Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Open Thread, 3/26/2018

Posted on by Razib Khan

Does anyone have a galley or review copy of She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity? The book is long, and review copies are in short supply. Would be nice if I could see it before it’s released at the end of May. Just use my contact email if you have a copy.

Pretty excited about it! The use of the word “heredity” is a clue to me that this is going to be a book with a really long historical narrative.

How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’. Everyone is talking about this David Reich op-ed in The New York Times. Well, at least in my corner of Twitter.

It’s adapted from a chapter of Who We Are and How We Got Here. That chapter is both more subtle and more punchy than the op-ed. Anthropologists will probably dislike it even more than they dislike this op-ed because Reich does not pull punches (though contrary to the impression you might get from the op-ed he clearly prefers to use “ancestry” rather than the word “race”).

There’s not much to say about the op-ed.

I think it’s more interesting to perceive the dynamics of scientific culture at work in the reaction. The Reich lab is an eminent one, and its Diaspora includes other elite institutions now. He is affiliated with Harvard Medical School and the Broad.

Friends of mine who operate outside of human genetics characterize this subfield within genetics as one with sharp elbows and a mafia-like network of pedigree laboratories and superstar professors. It’s probably worse in the explicitly biomedical area, but population geneticists who don’t work on humans still say human population geneticists are different (we’re talking averages here).

There were many criticisms of the op-ed from human population geneticists…but they were subdued, restrained, and often prefaced by praise for Reich’s scientific chops or his generosity as a collaborator. Both true of course. There was also praise.

But the op-ed illustrated the reality of some unpalatable propositions. In Who We Are and How We Got Her David Reich himself makes it clear that some of the ideas he’s mooting are not palatable to him. If it wasn’t clear from the op-ed already.

It also illustrated a truth in academia from what little I’ve seen and experienced within it: it is a highly feudal culture defined by patronage networks and an ordered understanding of the relationship of superiors to subordinates. As they say: “You come at the king, you best not miss.”

If he was someone less connected, less at the peak of his powers, I believe that David Reich’s reputation would be ground up in a sausage machine. This op-ed reminds me of nothing more than Symmachus’ plea for an old way that is fading before the new. Symmachus was rich and famous. He could dissent from the ascendant orthodoxy that was “passing on to better things.” But his class of the old pagan elite was at its dusk.

Most of the more vociferous criticisms of the 0p-ed are coming from anthropologists because it’s a different field with an alternative nobility of blood and status. David Reich can be thought of as an alien warlord who as trespassed the boundaries of their kingdom. But he is also aiming at the very foundations of their rule, so they can do no other but unleash the dogs of war.

Speaking of that book, my review is up at National Review Online. Hope to contribute more in the future to that publication! Doesn’t look like Kevin Williamson is getting fired from The Atlantic, so there’s space in those pages.

I’ll probably talk more in a spoilerish way next week so that people who purchased the book can read it.

Efficiently inferring the demographic history of many populations with allele count data and Recovering signals of ghost archaic admixture in the genomes of present-day Africans. These deserve close readings.


I assume everyone on this blog has heard about my podcast and are sick of hearing about it. But there are still people who follow me on Twitter who haven’t.

Since nothing has changed in a while, more positive reviews on iTunes and Sticher, please.

I think you’ll enjoy the interview with Stuart Ritchie, though that won’t post until further into April.

In a few days, I’ve going to have a post up on a new shirt which I pushed for at DNAGeeks (we got an artist to do something). But for now, check out the GNXP-helix themes hats and beanies.

The Battle of the Blue Cat Café How an anti-gentrification boycott became a proxy war between the radical left and the alt-right. Hits a little close to home.

The basic outline is that gentrification in East Austin is transforming lower class & lower-middle-class black and Latino neighborhoods into middle and upper-middle-class white neighborhoods. This makes some people really angry because they don’t want their neighborhood to change.

I’ve had some “interesting” discussions about this with locals with deeper roots. It’s fashionable to bemoan gentrification, but when I bring up my experience as an immigrant, and how that naturally results in change and transformation of neighborhoods, people get uncomfortable. The emotions deployed against gentrification aren’t that different from the emotions used against immigration. In many ways, the East Austinites who are being “displaced” can be psychologically analogized to middle and lower-middle-class Trump voters who feel they’re being “displaced.” Both groups feel they are being marginalized by people who are changing the world that their ancestors created with their own labor. And they probably are.

I don’t have a good answer to this. The free-market person in me says that gentrification has to happen, and the neighborhoods are going to change no matter what. But another part of me actually understands the argument by making an analogy to the national level: too much migration into a polity can result in a transformation of its institutions and dispossession of its majority. Pretty soon East Austin will mean something very different from what it has traditionally meant.

