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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid. A native Pennsylvanian of Egyptian ethnic background, and Islamic faith, Hamid completed his Ph.D. in politics at Oxford University. He is an assistant professor at Fuller Seminary, co-host of the Wisdom of Crowds podcast and website, and now the author of his own Substack and a recent book, The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea. Hamid is also the author of Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East and Rethinking Political Islam.
Hamid and Razib discuss the tail end of the war in Gaza, from the explosion of 10/7 and the wave of atrocities against Israelis surrounding the Palestinian enclave, to the brutal counter-attack that has resulted in tens of thousands of Gazan civilian deaths. While Hamid points to the deep structural issues that divide the two parties, and make final resolution of the conflict difficult, Razib highlights the many pitfalls of third parties becoming involved in such a highly polarized and fraught topic. They also discuss the growing identification of the global Left, including American progressives, with the Palestinian cause, the difficulties of grappling with and containing anti-Semitism within the movement. Though Israel’s counter-offensive is finally reaching a denouement, Hamid strikes a fundamentally pessimistic note about long-term possibilities.
Then they pivot to domestic politics, and recent cultural trends that culminated in a Trump victory in the 2024 USelection, and the alienation of many nonwhites in the Democratic coalition from the hegemony of woke cultural elites. Hamid reiterates his long-standing critiques of racial identitarianism on the Left, and the irony that the progressive awareness of racial minorities only tends to extend to them when these minorities cosign woke nostrums. In contrast to the seemingly interminable nature of the conflict in the Middle East, Razib and Hamid both see hope for a path forward with reduced racial polarization and a reorientation of politics around substantive material interests rather than symbolic racial or ethnic categories.
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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Conn Carroll, the author of Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy. Caroll is currently an editor for the Washington Examiner, but previously he was the communications director for Senator Mike Lee of Utah, an assistant director at the Heritage Foundation, White House correspondent for Townhall.com and a reporter at National Journal. Carroll wrote Sex and the Citizen in response to what he felt was misleading and biased reporting in the mainstream media on the origins and implications of marriage and monogamy.
Razib asks Carroll how he refutes the ideas presented in Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s Sex at Dawn, which argues that prehistoric humans were non-monogamous. Carroll outlines the current mainstream thinking in evolutionary anthropology and primatology, and all the biological reasons that indicate that Homo sapiens is far more monogamous than our common chimpanzee and gorilla cousins, most clearly in our reduced sexual dimorphism.
But while our hunter-gatherer past was defined by monogamy, Sex and the Citizen argues that the rise of agriculture resulted in the explosion of polygamy, as high status males in societies defined by incredible inequality began to monopolize access to women, culminating in the explosion of Y chromosomal “star phylogenies,” where supermale lineages exploded all over Eurasian 4,000 years ago. Carroll then explains that the Romans and Greeks took steps toward enforcing monogamy as a legal institution, and Christianity introduced the idea of sexual fidelity upon men. After Christianity popularized egalitarian monogamous marriage, Sex and the Citizen follows in Joe Henrich’s wake in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Carroll discusses the Catholic Church’s strict policies on incest and adoption, which destroyed the power of elite related clans in the West, and hastened the emergence of the Western European marriage norm of independent and separate nuclear families, rather than extended families as the primary unit of kinship in society.
In the second half of Sex and the Citizen Carroll addresses the social history and policy changes in relation to marriage in the US. While Western European societies took a significant step away from familialism, Carroll explains that American marriage was even more individualistic and radical, as nuclear families spread out to the frontier, away from their extended kin networks. He also contextualizes the rise of the 1950’s nuclear family, which some scholars have argued was an aberration in American history. Carroll argues that actually it was an extension of earlier American norms, but the rise of the wage-based capitalist economy allowed for couples to set up separate households earlier in their lives. Carroll concludes the discussion outlining the 1970’s policy changes in welfare provision that discouraged marriage, noting the decline of the institution across American society over the last 60 years, and how government policy might reverse it.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib has a wide-ranging conversation with Dan Hess, the man behind the More Births account on social media. An engineer with a large family in the DC area, Hess’ essays on topics like Israelis’ high birth rate have gained the attention of X, with an account that has come from a few hundred followers to more than 30,000 in 2 years.
