Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
188 episodes - English - Latest episode: 22 days ago - ★★★★★ - 157 ratingsRazib Khan engages a diverse array of thinkers on all topics under the sun. Genetics, history, and politics. See: http://razib.substack.com/
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Episodes
Alex Mesoudi: the origins of cultural evolution
July 23, 2021 06:40 - 1 hour - 53.8 MBIn this conversation, I discuss “cultural evolution” with Alex Mesoudi. The very term can be confusing and perplexing to some. After all, it seems intuitive that culture evolves and changes. But here Mesoudi and I discuss the science of cultural evolution, which is today a robust and interdisciplinary field (also see my conversation with Richard McElreath). Why do cultures vary? How fast and why do they change? What is the relation between genes and cultures? All these are topics that cultur...
Patrick Wyman: Luther, Columbus and Gutenberg
July 20, 2021 20:00 - 1 hour - 55.4 MBToday on this bonus episode of Unsupervised Learning I’m excited to talk to Patrick Wyman about his new book, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World. Full disclosure, I enjoyed The Verge, and a review will be posted from me on National Review Online within the next week. Wyman is the host of Tides of History, a podcast about history and assorted topics which I recommend to everyone (I’ve been a guest). If you’ve listened to him speak at length, you won’...
John S. Wilkins: species, the history of an idea
July 15, 2021 19:13 - 58 minutes - 44.4 MBLast week we saw the debut of two new possible human “species”, one in Israel and another in China (read my post on the topic or listen to the podcast with Vagheesh Narasimhan). The team out of Israel did not explicitly name their find a new species, referring to it as the “Nesha Ramla hominin.” But it is clear reading between the lines that they believe they did discover a new species-level hominin. In contrast, the Chinese team did explicitly propose a new species, Homo longi. Whether you ...
Dragon Man ascending: two geneticists discuss the latest paleoanthropological discoveries
July 14, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 49.4 MBLast week two new hominin fossils were published in the scientific literature, and extensively reported on in the media. “Dragon Man”, discovered in Harbin, China, and dating to 140,000 years ago is claimed to be a new species that is the closest to the modern human lineage. Meanwhile, the hominin discovered at Nesha Ramla in Israel dates to 120,000-140,000 years ago, and it seems most similar to Neanderthals (though its tools are no different from modern humans to the south and west in Afri...
Richard Hanania: Israel, "wokeness" is just civil rights, and the Chinese century
July 11, 2021 18:45 - 55 minutes - 40.8 MBRichard Hanania is the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI). He also runs a Substack and a podcast that are “must-read/listen.” Richard is perceived as something of a contrarian, so I wanted to ask him about Israel and its role in American politics because he has opinions on that topic somewhat outside of the mainstream. But since I scheduled this podcast he’s “blown up” due to a piece he wrote, Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law. Eliciting resp...
Samo Burja (again): finding "lost civilizations"
July 09, 2021 14:01 - 58 minutes - 51.4 MBBy popular demand, Samo Burja is my first repeat guest on this podcast. You’ve been asking for him, so when he wrote a great piece in Palladium Magazine, Why Civilization Is Older Than We Thought, I had to ask him back on. Much of the piece is specifically about Göbekli Tepe, an ancient site in Turkey that predates the Neolithic, dating to 11,600 years ago. Burja focuses on how our preconceptions shape how we understand the world and interpret data. For example, at first, archaeologists th...
Ramez Naam: a promising future
July 02, 2021 19:28 - 52 minutes - 40.5 MBI’ve known Ramez Naam since 2003 when he wrote More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. Back then he was leading a team at Microsoft, and moonlighting as a writer. Over the last twenty years, he’s changed careers, and become a full-time writer and speaker. He’s the author of three science fiction books, Crux, Apex, and Nexus. Ramez has also written The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. It’s because of the last book that he’s become an expe...
Colin Wright: wasps, New Atheism, and sex
June 25, 2021 00:29 - 1 hour - 47.1 MBThree years ago the Golden State Killer was arrested through genetic genealogy enabled by the new direct-to-consumer platforms. Over the past several years many more cases have been solved through new DNA techniques and database searches. But more recently, Montana and Maryland banned the practice. Six years after the original CSI went off the air, genomics and forensics have started to fuse into something new and far more powerful. David Mittelman is a scientist who is bringing “next-gene...
