Warren Treadgold’s The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education is going to come out in early July, but I’ve written my review. Don’t know when NRO will post it. In general, I’m positive. Though Treadgold has some ideological issues with Leftism in the academy, much of the book is apolitical and shines the light structural problems with contemporary academia.

It’s not a secret that I’m a fan of the author’s earlier work, A History of the Byzantine State and Society. So I checked some of the footnotes in The University We Need, and it turns out he’s a skeptic about the accolades given to Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages. Myself, I think both of these huge books are worth reading.

Bernard Lewis has died. He gets a lot of bad press from people like Edward Said of Orientalism fame, and over the last 20 years has become inextricably connected to neoconservatives who cheered on our nation’s foreign adventures. But a lot of his work is pretty interesting, especially the earlier stuff. I like The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years.

On The Number Of Siblings And p-th Cousins In A Large Population Sample. I can’t say I follow all the mathematical details but jump to equation 7. But this preprint heavily informs Edge & Coop’s How lucky was the genetic investigation in the Golden State Killer case?

The Coming Wave of Murders Solved by Genealogy. The horse has left the barn and the great rush is on. Ultimatley this all going to be a normal part of forensic work soon enough.

I’m not sure that there’s a single fact yet in The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War that’s surprised me. Is this because so much of this stuff has now percolated across our culture (e.g., the increased demand for horses in the late 19th century due to complementarity with railroads).

That being said there is a lot of specific detail that’s of interest. For example, the proportion of households with telephones during the Great Depression dropped, but those with radios kept increasing as a fraction of the American populace. The reason is that telephones were rented and required recurrent payments, which many families could no longer afford, while radios were purchased once, after which usage was free.

I don’t know much about Jordan Peterson. Curiously the people who talk to me about him the most are moderate liberals who are annoyed about the demonization of him by the further Left. I don’t have much to say, except it’s shocking how many patrons he has, and, the Left-media attacks on him probably are making him more popular.

Men are far more dangerous than women:

Problematic anti-Semitism bill passes in South Carolina:

The Act, which if not challenged in court and struck down as unconstitutional, will require South Carolina’s public institutions of higher education to “take into consideration the [State Department’s] definition of anti-Semitism for purposes of determining whether the alleged practice was motivated by anti-Semitic intent” when “investigating, or deciding whether there has been a violation of a college or university policy prohibiting discriminatory practices on the basis of religion.”

Heavy-handed suppression of anti-Semitism on campus is going to lead to more, not less, anti-Semitism. You know why.

Genetic analysis of Sephardic ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula.

Hybridization and postzygotic isolation promote reinforcement of male mating preferences in a diverse group of fishes with traditional sex roles.

A New Way for DTC? Nathan Pearson, Root Deep Insight.

Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder?

Farmers, tourists, and cattle threaten to wipe out some of the world’s last hunter-gatherers.

The new book, The Book of Why, is important.

The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education is a funny book. The author, Warren Treadgold, is someone I know from his magisterial A History of the Byzantine State and Society. One of the complaints about A History of the Byzantine State and Society is that it’s too dry and academic. The University We Need is not dry at all, unless you are referring to the mordant wit on display.

Since I’ll be reviewing The University We Need for NRO I won’t say much more than that, except that Treadgold is most definitely in a “gives no fucks” mood. Yes, he attacks administrators as you’d expect, but he also slams Hillsdale, the professoriate, and students. He also has opinions about cafeteria food!

Italy’s 5 Star, League Reach Deal to Govern Nation. This sort of Left-Right hybrid to me illustrates that we’re in a “crisis of capitalism,” or more precisely a crisis of Western civilization. Italian total fertility rate is ~1.40. The rest is commentary.

Localizing and classifying adaptive targets with trend filtered regression. In Who We Are David Reich talks about his ambition to create a sort of encyclopedia of human genomic history. But once that history is established, we’ll need to move on to understanding selection. This preprint looks like it will be important.

23andMe Hits Ancestry.com With Patent Suit Over DNA Kit. One thing they are doing is suing over notifying about identity-by-descent. The “non-obvious” reason for awarding the patent is apparently the notification.

Intellectual property is a joke. But it’s also big business.

This week on the podcast we talked about the grandmother hypothesis with Kristen Hawkes. I should have been more aggressive in jumping in to get her to clarify what “life history theory” was. Live and learn.

We are now at 20 podcasts. If you can, please subscribe with iTunes or Stitcher. Also rate us highly and leave positive views if you can! It looks like we’ll get to 100 in iTunes soon, at which point I’ll stop pestering, though we’re only at 6 reviews on Stichter.

Carl Zimmer’s podcast has been recorded already, but won’t be dropped until close to when She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is published. We’re also recording a podcast with Patrick Wyman of Tides of History this week. This should be “evergreen”, at least on the scale of a year, so expect that in June or later. It will be nice to have a historian on.

The next few weeks we’re going to go it alone, covering a few topics Spencer and I are both interested in. It’s a good change of pace. We’ve got some ideas for what we’re going to talk about in June too. I think it is most definitely important to follow-up on the Indo-Aryan podcast, which we actually recorded in July of 2017, though we didn’t drop it until 2018.

There was an interesting fiasco on Twitter recently where some semi-prominent people asserted that Andrew Sullivan was against gay marriage. This is really bizarre because Sullivan was a major proponent of the idea before it was ever mainstream, and for a period also got resistance from the more radical anti-bourgeois faction of the gay rights movement.