Razib and Hess first review the birth-rate collapse seen worldwide in the past two decades. They discuss the relatively abrupt cultural pivot that has occurred since the turn of the century, with the end of the “overpopulation” narrative typified by Paul Erhlich’s Population Bomb, the rise of the “birth dearth” and the natalist movement. They talk about the most extreme cases of low total fertility rates (TFR) in Europe and East Asia, but also the decline in societies like the US, Latin America and the Middle East. Hess addresses both possible causes and possible solutions. They also discuss historical and demographic factors that impact fertility; for example, which religions have been the most pro-natalist? Hess also puts a particular focus on South Korea, the world’s most extreme case of a sharp decrease, with a TFR of about 0.70 children per woman (vs. 2.1 replacement), as well as exceptions to the rule like Haredi Jews and the Amish. Finally, Razib and Hess tackle why we should care about slower population growth in this century, from dependency ratios to the impact on cultural vitality.
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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Brian Chau, who writes at the From the New World Substack. A graduate of the University of Waterloo and former software engineer with a background in pure mathematics, today Chau is executive director of the Alliance for the Future, a think tank that believes artificial intelligence will transform our world for the better.
Chau addresses the great “doomer vs. anti-doomer” debate, and argues for an anti-catastrosophist position. He also makes the case that increasing scaling has started to hit diminishing returns, and the expectation that artificial intelligence will continue to gain power purely through throwing more resources at the same problems. Then, they discuss the revolutionary impact of the recent advances DeepSeek has made in China (an issue he addresses on his Substack). Chau breaks down the technological nuts and bolts, as well as geopolitical and economic consequences.
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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, third-time guest John Hawks returns after two years to discuss what we’ve learned in paleoanthropology since he and Razib last talked. Hawks obtained his PhD under Milford H. Wolpoff, and is currently a professor in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. Hawks has also co-authored Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story and Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins with Lee Berger.
Razib first presses Hawks on what we know about archaic human admixture into modern populations, and particularly what we’ve learned about Denisovans. They discuss how many Denisovan populations there were, how many Denisovan fossil remains we have, and why it has taken so long for researchers to assign a species name to this lineage of humans. Hawks also address the puzzle of the phenomenon of why there are at least two pygmy hominin populations in Southeast Asia. Perhaps humans too are subject to island dwarfism like many other mammals? Also, Razib wonders why Southeast Asia was home to such a startling variety of humans at once prior to the arrival of modern populations. They discuss all of this in light of the framework of Out-of-Africa, the recent spread of anatomically modern humans outside of Africa. Razib questions how robust this model is today given our understanding of modern humans’ extensive and repeated interactions with both Neanderthals and Denisovans. Finally, Hawks covers some controversies over fossils being sent into space that roiled the archaeological world last year.
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Three years ago David Mittelman came on Unsupervised Learning to talk about emerging possibilities on the frontiers of genomics, and his new startup at the time, Othram. Since then, Othram’s work has been featured widely in the media, including in a Law & Order episode, and the firm has solved thousands of unsolved cases, with nearly 500 public. For over a decade, Mittelman has been at the forefront of private-sector genomics research. He trained at Baylor College of Medicine and was previously faculty at Virginia Tech.
Razib and Mittelman discuss the changes that the rapid pace of genomic technology has driven in the field of genetics, from the days a $3 billion dollar draft human genome in the year 2000 to readily available $200 consumer genomes in 2024. One consequence of this change has been genetics’ transformation into information science, and the dual necessities of increased data storage and more powerful, incisive data analysis. Genomics made information acquisition and analysis so easy across the research community that it allowed for the pooling of results and discoveries in big databases. This has pulled genetics out of the basic science lab and allowed it to expand into an enterprise with a consumer dimension.
Mittelman also discusses the improvements and advances in DNA extraction and analysis techniques that allow companies like his to now glean insights from decades-old samples, with bench sciences operating synergistically with computational biology. Razib and Mittelman talk about how he has helped solve hundreds of cold cases with new technology, in particular, at the intersection between new forensic techniques and both whole-genome sequencing and public genetic databases. They also discuss the future of genetics, and how it might touch our lives through healthcare and other domains, passing from inference to fields like genetic engineering
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On this episode of Unsuperivsed Learning reviews what we know about Indo-Europeans as 2024 comes to a close. This is prompted by a new preprint Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages, which finally establishes that populations in Northern and Southwestern Europe derived from a different steppe-origin population than the Greeks and Ilyrians of the Balkans, as well as Armenians. Razib talks about how ancient DNA is resolving long-standing disputes in historical linguistics, and coming down on the side of very particular sets of hypotheses. He discusses Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, and its models about the origins of Indo-European languages, and how they have been falsified by paleogenomics. Razib also steps through the relationship of particular Indo-European groups to ancestral archaeological cultures like the Corded Ware, Bell Beaker and Catacomb Cultures. He also talks about the connections between charioteers and the early Mycenaeans, and looks at Robert Drews’ ideas in Coming of the Greeks. Finally, he addresses outliers in the ancient DNA data that indicate connections between locales as disparate as Scandinavia and Cyprus 4,000 years ago.