David Mittelman: genomics for justice
June 18, 2021 06:32 - 57 minutes - 44.5 MBThree years ago the Golden State Killer was arrested through genetic genealogy enabled by the new direct-to-consumer platforms. Over the past several years many more cases have been solved through new DNA techniques and database searches. But more recently, Montana and Maryland banned the practice. Six years after the original CSI went off the air, genomics and forensics have started to fuse into something new and far more powerful. David Mittelman is a scientist who is bringing “next-gene...
James P. Mallory: finding the Indo-Europeans
June 11, 2021 05:15 - 1 hour - 53.7 MBJames P. Mallory received in Ph.D. in Indo-European studies from UCLA in 1975 under the supervision of Marija Gimbutas. He is the author of In Search of Indo-Europeans, The Origins of the Irish, and The Tarim Mummies, and an emeritus professor at Queen’s University Belfast. Mallory devoted much of his career to understanding the origins of the Indo-Europeans. Over the first 30 minutes of he gives a magisterial overview of the question, the field, and where we are now. Mallory begins in the...
Marie Favereau: the Golden Horde and world history
June 04, 2021 10:09 - 57 minutes - 33.5 MBDr. Marie Favereau is an associate professor at Paris Nanterre University. Her academic work has been on the Mamlukes of Egypt and the Mongol Golden Horde. Most recently, she is the author of The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World. I recently reviewed it for UnHerd, What the Mongols did for us: The Golden Horde wasn't barbarous, it created the modern world. Dr. Favereau and I discuss the origin of the Golden Horde, the Mongols of the northwest who ruled much of Eastern Europe for cen...
Kristian Kristiansen: the birth of Northern Europe
May 27, 2021 20:12 - 1 hour - 40 MBDr. Kristian Kristiansen has been at the forefront of the synthesis between archaeology and ancient DNA. That new joint field has allowed for a deeper understanding of the transition to Indo-European languages in Northern Europe 5,000 years ago. In 2015 he was a co-author on Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia, which established that there was a massive migration of the steppe people into Europe that resulted in the emergence of the Corded Ware culture, the likely predecessor of most s...
David Anthony: the origin of Indo-Europeans
May 21, 2021 05:29 - 1 hour - 13.8 MBDavid Anthony is an emeritus professor of Hartwick College and now a collaborator with David Reich at Harvard. Over the past four decades, Anthony has been involved in exploring the origin and rise of Indo-Europeans from the perspective of archaeology, most especially in his magisterial 2007 book The Horse, The Wheel, and Language. In the 2010’s he began collaborating with geneticists. He provided many of the Yamnaya samples for 2015’s Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Ind...
Thomas Olander: the origin and spread of Indo-European languages
May 14, 2021 07:46 - 1 hour - 50.9 MB45% of humans speak an Indo-European language. English is Indo-European. Hindi is Indo-European. The language of the ancient Hittites was Indo-European. This is one reason the origin and expansion of this language family is so interesting to so many. Thomas Olander is an associate professor of Indo-European studies in Denmark. He has a deep interest in the question of when and where the Proto-Indo-European speakers flourished. In the podcast we talk about different hypotheses in terms of t...
Greg Clark: For Whom The Bell Curve Tolls
May 07, 2021 06:09 - 56 minutes - 33.8 MBIn the winter of 2021, I noticed a minor controversy regarding ‘academic cancellation’ around Gregory Clark, an economic historian at UC Davis. Representative pieces are Glasgow University in row over decision to invite guest speaker Gregory Clark, and Why is the woke mob so scared? The Free Speech Union put together a petition, Letter to Adam Smith Business School About No-Platforming of Professor Gregory Clark Signed by Over 70 Academics, signed by numerous public intellectuals after his t...
Benjamin Basset: pagans and Christians then and now
April 29, 2021 21:28 - 56 minutes - 43.9 MBWhat are the relationship between Christianity, ancient paganism, and Western culture? Does mass secularization in the West presage a new pagan era? Where is “New Atheism” 15 years after its peak? These are just some of the questions Ben Bassett and I mull over. Bassett is an archaeologist but has a deep interest in ancient history. Three years ago he wrote: Progress and Polytheism: Could an Ethical West Exist Without Christianity? We also referenced Unbelievable? Is the God of the Bibl...
