I’ve kind of fallen down on the job regarding the book club. But, I will catch up with Not Born Yesterday and Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom. My goal is to catch-up this week after a few calls tomorrow.
It’s been a busy last quarter of 2020 for various reasons. I will offer a bit of a personal note and admit that this has been a very nice Christmas with the family. The kids are not yet at the age where they hate me. yet.
A lot of my spare energy has been going into my Substack. Since you read this weblog you know all about it and are probably sick of hearing about it, but just to reiterate, I imagine it is a synthesis of a blog, a podcast, and a newsletter. Last week I recorded podcasts with Armand Leroi and Alina Chan. I’ll be posting Armand’s this week for subscribers, and then pushing in a few weeks to the ungated website.
In setting up the short conversation with Alina I feel like I’ve gotten a better sense of her. Perhaps she’s fooling me, but my initial impression that she’s sincere and earnest has been confirmed. I wish more young academics had her fire for truth above all else. There are more important things than truth, but if you are an academic in particular, why are you in the game if the truth isn’t number one?
Chinese Demography: China is shrinking, and is about to shrink more. These are structural forces we all know. I think they give the rest of the world an opportunity to constrain the dragon. The problem that I see is that the West seems to be engaging in some sort of cultural suicide, in particular the United States.
The distribution of waiting distances in ancestral recombination graphs and its applications.
Democrats see grim prospects in final election results despite Biden’s win. The takeaway is what Kevin Drum observed: Democratic elites and base are very culturally liberal, and don’t want to concede an inch on cutting edge progressive values. Non-college educated America barely knows what they’re talking about half the time. I think this is a bit like the Republican fixation on cutting taxes to increase revenue and the cult of the “job-creator.” People on the Right are pretty bullish on 2022 and 2024.
That being said, the Left controls all the major cultural institutions. What does it matter if you win elections if in 2024 every member of Congress is mandated to state their pronoun on the directory?
Reconstructing the human genetic history of mainland Southeast Asia: insights from genome-wide data from Thailand and Laos. Going to have to look at this closely.
Sexual conflict drives micro- and macroevolution of sexual dimorphism in immunity.
Placing ancient DNA sequences into reference phylogenies.
A higher burden of multiple sclerosis genetic risk confers an earlier onset.
Last week I posted a long conversation with Samon Burja. I’ll ungate it soon. But I think you’ll enjoy it.
How 2 Pro-Nazi Nobelists Attacked Einstein’s “Jewish Science”. Science must fall?
“engaging in some sort of cultural suicide” Agree.
1) What historical echoes do you and your readership perceive?
2) Is the McLuhan:de Toqueville admixture 2:1 or is it 1:2 ?
The Right made the mistake of giving up the institutions of media and higher education. These institutions create the new generation of elites and propagate their narrative. Rather than isolating themselves, the right needs to takeover these institutions by any means necessary. I am not sure how but maybe institute state control over media and education. Nationalize CNN, Instagram and Harvard. Completely antithetical to 200 years of American political philosophy buts it is better to try something new than completing giving up all cultural power, as the American conservatives are doing right now.
Speaking of Nazi science, I’d like to mention two things.
1) While still a science powerhouse, Germany really relatively declined in science after WWII. After WWI a decline (In Western Europe and the US) happened in the prestige of the German language, including scientific publishing. Also, I don’t have the exact numbers on me, but I think a majority of Germany’s scientific Nobel Prizes come from work done before the Nazis took over. And that quite a bit came from those of Jewish descent. Damn the Nazis were stupid.
2) The story of Otto Warburg is pretty fascinating. His father Emil Warburg was born of Orthodox Jewish parents, but he converted to Christianity as an adult. This would make Otto a “mischling” and subject to certain laws. However, due to his research, the Nazis took a softer approach with him.
Alina Chan might be a real expert in her field, I wouldn’t know, but outside of it she says some really dumb things, and there is no one to correct her. I’m not going to, but she needs someone who can give her a reality check on some of the nonsense she sprays out on Twitter, preferably before she does it.
Re: Chinese demography. Yeah, I do wonder about this. I’d be interested to see how more folks who’ve made a name for themselves depicting a drastic demographic age shift fuelled decline for Western societies, as an argument to offset this by migration, react and whether they’re consistent or non-consistent. Anyone who argues now “Well, it’s not such a big problem for China because of automation and AI and aging reversal technology” when arguing something quite different previously, well, that will tell you something about what their real reasons for making their arguments were all along (and vice versa of course!).
Would add that if relative stagnation of growth in market size happens, relative stagnation of income growth happens, and rising dependency share happens in China, then perhaps China’s society becomes much more focused on relative social position and less focused on the gains in absolute social mobility. And that means more potential for frustration with social position and concern with avoiding downward mobility, especially since Chinese already seem to be highly aspirational. (An interesting article on how that already manifests in China, about the idea of “Involution” in contemporary Chinese culture – https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006391/how-one-obscure-word-captures-urban-chinas-unhappiness). Then that raises class tension and mistrust.
China’s society could end up replicating a lot of these political problems of the West, if we view those as due to the structural issues Turchin seems to theorize are the cause, relating to elite overproduction, and relative economic stagnation, and hollowing out of lower middle class to technological trend. How well will China cope with growth slowdown and demographic decline, which both seem somewhat inevitable?
Of course I’m saying nothing new to say “the West” has historically unique problems with these same issues. Due to its openness to new social elites (ethnically, gender, etc.) and how this mixes with the general ethos of social criticism. These features have of course in some ways been positive. But have also opened unique ways for frustration with stratification to manifest in the face of aspiration. (I could go on about this at great length, but it would be a tangent that would spam the comments here).