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This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Megan McArdle, author of The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success and Washington Post columnist and op-ed board member. McArdle was raised in New York City and attended Riverdale Country School. She obtained an undergraduate degree in English from University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the University of Chicago. A pioneering blogger based out of New York City and covering the site of the WTC in the wake of 9/11, McArdle went on to work at The Economist, The Atlantic and Newsweek.
In this episode, the discussion largely focuses on McArdle’s research about the cultural history of food and cooking in the US. But first they discuss the economic implications of Donald Trump’s election, and the domestic consequences shifting toward a tariff-heavy trade regime. McArdle lays out the case that a massive tariff would have the same impact as a tax, not to mention the broad disruptive economic effects on large companies’ supply chains.
Then they move on to the changes in American cuisine over the last few centuries, and the shifts driven by technology and innovation. McArdle points out that in the 19th century, gelatin dessert was a luxury and an exotic treat because it was labor intensive to prepare. But by the middle of the 20th century industrial-scale food processing made gelatin, in particular Jell-o, a cheap commodity, and it became associated with the lower classes. Similarly, before factory farming, chicken and eggs were more expensive than red meat, and thus viewed as high-end ingredient (whereas today, chicken is far cheaper than beef). Finally Razib and McArdle talk about how the plentitude of food available in the 21st century contributes to the obesity epidemic that has only ceased its relentless expansion with the advent of Ozempic.
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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib catches up with Nikolai Yakovenko about the state of AI at the end of 2024. Yakovenko is a former professional poker player,and research scientist at Google, Twitter and Nvidia. With a decade in computer science, Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the large-language-model revolution that has given rise to multi-billion dollar companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity and hundreds of smaller startups. Currently, he is the CEO of DeepNewz, an AI-driven news startup that leverages OpenAI’s latest model. Full disclosure: Razib actively uses and recommends the service and is an advisor to the company.
Razib and Yakovenko first review what makes the last few years special, the rise of large-language-models on top of neural network architecture of transformers. Yakovenkoi discusses how far they’ve come since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in the fall of 2022, and how people have been using the underlying technology to develop applications atop it. Despite predictions of mass unemployment, Razib points out that two years later America is at full employment, and only niche fields like translation have been impacted. In contrast, Yakovenko points out that most software developers use artificial intelligence in some form to aid in their daily engineering work, noting the possibility that the AI revolution is integrating itself seamlessly as a utility for preexistent jobs. They also discuss the fact that though AI is a booming field, only one brand-name company has so far emerged in the industry, OpenAI. Though they agree that the current hype cycle is now abating, it is clear that the major investments in the field like data centers will continue from major players as AI-driven applications like self-driving cars become more and more mainstream.
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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Yasha Mounk. The founder of Persuasion, a contributor to The Atlantic and a professor at Johns Hopkins, Mounk now has his own Substack, where he hosts his weekly column and podcast. He is the author of The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It and The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.
Razib and Mounk first discuss Mounk’s immediate reaction to the 2024 election, and how the Democrats might pick up the pieces going forward. Mounk believes that the argument in his book The Identity Trap, neatly captures many of the problems for the party. Democrats leaned in on the inevitably of racial polarization in an age of progressive depolarization. Razib also asks Mounk for his retrospective on the COVID-19 epidemic, in which he was a commentator who argued in The Atlantic for more stringent habits and then later, for an opening up. They also discuss how the Public Health establishment COVID interventions threw the whole field into disrepute, and what it tells us about the nature of expertise.
Then Razib asks Mounk about European nations and their future. In particular, whether their low productivity and fertility rates combined with mass migration doom them to a future of irrelevance and national dissolution. Mounk highlights the unfortunate case of the UK in particular, though he notes that his home nation of Germany is finding itself in a precarious situation with China competing with its manufacturers and Russia cutting off its gas supply. Finally, Razib closes by asking Mounk whether he is still as worried about American democracy in the wake of the 2024 Trump win as he was in 2016.