Abdel Abdellaoui: a behavior geneticist in the 21st century
April 23, 2021 09:45 - 44 minutes - 36.3 MBAbdel Abdellaoui is a researcher in the Netherlands who works in the intersection of psychology and genetics. He’s a pretty active figure on social media, and because of his subject matter interests, he has become embroiled in a few controversies. When scientists talk about genetics and psychology, behavior genetics, the public listens and offers opinions. Over the course of our conversation, I discuss how he got into behavior genetics, and what the lay of the land in the Netherlands is li...
Gabriel Rossman: the sociologist who tells you that influencers are overrated
April 17, 2021 03:43 - 1 hour - 67.9 MBGabriel Rossman is a sociologist at UCLA. The author of Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation, Rossman takes a deeply analytic toolkit to questions such as why 2005’s “My Humps” became a viral hit. The last 1/3rd of the podcast is devoted to discussing a recent paper that he is an author on, Network hubs cease to be influential in the presence of low levels of advertising. But first, we discuss other topics. Recently Rossman has been seeing a ch...
Chris Stringer: 1,000,000 years of human evolution
April 09, 2021 16:44 - 51 minutes - 36.3 MBListeners to some of my podcasts on human evolution often tell me, in a friendly enough manner, that the jargon is often tough going. To be frank I can actually empathize with this. It is difficult for me to keep up with all the paleogenetics, let alone the ins and outs of paleoanthropology. What’s the difference between ergaster and heidelbergensis? Are Denisovans a species? Where in Africa did modern humans emerge? There are dozens of questions like this. This is why I often touch base w...
Tom Booth: Cheddar Man and Beyond
April 02, 2021 05:31 - 1 hour - 90.1 MBTom Booth is an English archaeologist who has had great timing in his career, as he’s been riding the massive wave of ancient DNA findings out of Britain over the past decade. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6520225/
Nick Patterson: cryptography to Neanderthals
March 26, 2021 06:01 - 1 hour - 64.3 MBNick Patterson is a computational biologist at the Broad Institute. A collaborator with David Reich for nearly 20 years, Nick has traversed the world of genetics from its medical domain to the realm of anthropology and ancient DNA. But before he was a geneticist Nick had varied lives, including a stint with the British government, as a cryptographer, and a quant for Renaissance Technologies. We also discuss his background in dark post-World War II England, and how it shaped him.
Matt Ridley: evolutionist, Thatcherite, and writer
March 18, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 60.9 MBNormally I post a photograph of the guest for the podcast. But in the case of Matt Ridley, I am making an exception. Rather, I’m highlighting his 1999 book, Genome: The autobiography of a species in 23 chapters. This book is incredibly influential for the generation of genomicists who came of age in the 21st century. Written in the late 1990’s when the genomics revolution was barely off the ground, Ridley’s elegant prose anticipated how exciting this field was going to be for many of us. Gen...
Lee Jussim: he comes to abolish social psychology
March 12, 2021 07:19 - 1 hour - 49.4 MBLee Jussim is a social psychologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Known outside of his field as a major critic of stereotype threat, Lee is involved in online science communication and the replication crisis. A major internal critical of his own field, Lee and I discuss: - His experience after Hurricane Sandy - What he actually believes is true in social psychology - The relationship between political uniformity and results in social science
Cathy Young on the French Revolution
March 05, 2021 06:47 - 1 hour - 92.9 MBCathy Young is a writer who contributes to Reason, Newsday, and Arc Digital. Born in the Soviet Union, she immigrated to the United States as a teen in the 1980s. Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood and Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality. In December she wrote The Guillotine Mystique: The French Revolution has long inspired progressive radicals ready for change at any cost for Reason. She has even started the Frenc...
Chad Orzel: quantum jumps across science and writing
February 26, 2021 02:33 - 1 hour - 51.5 MBChad Orzel is a spherical object…actually, no. He’s a physicist. More precisely, a physics professor at Union College, in Schenectady, New York. He’s the author of four books: Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist
Texpocalypse Now: a postmortem
February 20, 2021 05:37 - 2 hours - 75.4 MBThis week’s guests made time to chat at a moment’s notice over the last 24 hours as the luckiest of us are just beginning to get back to normal life (though many here remain without water even after power was restored). This is very much a rough draft of history, not my usual evergreen type of content. I’m learning something new daily and I hope you’ll get something out of it, too. My guests: Jon Stokes, a deputy editor at The Prepared. Jon talks about how and why even he was caught flat...
