central through-line between the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the modern woke era is the black-white racial division in the US, and the fight for racial equality before the law morphing into a campaign for total equity of outcome in all domains of life. Synthesizing his background in law and political science, Hanania argues that a combination of vague initial legal frameworks and an activist bureaucracy have enabled the sharp detour from the original drafters’ intent with civil rights legislation instead into a total revolution of norms. He also points out that much of the framework for the woke revolution was put in place under the conservative Nixon administration, a pattern observed by Pat Buchanan in his 1975 book Conservative votes, liberal victories: Why the right has failed.

One of the major contentions of The Origins of Woke is that excessive focus on Andrew Breitbart’s assertion that “politics is downstream” of culture has led the Right down the wrong path to de facto defeatism. Hanania discusses how the “marketplace of ideas” model ultimately fails given the Left’s capture of all institutions that would arbitrate issues around the culture war. Rather, Hanania clearly believes that the path to the rollback of woke norms across the broader culture is through politics, and in particular the Republican party fully embracing its role as a reactive force against the American legal regime that was seeded in the 1960’s.

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In the US, roughly 1 in 33 infants are born with a congenital disability, about 25% of which have an identified genetic cause. For the first time,, parents can use Orchid’s whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for these genetic variants and mitigate their baby’s disease risk. Check out orchidhealth.com, and use code RAZIB when signing up to skip the waitlist.

What is caste? This is a question many Americans have been asking since the publication of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (an Oprah's Book Club selection). On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks at length about the historical, cultural and genetic aspects of caste. He explains the genetic origins and impacts of the practice in the Indian subcontinent, and how that contrasts with “caste” in other societies like feudal Japan. Razib also explores how caste, a European-origin word, came to bracket a sociological phenomenon that includes two related concepts, varna and jati, and how the former is abstract while the latter is concrete.

Caste in the Indian subcontinent has massive social and political implications. Razib talks about the demographics of caste, and how this is relevant to considerations of equity in a nation-state originally founded on socialistic principles. In the subcontinent, caste is not simply a Hindu phenomenon but extends to Muslims and Christians. And in a subcontinent of nearly 2 billion people, caste expresses itself in varied ways depending on region.

Finally, Razib ponders the future of the institution. If diasporic communities like Mauritius and Guyana are any guide, caste has a dim future. With urban jati exogamy rates increasing constantly over the last generation, Razib predicts that in the 22nd century caste in the subcontinent will be viewed as a outmoded practice continued only by a few communities. Caste is a question that is relevant to both the past and the present, but the forces of modernization will eat away at its foundations going forward.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com

1 in 36 children in the US have Autism Spectrum Disorder, but did you know that 20-30% have a known genetic cause for their condition? Read more about how, for the first time, parents can use Orchid’s whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for these genetic variations, and mitigate their baby’s risk of disease. Check them out at orchidhealth.com, and use code RAZIB when signing up to skip the waitlist.

Today, Razib revisits The Horse, the Wheel, and Language with David Anthony, emeritus professor at Hartwick College and collaborator with David Reich’s ancient DNA research group at Harvard University. Anthony and Razib survey the last two years in terms of questions regarding the domestication of the horse, the spread of the wheel, and Yamnaya steppe herders' language; subjects of his 2007 book. They also discuss the exponential growth in our understanding of the paleodemography of Bronze Age Eurasian nomads since 2015’s publication of Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe, a study for which Anthony provided many of the samples.

Razib asks Anthony how his understanding of the rise of Indo-Europeans has or has not changed, in the wake of new data and novel interpretations over the last two years. Anthony reiterates the broad outlines he has been proposing for decades: the Yamnaya nomads of the Bronze-Age Eurasian steppe were the proto-Indo-Europeans, full stop. He also addresses those who argue for the Corded Ware culture of East-Central Europe being considered a sister, as opposed to a daughter, culture of the Yamnaya. Anthony points out that analysts in Reich’s group have discovered individuals who are apparent relatives between the Yamnaya and Corded Ware, indicative of a close and tight bond. Like the Danish archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen, Anthony believes that the pastoralist people who invaded Northern Europe 5,000 years ago should be thought of as fundamentally Yamnaya. He also addresses those skeptical of Yamnaya origins, positing perhaps some discomfort with the idea that modern people descend from warlike nomadic groups.

Finally, Razib presses Anthony about new theories regarding more detailed structure of early Indo-European migrations. Does he accept the contention that most Indo-European groups descend from the Corded Ware, while Armenians, Greeks, Tocharians and Illyrians descend from the Yamnaya directly? What more elements to the narrative are going to be added beyond the broad assertion that the Yamnaya were the proto-Indo-Europeans?

Related podcasts: David Anthony: the origin of Indo-Europeans, Thomas Olander: the origin and spread of Indo-European languages, James P. Mallory: finding the Indo-Europeans and Kristian Kristiansen: the birth of Northern Europe.

Selected publications:

* The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe

* Population genomics of bronze age Eurasia

* Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

* The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes

* Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com

1 in 36 children in the US have an Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis, but did you know that 20-30% have a known genetic cause for their condition? Read more how, for the first time, parents can use Orchid’s whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for these genetic variations, and mitigate their baby’s risk of disease. Check them out at orchidhealth.com, and use code RAZIB when signing up to skip the waitlist.