If you haven’t had wood ear salad, you haven’t lived. I highly recommend it as one of the major experiences of Sichuan cuisine (and of course don’t go to the place if their green beans are not recommended.

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31 thoughts on “Open Thread, 3/26/2018”

  2. In your NR article, you really watered down the stuff and was careful with the lingo and signaling.
    Was that on purpose? Did you have the audience in mind, for instance?

  4. I’m not typically sympathetic to anti-gentrification concerns, although I’m more sympathetic when the downsides for the people involved are really obvious and straight-forward. A lot of black neighborhoods are heavily tenant-based because of historical lack of access to equal housing finance opportunities plus poverty, so I can empathize with fears that they’ll literally be turned out en masse by landlords and get no gain at all from gentrification. Not so much in cases where folks are home-owners and aren’t about to be turfed out of their neighborhood by newcomers.

  5. I listen to your podcast from the website. I am not on any of those other platforms so I can’t give you a good review there. Just wanted you to know that there are still people like me as well! Good job, I watch for it.

  6. >it is a highly feudal culture defined by patronage networks and an ordered understanding of the relationship of superiors to subordinates. As they say: “You come at the king, you best not miss.”

    I was a lowly “research technician assistant” (i have no degree, nor any desire for one outside of what signaling qualities it possess now) in a neurosciences lab where I was writing software for neural feedback with EEG and fMRI (as well as data analysis).

    I wanted to work there for barely above minimum wage because it was more interesting work than what Is often available outside of academia, but it was kind of freeing at the same time where I could call the “kings” PI’s (and all the appeasers) out on stuff and not really care about the repercussions because I could then go do contract work at another lab (they are all short on useful talent at low wages, setting aside academia reliance on “trapping” h1b’s), or a way better paying job outside of academia afterwords (which I did eventually when I got fed up, and still retain the knowledge of what I worked there to be able to work on in my free time now, even managed to get co-authorship on a paper in neuroimage).

    I don’t know how it is in other fields, but it seems as tech takes over, the kings look like they have less clothes on…

  7. Oh, California, you hated lover, you tempestuous teapot! Importuning the Tesla-overrun rubble of SF for a turn of the seasonal wheel. The you-know-who-bro city east of Stanyan doesn’t exist. Enough pho banh mi to fill for a fortnight. So, Wood Ear Salad tonight, it is!

  8. Just want to say that you’ve been really on a roll recently with your writing and podcasting. I think part of it may be you now have a job which aligns better to what you’ve written about as your side gig. Now can do it more full time as it has a fairly large overlap with how you’re getting paid.

    But also I think sometimes you are standing at a certain point with certain views, and history rolls toward you. Genomics/history/open society/class/race are now about to get realigned in the next decade. So please keep it up. Think the times have caught up to where you’ve been standing for over a decade, and you should try to catch the wind.

  9. I emailed this yesterday after reading your review of Reich, but will take this opportunity to repeat myself:

    I can’t wait for an open thread.

    This is a wonderful review… However, I would like you to elaborate about one claim near the top of the review that strikes me as hyperbole, or perhaps bragging since you as a geneticist are in some sense on the same team as Reich.

    You write, “… ancient DNA, which will do more for our understanding of prehistory than radiocarbon dating did. ”

    Radiocarbon dating allows for significantly better understanding of the pre-historic “history” (development?  chronology?) of technology and culture than is possible without it.  I don’t see what ancient DNA can do that is comparable at least in these areas.  Would we know that Neanderthals went extinct during this period without C-14 analyses, or that they were responsible for at least some of the cave painting?  

  10. Building on your comparison of (attitudes toward) gentrification and immigration, a less timely issue would be integration of housing/neighborhoods/public schools. I had never previously thought of your parallel (or my response here), although perhaps I should have: Jimmy Carter did get catch s**t for his views on ethnic purity during the 1976 presidential campaign.

    One thing believe is important, and that I rarely hear anyone state out loud. income), is the reasonableness of double standards in certain situations: e.g., allowing individuals who are less affluent or belong to groups historically discriminated against more leeway. This suggests, for instance, that when public housing is built or schools are integrated, justice and efficient social policy demands that this be not in generic (or working class/lower middle class) white neighborhoods but in affluent ones.

    Of course this is not the way things work in the US (or anywhere so far as I know), just the way they should (all else equal).

  11. Thanks for the link to the Carl Zimmer book. Great writer. I really liked his E. coli book a few years back.

  12. Reich may be among the kings of population genetics today, but Watson, whom he attacks with a vengeance, is one of the two kings of molecular genetics over its history.