Rob Henderson: Red America to Oxbridge and Beyond
February 19, 2021 09:33 - 1 hour - 78.5 MBRob Henderson is one of the most interesting young thinkers active today. A writer with an engaging Twitter account and must-subscribe newsletter, he is perhaps most well known today for his popularization of the concept of “luxury beliefs.” My conversation with Rob occurred in the midst of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. I was looking for his perspective on the world, and the reality of American decline, because his own life story is so unique, and yet so American. Given up for adoption ...
A conversation with John Hawks: a life in paleoanthropology
February 12, 2021 01:48 - 1 hour - 79.1 MBJohn Hawks is a paleoanthropologist who has been a researcher and commentator in the fields of human evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology for over two decades. With a widely-read weblog, a book on Homo naledi, and highly cited scientific papers, Hawks’ voice is essential to understanding the origin of our species. In this episode, Hawks talks about how he stumbled onto paleoanthropology, and his work in the 2000’s, where he was at the center of debates between various camps within th...
Ramesh Ponnuru on the pro-life movement in America
February 05, 2021 00:16 - 51 minutes - 38.7 MBOn January 22nd, 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States of America declared abortion legal in all 50 states when it decided Roe vs. Wade. This landmark decision was arguably one of the two biggest cases in relation to social policy in the US in the 20th century (the other being 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education). Though abortion has been on the back-burner as an issue over the past decade or so, for most of the whole period after Roe vs. Wade it has dominated and shaped cultural pol...
American Civil War? Richard Hanania thinks it unlikely
January 29, 2021 05:56 - 1 hour - 75.7 MBFor this episode of Unsupervised Learning, I talked to Richard Hanania of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.
Alina Chan on SARS-CoV-2 and "lab leak"
January 22, 2021 02:46 - 43 minutes - 37.1 MBAlina Chan is a post-doctoral fellow at the Broad Institute. Since the spring of 2020 Chan has been prominent in online (and “offline”) discussions as to the nature of the origins of SARS-Cov-2. Her argument is that there needs to be more openness to alternative possibilities of the origin of SARS-Cov-2. She is a co-author on two preprints related to SARS-Cov-2: SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence? Single source of pangolin CoVs with a near identic...
Armand Leroi: an evolutionist for all seasons
January 15, 2021 07:14 - 1 hour - 57.3 MBArmand Marie Leroi is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body and The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. An evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London, Leroi has tackled race and eugenics, as well as published on the cultural evolution of music and the neutral theory of evolution. In a wide-ranging conversation, we discuss his attempts to tackle the concepts of race and eugenics as a public intellectual, his exploration of cultural evolution, and finally, t...
Samo Burja on "social technology," China, and the foreign view of America
January 08, 2021 04:52 - 1 hour - 51.6 MBOn this episode of Unsupervised Learning I talk at length with Samo Burja, a public intellectual who focuses on the insights that history can provide to the present and future. To be frank, Samo is one of the most historically literate people I’ve ever met. This probably explains how we could talk so easily for well over an hour on topics as diverse as Confucianism, “social technology”, and the European view of America and China (the last might surprise you!).
Jeremy Kamil: a virologist in the time of COVID
December 24, 2020 06:37 - 52 minutes - 34.6 MBDr. Jeremy Kamil is a virologist in the LSU system. He is one of the people I have encountered over the last year whose opinion I’ve learned to take to heart. Not because Jeremy holds forth from on high, but because he doesn’t. As you will hear in this conversation, he is candid about how little he truly knew at the beginning of 2020. A world transformed by COVID-19 has also seen a world of pundits and commentators rewriting history, testifying to their foresight. Masks are useless until th...
David Shor, the uncancellable
December 16, 2020 23:10 - 57 minutes - 43.1 MBRazib talks to political analyst David Shor.
Eric Cline and the End of the Bronze Age
December 10, 2020 13:41 - 55 minutes - 44.5 MBRazib talks to archaeologists Eric Cline about his book 1177, and the end of the Bronze Age.
A conversation with Charles Murray
December 03, 2020 06:37 - 1 hour - 46.4 MBRazib discusses the life and times of Charles Murray. They explore Murray's upbringing, time in Thailand, and his perspective on the USA today.
Anders Bergstrom: The five lineages of Holocene dogs
November 26, 2020 01:33 - 1 hour - 57.8 MBOn this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, I talk to Anders Bergstrom about the new paper in Science, Origins and genetic legacy of prehistoric dogs, on which he is the first author.