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Today Razib talks to Russian commentator and transhumanist Anatoly Karlin. Karlin has a BA in political economy from U C Berkeley. For most of the 21st century he had positioned himself as part of the right wing of the transhumanist movement. He returned to Russia after living in California’s Bay Area for several years, and from there he promoted a nationalistic vision in opposition to American military and cultural power. With the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he joined a chorus of Russian warbloggers cheering on the inevitable conquest.
And then, like Richard Hanania, he did an about-face on the Russian invasion, reversing many of his views. Today Karlin is a digital nomad, and aligns firmly with American cultural and technological progressivism. He endorsed Kamala Harris and promotes what he terms a “Biosingularity.” His Substack is “Elite Human Capital,” a term popularized by Hanania. Arguably Karlin has gone further than Hanania in endorsing the new American global order, underpinned both by the US’s technological and cultural dominance.
Razib and Karlin talk about how he came to invert so many of his views, while at the same time remaining fundamentally committed to the transhumanist project, like combating aging. They discuss the contrast between Russia and the US, and how Karlin came to see Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and stand against the West as folly. Karlin also discusses his peripatetic lifestyle, the new friends made and those lost due to his conversion to what he would have previously called “globalism.”
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During the Ice Age our ancestors often painted the horse in caves
On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib covers the archaeology, genetics and history of the horse. Dogs may be man’s best friend, but for thousands of years horses were humanity’s most valuable domesticate. While pigs, cattle and goat were essential elements of the world’s subsistence economies, the horse in its military roles was a luxury good, with Chinese emperors sending delegations to Central Asia in search of “heavenly steeds.”
But while dogs have been humanity’s sidekick for at least 20,000 years, and cattle and caprids for about 10,000 years, the horse is a relatively new addition, tamed on the Central Asia steppe only some 5,500 years ago. But despite their late entrance, horses quickly proved economically critical, opening up trade routes, increasing farming productivity and remaining weapons of war down until the last futile Polish cavalry charges in 1939 against invading Nazis. The horse’s role as a loyal steed was not inevitable; repeat attempts to domesticate tropical zebras have failed, while most other Eurasian megafauna, from moose to elephants, remain wild.
The horse is part of the “secondary products revolution,” with high-fat milk and manes that can be refashioned to adorn human helmets, but just as importantly it was a pre-modern information technology revolution. Mongolian cavalry-messengers were able to cut a year-long trek across Eurasia down to a month. And between about 300 AD and 1500 AD, mounted cavalry dominated the Eurasian continent, driving the emergence of new empires and hastening the collapse of old ones. Since its domestication on the Pontic steppe in 2500 BC, which may have saved the species from extinction, the horse has played a critical part in world history, only really finally passing into obsolescence on the farm, the road and the battlefield in the past century and a half.
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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to returning guest Wilfred Reilly about his new book, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America's School Curricula. Reilly holds a Ph.D. in political science from Southern Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Illinois. Raised in a working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, he worked in the private sector before his career in academia, including stints as a political canvasser, real estate investor and a corporate sales executive. He is also the author of Taboo: 10 Facts [You Can't Talk About] and Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left Is Selling a Fake Race War. His writing appears in a wide array of publications like Commentary, National Review and Quillette.
Razib and Reilly tackle the reality that over the last few decades the American education system has reoriented itself to teach values by slanting a neutral historical narrative not specific to a particular viewpoint in the direction of what is arguably distortion and misinformation. Perhaps the most egregious case of this is the narrative about slavery, making the institution a uniquely American sin when the reality is that until the 19th century it was a widespread practice across almost all societies. In fact, as Reilly points out, it was the West, and in particular Britain, that ended the practice across much of the world. An aspect of counterfactually reorienting the historical narrative for didactic purposes is that many educators have reinvented peoples and places to serve their own idealism; Native Americans for example have become repurposed into premodern environmentalist activists, even though their arrival in the New World over 10,000 years ago was indisputably associated with megafaunal extinction. Reilly shows that this pattern of reinterpreting and shading the past applies even to events within the lifetimes of the living. The various retellings of the “Red Scare” periods of American history after World War I and World War II obfuscate the reality that the US in the 20th century did have a Communist movement that infiltrated the professions and even the diplomatic corps; Joe McCarthy’s excesses seem to have ended up justifying amnesia about a global political movement that transformed much of the world and had very real aims to take over the USA.
Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me highlights that current attempts to retell history are not actually even liberal, but simply radical, and reflect the capture of education schools by Leftist activists since the 1970s. Rather than equipping children for the modern economy and expanding their understanding of the world, the regnant generation of educational practitioners seems intent on creating a cadre of 21st century radicals whose vague view of the past is rooted in ideology rather than any observable reality.
