Richard Harris’ Hume: An Intellectual Biography. Whatever you think about David Hume’s philosophy, he knew how to be a man who lived for the life of the mind.
A Farewell to Feministing and the Heyday of Feminist Blogging. Nothing particular to feminist blogging.
‘I Have Told Everything,’ Says Whistle-Blower in China Crackdown.
How much does Ne vary among species? If someone tells you they get Ne, they’re lying.
FedEx Goes Deep Into Mississippi Delta to Find Workers. Full-employment!
Early replacement of West Eurasian male Y chromosomes from the east.
Splintered Isle: A Journey Through Brexit Britain.
How Life on Our Planet Made It Through Snowball Earth.
If you haven’t checked out Gwern, do so.
The irony of worrying about Star Trek 4’s budget is that possibly the most beloved installment of the movies (Wrath of Khan) was a relatively low-budget sequel to the hugely expensive flop that was Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Maybe less is more when it comes to Star Trek, forcing them to get creative.
People just don’t seem to care about that particular subset of the franchise. It’s not like we have any real deep connection to those actors’ portrayal of the characters, since we’ve only seen them in sporadic movies.
my dante vcf https://www.dropbox.com/s/j8jta5sx943rcrb/60820188482033.filtered.snp.vcf.gz?dl=0
I don’t think that i have brought this up before, but is anyone here familiar with the GRW theory? If so what are your thoughts on it and its variants?
Interesting review in Nature:
When did societies become modern? ‘Big history’ dashes popular idea of Axial Age
Humanity’s supposed singular transition to modernity in the first millennium BC was much messier than previously thought, finds sweeping study of historical data.
I suspect that it is, unfortunately, gated. If so, search on the book,
Seshat History of the Axial Age:
google
amazon
The opening paragraphs of the article:
It’s an idea that has been influential for more than 200 years: around the middle of the first millennium BC, humanity passed through a psychological watershed and became modern. This ‘Axial Age’ transformed an archaic world of divine rulers, slavery and human sacrifice into a more enlightened era that valued social justice, family values and the rule of law. The appeal of the general concept is such that some have claimed humanity is now experiencing a second Axial Age driven by rapid population growth and technological change. Yet according to the largest ever cross-cultural survey of historical and archaeological data, the first of these ages never happened — or at least unfolded differently from the originally proposed narrative.
Major changes did take place in the way humans understood their place in the universe, and their relationships with each other, finds the analysis. But sometimes these societal shifts happened earlier than the first millennium BC, and sometimes later. And they did not always occur in the societies typically considered ‘axial’ — what is now Greece, Israel–Palestine, Iran, India and China — although they did take place in some other societies. “We couldn’t find any consistent Axial Age that was confined to those five societies,” says anthropologist Jenny Reddish at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, one of the survey’s authors.
The work, published this week as a 500-page book1 entitled Seshat History of the Axial Age, spotlights the ‘big data’ approaches to history that have become popular in the past decade. These can complement the very specialized, detailed work of standard historians with a broad-brush, comparative approach to the evolution of societies that are widely separated in time and space. The current finding is likely to be followed by many others addressing the origins of complex societies using these new techniques.
On the topic of ancient dna, came across this preprint from the summer which I didn’t look at, at the time – https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/685404v2 – “The origin of the Gravettians: genomic evidence from a 36,000-year-old Eastern European”
Some of the D-stats are actually quite interesting and puzzling (see excerpts – https://imgur.com/a/1CmcC4X), they seem to suggest:
1) The 36kya Gravettian Buran-Kaya III Crimea sample is no closer to the Villabruna late Upper Paleolithic Europeans (the “WHG” guys), than Han, Tianyuan or Ust Ishim.
2) Yet, unlike in many other samples, this is not explained by “Basal Eurasian” and Buran-Kaya III has no more Basal Eurasian than other UP Europeans (who do show relationship to the Villabruna/WHG cluster).
3) At the same time Buran-Kaya III does show a relationship with Gravettian samples slightly later from Upper Paleolithic Europe.
If that holds up in quality that seems to raise questions about what this even means in terms of phylogeny. You have this group that seems to have a phylogenetic relationship with some UP Europeans (“West Eurasian” in Fu et al’s paper), but also to have no more relationship with late UP Europeans (also “West Eurasian”) than Tianyuan / Ust Ishim / Han (all supposedly East Eurasian or not phylogenetically forming a clade with “West Eurasian” in any case).