@Odacer, couple very quick plots of science nobels (medicine, physics, chemistry) per ten million, by year, USA and Germany: https://imgur.com/a/O1peaBn
Accounting for noise, Germany is constant or detrends very slowly over time, USA jumps suddenly after WWII and then roughly constant. Countries should decline over time if trend is more frequently to convergence between countries than divergence. This doesn’t say anything about when the work is done of course.
@Razib,
I remember you had a patreon podcast a few months ago with an old friend of yours who was a recent apostate from Wokeness/CRT. Do you ever intend to ungate that one?
From the linked obit of Bryan Sykes: As his interest in studies of human populations developed, he recruited lab members who worked in that area alongside those who continued his pathological studies.
How juicy. And frustrating. The piece, unfortunately in my estimation, does not provide any detail about these pathological studies. (Another odd note: his marriage was annulled in 1984 but he and his ex-wife had a son, born in 1991!)
“How 2 Pro-Nazi Nobelists Attacked Einstein’s ‘Jewish Science’.”
I continue to believe that the “woke” students of today simply do know or understand what fascism was.
A sign at the Bryn Mawr student awokening strike:
Are U Teaching the White Man’s Science. Decolonize STEM!!!
A Student Mob Took Over Bryn Mawr. The College Said Thank You
Written by Minnie Doe Published on December 27, 2020
https://quillette.com/2020/12/27/a-student-mob-took-over-bryn-mawr-the-college-said-thank-you/
Brian Sykes wrote a book:
“The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry (2002)
https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Daughters-Eve-Science-Ancestry/dp/0393323145/geneexpressio-20
I will wager that it was the inspiration for Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson (2015)
https://www.amazon.com/Seveneves-Novel-Neal-Stephenson-ebook/dp/B00LZWV8JO/geneexpressio-20
Hint, hint. Razib
I remember you had a patreon podcast a few months ago with an old friend of yours who was a recent apostate from Wokeness/CRT. Do you ever intend to ungate that one?
will post on unsup learning. yes
Phillip Ball writes in the excerpt from Aryan Physics:
It was one thing to say that art was decadent—that its elitist abstraction or lurid imagery would lead people astray. And the “depraved” sexuality saturating the pages of Freud’s works was self-evidently contaminating. But how could a scientific theory be objectionable? How could one even develop a pseudo-moralistic position on a notion that was objectively right or wrong? Besides, hadn’t Einstein’s relativity been proven? What did it even mean to say that science could be subverted by the “Jewish spirit”?
“objectively right or wrong”? Didn’t Ball get the postmodern memo? There is no objective truth, only narratives. And the narratives reflect the race/class/gender/religion/etc. of the people who construct them. Narratives constructed by the wrong people will be hurtful and work against social justice. They must be put down.
@matt
See fig 3 here
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.180167
“Germany’s science productivity peaked in 1898, which antedates the first Nobel prize by three years. The Nobel prize hence came somewhat too late for Germany, which would have received a substantially larger amount of medals if the first prize had been awarded not in 1901, but 20 years earlier. Today’s rate is 0.24 science Nobel prizes per year and per 100 million inhabitants.”
Interesting notes about US decline as well.
Rare and de novo coding variants in chromodomain genes in Chiari I malformation
“Chiari I malformation (CM1), the displacement of the cerebellum through the foramen magnum into the spinal canal, is one of the most common pediatric neurological conditions.
Individuals with CM1 can present with neurological symptoms, including severe headaches and sensory or motor deficits, often as a consequence of brainstem compression or syringomyelia (SM).
We conducted whole-exome sequencing (WES) on 668 CM1 probands and 232 family members and performed gene-burden and de novo enrichment analyses.
A significant enrichment of rare and de novo non-synonymous variants in chromodomain (CHD) genes was observed among individuals with CM1 (combined p = 2.4 × 10 −10), including 3 de novo loss-of-function variants in CHD8 (LOF enrichment p = 1.9 × 10 −10) and a significant burden of rare transmitted variants in CHD3 (p = 1.8 × 10 −6).
Overall, individuals with CM1 were found to have significantly increased head circumference (p = 2.6 × 10 −9), with many harboring CHD rare variants having macrocephaly.
Finally, haploinsufficiency for chd8 in zebrafish led to macrocephaly and posterior hindbrain displacement reminiscent of CM1. These results implicate chromodomain genes and excessive brain growth in CM1 pathogenesis.”
https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(20)30437-7
https://www.yahoo.com/news/dont-blame-sharia-islamic-extremism-212108996.html
Don’t blame Sharia for Islamic extremism — blame colonialism
is this the worst article ever written?
@Robert Ford
It’s telling that this article was published on New Year’s Eve, a day that no one pays attention to the news; the topic is decidedly out of vogue, and the perspective is embarrassing. Yahoo may have been contractually obligated with the author to put out one of his opinions, and picked a day on which it could do as little damage and attract as little attention as possible.
Why Do We Dream? A New Theory on How It Protects Our Brains
https://time.com/5925206/why-do-we-dream/
thought this was a cool article. David Eagleman suspects that while we sleep some areas of the brain remain somewhat active to prevent other areas of the brain from taking it over. he’s a really interesting guy, gonna get his new book.
http://www.canceledpeople.com/cancelations
Happy New Year Razib.
Noah Smith is alarmed at fewer under-forties, but the belief you can go on definitely with a bottom-heavy population pyramid is a fantasy. Of the following three “goods”:
More than half the population is under forty
People live to eighty
The population is not growing forever,
you *must* give up one. It is impossible to have more than two out of those three.
I want to give up the first, and Blissex in Noah Smith’s comment section has it right, the first is the desire of a minority rentier class looking at aggregate, not per capita, GDP, because they get the aggregate.