Today, Razib talks to Erik Hoel, host of the Substack The Intrinsic Perspective and author of The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science. An academic neuroscientist by training, in The World Behind the World Hoel outlines the emergence of modern neuroscience, and where it went wrong in terms of the field’s researchers' focus. But first, Hoel discusses human understanding of the mind, and how it has changed over time. He gives his take on Julian Jayne’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and explains that it is unlikely that consciousness emerged after the Bronze Age as posited in the book. Instead, The World Behind the World argues that the differentiation between the inner world and the outer world, the intrinsic perspective of literature and psychology and the extrinsic perspective of physics and biology arose with the Classical Greeks 2,500 years ago. Hoel also observes that a modern perspective on one’s inner world and psychological complexity so evident in Greco-Roman texts rapidly fades again after the fall of Rome and the regression during the Dark Ages, when literacy declined and text became refocused exclusively on the functional external world, whether it be tax records or agronomy manuals.

The World Behind the World is a book-length argument fleshing out Hoel’s contention that understanding consciousness is, and must be, at the heart of neuroscience. Though studies of the biology and chemistry of axons and glial cells make sense from a reductionistic perspective, Hoel makes a convincing case that contemporary neuroscience models fail to understand how the brain works. The World Behind the World suggests modern neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic, like biology before evolution or physics before Newtonian mechanics:  merely a collection of fascinating observations and detailed mechanisms. Hoel maintains that a true neuroscience theory with consciousness as its center and organizing principle is necessary to understand how the intrinsic world emerged and functions.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to internet commentator formerly known as default friend who is perhaps better known today as the internet culture writer Katherine Dee. Dee is a regular contributor to Retvrn, The Washington Examiner, The American Mind, Tablet Magazine and UnHerd. She has also recently written a piece for Compact: Why You’re Never Leaving Twitter. 

But first, Razib and Dee discuss how they have known each other for nearly a decade, going back to 2015 on the site formerly known as Twitter, and more substantially as residents of Austin in the late teens. Since 2019 Dee's existence has been a peripatetic one; after leaving Texas and first moving to the Bay Area, she then lived in the Pacific Northwest, before finally settling in Chicago. Working in advertising, and then in big tech, Dee has finally settled on a career as a freelancer, with all the freedom and uncertainty that entails.

Razib asks Dee whether there is today, in 2023, any culture that isn’t somehow connected to the internet. She agrees about the pervasive nature of digital and social media, and how thickly it is interleaved into the lives of younger Millennials and Zoomers. And yet as a counterpoint to this conception of a revolution that has transmuted “IRL” life online, Razib argues that ‌social media is just an amplification of “bulletin board system” (BBS) culture which existed as early as the 1980’s. Dee then reflects on her maturation as an observer of all things internet through Twitter and Discord, and the shadow-impact of more obscure platforms like Tumblr and 4chan on our broader culture, beneath the notice of the wider population of “normies,” while Razib reminds her how small Twitter’s user base is compared to platforms like Facebook or YouTube (the latter are measured in billions, while Twitter retains some 450 million active users).

In her piece, Why You’re Never Leaving Twitter, Dee argues that the anemic showing of dozens of Twitter clones and pretenders in the last decade argues that the platform just isn’t going to be dethroned from its central role in the media, and thereby wider American culture. From right-wing to left-wing imitators, or Facebook’s Threads, every challenger has failed to eat into Twitter’s critical position as a nexus in the media ecosystem, a central node in transmitting information throughout diverse subcultures. But Razib plays devil's advocate, musing whether Elon Musk’s erratic tenure since assuming ownership of the platform, his change of its brand to X, his petty beefs with publishers like Substack and ex cathedra pronouncements of major feature changes, might actually spell the end of the platform. Though Dee seems skeptical that even Musk could destroy his new property, not seeing any replacement on the horizon, suggests to her that the age of a single central information switchboard for the internet may be ephemeral and one we look back on as a particular and unique moment in history, just as we do the age of three major television networks in the 20th century.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Dr. Cory J. Clark, a behavioral scientist and executive director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania. Clark got her Ph.D. in social psychology at UC Irvine, but her interests have broadened over her career as is clear in a diverse oeuvre.

First, Razib and Clark talk about the culture of self-censorship within science due to politicization and intra-scientific politics. They discuss whether fraud is more damaging to the career of a senior or junior scientist, and the crisis coming for behavioral economics in the wake of the Francesco Gino and Dan Ariely ethics scandals. While Razib offers the prescription of viewpoint diversity, Clark argues that a recommitment to objectivity and truth as the fundamental values of science is needed. They then move on to her major current project on “adversarial collaboration.” Whereas in “normal science” two rival research groups may hold to conflicting hypotheses for decades, with outsiders unable to adjudicate, Clark argues that researchers with differing views should come together to converge upon the truth.

Her interest in the culture of science leads naturally to a broader concern about human cultural equilibria. In The Evolution of Relentless Badassery, Clark argues that a particular personality type is socially and evolutionarily favored. Razib and Clark discuss whether we live in a time of peace so that disagreeable violent characters are at a low ebb in their stature, and perhaps in the face of cultural chaos the “badass,” figures like Michael Corleone in The Godfather films may reemerge to establish order and ruthless justice.

The discussion loops back to a consideration of the values that unite scientists, and the cultural and political winds moving through the profession that might threaten to blow it off course as an enterprise, might leave it more a social club than a venerable institution to generate information. Clark is candid that she is not sure she would recommend heterodox students even attempt to join the academy.