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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes Leighton Akira Woodhouse back to the podcast. Woodhouse is a freelance journalist and a documentary filmmaker, currently 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 and The Nation, before starting his own Substack, Social Studies, as well as working with Michael Shellenberger. He also has a new podcast with Lee Fang, Le Pod.
Woodhouse and Razib discuss the broader issue of the necessity of order in cities, how important cities are to American economic dynamism, and how the problems of cities impact us all. One of Woodhouse’s beats has been crime and public disorder, and living in the Bay Area he has been unwitting witness to some of the most flagrant dysfunction of the current era. He outlines the culpability of the judicial system in the rise of petty crime and details organized crime’s opportunistic manipulation of the system.
Razib inquires about the political elite’s role in fostering disorder, in particular the policies and views of the mayor of Oakland and the Alameda County district attorney. They address the rise of the movement against law and order on the West coast, its connection to social libertarianism, and how that differs from East-coast big city liberalism. Woodhouse believes that the West coast’s homelessness crisis emerges in particular from its unique political configuration accelerated by a judicial system that aids and abets social libertarianism that is operationally pro-crime. Finally, they discuss the possibility that the 2024 elections will throw out of office many of the mayors and district attorneys brought in in the last few years on a plan of social justice activism.
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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Lyman Stone, a soon to be PhD in sociology from McGill University specializing in population dynamics. Stone runs the Pro-natalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, and has had appointments at AEI, and has written for The Atlantic and The New York Times. Well known for his social media presence, Stone is a published academic who has explored COVID policies, religion and divorce rates. Stone has previously been on Unsupervised Learning to discuss his work on religion, but this episode they shiftto his bread and butter: demographics and the preconditions for a pro-natalist society.
First, Razib and Stone discuss the variables behind the fertility crash in the USA since 2008, and Stone debunks the notion that it is driven purely by decline in teen births. Despite the reality that teen births have dropped, disproportionately among Hispanics, Stone notes that since 2008 there has been an increase in both the age of first birth and age of marriage, resulting in reduced lifetime fertility. Stone also addresses worldwide patterns, and notes that aside from Niger almost the whole of Africa seems to have been impacted by the demographic transition that is leading to reduced fertility on other continents. He does note that the gap between the number of children women want, and the number they have, is particularly large in Africa. Razib and Stone also discuss the fiscal/monetary rationales for reduced fertility, as well as social and cultural changes. They also discuss the genetics and heritability of pro-natal dispositions, concluding that the changes we see in total fertility rate are driven by cultural change.
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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to the pseudonymous commentator “Peachy Keenan.” A native of Los Angeles with an Ivy League education, Keenan worked in entertainment before detouring into punditry, writing for the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind, appearing on Fox News and penning Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War.
Razib and Keenan discuss her peripatetic and unique journey from a relatively apolitical member of America’s liberal professional managerial class to a conservative Catholic housewife with a large family. Keenan talks about her ability to connect with audiences of all stripes despite her partisan leanings as the product of her cosmopolitan upbringing among coastal elites. Though in her values and practices she lives the life of the “domestic extremist,” she still retains an aesthetic appreciation of the broader culture in which she grew up. Domestic Extremist is to a great extent a roadmap from where she was, to where she is. Keenan offers a sort of primer on how to change the “factory settings” for the American professional class, proposing traditional family life as an exit out of the endless rat race.
They also discuss the reality that the modern conservative culture falls short of produce any art for its own sake, at most putting out fare that ranges from overly didactic films produced by the Daily Wire to the cringe-inducing Christian film industry. Keenan emphasizes that good art must be good art, first and foremost, and whatever ideological valence should be layered in with subtlety and taste. She also discusses the problems with raising consciousness among conservative philanthropists about the problem of right-wing philistinism, and why aesthetic excellence would be a boon in any attempt to recapture the cultural high ground.
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On this episode Razib talks to Jesse Singal, a journalist who has covered the social science beat for the last decade. Singal has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from University of Michigan and a master’s in public affairs from Princeton. Currently a freelance journalist who writes his own Substack, Singal-Minded, and contributes to Blocked and Reported with Katie Herzog, Singal is formerly an editor at New York Magazine. His first book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, covered the replication crisis.