    For all of Reich’s attacks on Watson, is there any serious doubt that, in the long run, the very things Watson claimed or speculated for which Reich has excoriated him will prove out to be true?

    How will Reich look when it is Watson, not Reich, who was right on these matters — when, indeed, Reich’s own work may play a key role in proving them true?

    In science, in matters of legacy and history, all that really counts is being right. Watson will be the truth speaking Cassandra to whom the troglodytes refused to listen, and who was thrown out of polite society for being right.

    When that day comes, what will become of Reich’s reputation? Nothing good, I should think.

  14. A serious misread? From the op-ed:

    “[Watson and Wade] use the reluctance of the academic community to openly discuss these fraught issues to provide rhetorical cover for hateful ideas and old racist canards.”

    Reich is here claiming that both Watson and Wade are deliberately promoting hate and racism. I don’t see any other way to interpret it.

  15. The other thing about Reich’s attack on Watson that I find vicious is his throwing up something Watson said in a private conversation to attack him.

    If the conversation was private, including only Watson, Reich, and Beth Shapiro, how was what Watson claiming or speculating going to do any greater harm if Reich and Shapiro did not themselves report it? Why wasn’t the privacy of the conversation enough to allow freer discussion of these issues?

    This starts to approach thoughtcrime territory.

  17. Excellent podcasts. One small quibble: the sound levels sometimes vary between different people’s voices. This may seem a minor issue, but if, as I do, you tend to listen while doing something else which is also noisy, like driving or cooking, it can be annoying. Established radio stations seem to have cracked this problem, so there must be a simple technical fix.

  18. I have too much warrior ancestry not to smugly satisfy myself with challenging these chiefs to duels in my early 20s and having prettier girls

  19. This is a little thing, but I’m a sucker for nice endpapers, and Reich’s book has a doozy. Please thank him for that the next time you see him.

  20. I thought you were going to end the NR piece with “We are here and got here yesterday.” 🙂

  22. Reading the India chapter and grinning like an idiot: you really called it on some things, Razib!

  24. Excellent podcasts. One small quibble: the sound levels sometimes vary between different people’s voices. This may seem a minor issue, but if, as I do, you tend to listen while doing something else which is also noisy, like driving or cooking, it can be annoying. Established radio stations seem to have cracked this problem, so there must be a simple technical fix.

    we may have to adjust our levels.

    thanks

  25. Radiocarbon dating allows for significantly better understanding of the pre-historic “history” (development? chronology?)

    one whole genome of good quality can be used to construct the whole phylogeny of the ancestors of that individual.

  26. Razib: I listened to Charles Murray’s retirement lecture at AEI. I thought a lot about our pessimism optimism debates on the trajectory of American culture and politics. I do not always agree with Murray, but I think he is one of the smartest and most original thinkers on the conservative/libertarian side. He is also a pleasure to listen to, clear, concise, calm, and soft spoken.

    I highly recommend listening to or watching the lecture which is available at this link:

    http://www.aei.org/multimedia/charles-murray-on-the-right-questions-and-the-wrong-answers/

  28. Just finished reading ‘Who we are and how we got here’, very interesting read. The south asia bit was particularly enigmatic. Wondering what exactly he meant by saying ASI is part iranian farmer. Also he seems to have left the ivc question open. (The Indian scientists seem to be pretty certain that there wasn’t a post IVC migration. They also support paleolithic continuity models at public fora so I’m not sure how seriously they should be taken though. Hope you’ll blog about it sometime

  29. I know what you’re saying about gentrification. My libertarian ethics say there should be no government intervention to stop it, but I recognize the social implications. However, something also to consider is what policies currently make affordable housing harder to get for the people who might be displaced. E.g. zoning and rent control have both been shown to create housing shortages and drive up rents except for the lucky few who occupy the rent-controlled apartments, and even they aren’t always so lucky since landlords have little motivation to invest in repairs and upkeep when they aren’t profiting. These are usually complicated issues but I wish people would hesitate a bit more before calling for government intervention against a problem that may well be exacerbated by other kinds of intervention!

  31. Razib, I think every single person in the world and history of the world was an Ethno-Nationalist, even without a Nation State.
    You have Jews and Kurds as an example of that.
    There’s a catch though, you can teach people not to be an Ethno-Nationalist (something being done today) and this is often a sign that you’re living in an Empire, which is not a good sign. It shows that the interests of your people, and the decisions made for your people will now be neglected in favor of feeding the state machine, which will not work for your Ethnie nor another one, but only to sustain itself. It’s the end of self-determination.

    Also, inter-generational natural cultural loss and morphing happens, but then you’re just replacing an Ethno-Nationalism for another Ethno-Nationalism, without even breaking the chain of it, in a continuum.

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