Razib and Singal first talk about what he learned, and unlearned, during his time as a reporter at New York Magazine, especially social psychology results that were long on glamor but short on robustness. They discuss how long we’ve known that social psychology had a problem, and whether it still hasn’t reformed itself. Singal also reflects on his role in publicizing sexy findings, and how journalism has taken steps to be more careful lately. They also address some of the specific findings that came out of early 2010’s social science, from implicit bias to power posing.
Next, Razib asks Singal about youth gender medicine, and the major controversies over the last few years. Singal discusses the differences between female to male transitions as opposed to male to female, and relates the whole domain back to the replication crisis and the lack of good research. They also discuss political and social aspects, and where Singal sees youth gender medicine going in the next few years.
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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to economist Sam Hammond. Canadian-born Hammond serves as the Senior Economist at the Foundation for American Innovation. His work primarily focuses on innovation and science policy, with particular attention to the societal and institutional impacts of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Before his role at FAI, Hammond was Director of Poverty and Welfare Policy at the Niskanen Center. Hammond also held a research fellowship at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, focusing on policy issues related to technology and regulation. He holds a BA in Economics from Saint Mary’s University and MA's in Economics from George Mason University and Carleton University.
After a quick discussion about Canadian housing, Razib and Hammond consider his piece 95 theses about AI. Hammond’s contention is that AI might prove as impactful as the printing press, or, at the outer edge equivalent to photosynthesis. Nearly two years into the current “AI hype cycle” we still haven’t found the “killer app” of AI, but thinkers like Hammond are getting ahead of the likely inevitable societal changes. He believes that change is inevitable, and the details that need to be worked out are how we as a species adapt and evolve in response to our technology. Hammond contends that the AI-revolution is likely to produce changes in the next generation analogous to industrial transformations of the late 19th centuries and early 20th centuries, when cars, electrification and airplanes transformed civilization.
For early access, feel free to explore it there.
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/sam-hammond-i-for-one-welcome-our
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The full episode is available on: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/14000-years-of-natural-selection
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks about what we have learned from a blockbuster new preprint, Pervasive findings of directional selection realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation. Synchronously released was the Ancient Genome Selection browser, which allows you to trace the allele frequency of variants of interest over the last 10,000 years. Razib covers:
The relationship of selection to adaptation and the Darwinian understanding of evolution
Non-genetic selection
Types of biological selection like positive, negative, background and balancing selection
Hard vs. soft sweeps and their relevance to detecting selection in the genome
Older forms of natural selection detection between species (dN/dS, Tajima’s D)
Newer forms of selection detection within species with haplotype structure, outlier SNP analysis and site frequency spectra
The Generalized Linear Mixed Model used to model allele frequency change over time, and estimates of selection in cases where population structure and drift are not sufficient
Specific examples of SNPs whose variation can be examined in the browser and are clearly cases of selection
Survey of traits that were revealed under selection, including blood groups, pigmentation and intelligence
Critiques of the methods due to not accounting for drift or population structure, and its limitations in relation to the ability to port across populations due to LD structure
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On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the genetic and archaeological history of Europe from the arrival of modern humans (permanently) 45,000 years ago, to the end of the Bronze Age in the decades after 1200 BC. He covers these time periods:
Pre-Aurignacian (before 43 kya)
Aurignacian (43-26 kya)
Gravettian (33-21 kya)
Solutrean (22-17 kya)
Magdalenian (17-12 kya)
Epigravettian (21-10 kya)
Mesolithic (12-7 kya)
Neolithic (9-5 kya)
Bronze Age (5-3 kya)
The full episode is available for paid subscribers on: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/europe-40000-bc-to-1200-bc
Relevant papers:
Reconstructing contact and a potential interbreeding geographical zone between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans
The Persian plateau served as hub for Homo sapiens after the main out of Africa dispersal
A genome sequence from a modern human skull over 45,000 years old from Zlatý kůň in Czechia
An early modern human from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor
Palaeogenomics of Upper Palaeolithic to Neolithic European hunter-gatherers
Survival of Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula
A 23,000-year-old southern Iberian individual links human groups that lived in Western Europe before and after the Last Glacial Maximum
Population genomics of Mesolithic Scandinavia: Investigating early postglacial migration routes and high-latitude adaptation
Late Pleistocene human genome suggests a local origin for the first farmers of central Anatolia
Genomic Evidence Establishes Anatolia as the Source of the European Neolithic Gene Pool
Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe
The genomic ancestry of the Scandinavian Battle Axe Culture people and their relation to the broader Corded Ware horizon
The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years
Steppe Ancestry in western Eurasia and the spread of the Germanic Languages
- Visa fler