Anyway, the mistaken tweets occurred because Sullivan is transforming into a hate-figure on the far left, and a lot of people on Twitter are stupid and ignorant, so they just inferred facts from their theory that Sullivan is right-wing. Some of these people retracted the falsehood grudgingly. But as usual, you can see that retweets and likes are/were more evident on the original tweet.

The point is repeating all this is is how “knowledge” is created now. If you have a prominent Twitter account it’s trivial to inject falsehoods into the debate. I’ve seen people doing this pretty consciously several times (this is really common in anonymous/pseudo accounts).

At the Brown Pundits weblog, I put up a post on this strange Slate piece on how the 1990s TV show Friends is contributing to sexism and homophobia in India. Though ostensibly about India, and narrated by an immigrant from India, the piece is about a preoccupation within American culture in 2018.

A publication like Slate is going to get a lot of clicks if they post something about misogyny and homophobia in Friends, but how to make it novel? Pretend it’s actually about India! To me, this is to journalism what science fantasy is to science fiction. Even the editor of this piece must have known it was hilarious bullshit, but they were also aware that in 2018 this is what Slate readers want.

Societies and cultures in relative decline and stagnation tend to undergo a period of involution. Narcissism writ-large.

I also wrote a post on Brown Pundits on why India did not become mostly Muslim. Need to think a lot more on this. Not all the comments were dumb. I wish more people would know more things.

Reading the coalescent chapter in Molecular Population Genetics, and it’s amusing to observe that the coalscent’s big advantage over forward-simulations in terms of computational horsepower needed isn’t really that big of a deal today. Even a few years back this was a huge issue. This is like in phylogenetics where everyone runs Bayesian stuff, when 15 years ago people were having a hard time imaging max-likelihood!

While reading Molecular Population Genetics I keep hearing the author’s voice in my head. I think this has to do with the fact that I knew the author before I read his book. This didn’t happen when I read She Has Her Mother’s Laugh because I had read Carl Zimmer before I got to know Carl in person. At least that’s my theory (The 10,000 Year Explosion was all in Greg Cochran’s voice).

Reading too much about Rome. So Carthage Must Be Destroyed is in the stack.

A systematic assessment of ‘Axial Age’ proposals using global comparative historical evidence. The argument here is that the “Axial Age” wasn’t a singular time period, but a continous event that spanned thousands of years. I think this is probably right, though “ages” are conceptually useful mental bookkeeping. This is similar to the idea that age cohorts are a real thing, but generations are not.

The Infectious Enthusiasm of Breaking the Bee.

You know that classic Hart & Risley claim that poor kids are exposed to 30 million fewer words than middle class kids by age 3? Looks like it’s wildly inflated. https://t.co/U4KePPz0XJ

— Thad Domina (@ThadDomina) May 11, 2018

Detection of shared balancing selection in the absence of trans-species polymorphism.

Self domestication and the evolution of language.

I need to set aside a day to catch up on the South Asian Genotype Project (SAGP). Also, figure out which plugin is causing the 500 errors.

Longtime readers are well aware that A History of the Byzantine State and Society is one of my favorite books. To understand the Middle East right before the arrival of the Mongols and the emergence of the Crusader states, one has to understand the expansion of Byzantium in the early 11th century, and its subsequent regression in the late 11th and 12th centuries. In 2005 I actually did a 10 questions with the author, Warren Treadgold.

So I’m very excited to be reviewing his new book, The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education, for NRO.

Had a chance to read Matt Hahn’s Molecular Population Genetics. The con is that it’s an $80 book that’s 350 pages. This is not a replacement for Principles of Population Genetics or Introduction to Quantitative Genetics. Rather, as alluded to by the title there’s a lot of focus on molecular evolutionary and population genetics. Imagine a population genetics book written with an assumption that you know what a SNP-chip is and have access to genome-wide sequence data. In some ways, it’s similar to Rasmus Nielsen’s (and Slatkin) An Introduction to Population Genetics. But these books reflect the authors.

For example, if you look up “site frequency spectrum” in An Introduction to Population Genetics there are seven pages. In Molecular Population Genetics there is one page on this topic. Anyone familiar with the work of these researchers would totally expect this. If you are a pop-gen nerd, there’s really no debate. You need to get Molecular Population Genetics or steal it from a friend. But a bigger question is why I recommend seemingly esoteric books to my readers. I say seemingly because understanding population genetics in the generality makes a lot of the detailed more specifically interesting stuff much more comprehensible.

The readership of this weblog is small but self-selected. If you consider yourself an intellectual person and have some disposable income and leisure you should be developing yourself in various ways outside of the professional sense.  If you are reading this weblog you are likely to be the type of person who wants to understand things not just because one gets paid to understand things, but because understanding things is an end unto itself.

I am privileged to be paid to explore various topics related to certain intellectual interests (human population genomics), but I believe that something would be seriously wrong with me if I limited my inquiries to this narrow topic. Therefore I read a fair amount of history, and take an interest in topics like cognitive science and Biblical scholarship. Part of my attempt on this weblog to is to add population genetics to the list of interests of people who are professionally not engaged with the topic, whether they be in closely related fields (e.g., a theoretical ecologist) or in a totally different line of work (union organizer).

The Neutral Theory in Light of Natural Selection. This review is free. One of the great things about this is that it kind of revived a corner of science Twitter which had started to go into senescence (Patrick Phillips has been at the center of several of these discussions).

Related to our podcast topic from this week, Doc Edge and Graham Coop have the definitive formal take, How lucky was the genetic investigation in the Golden State Killer case? The TL;DR version is not that lucky. They show formally that with a database of ~1 million individuals with SNP-data it’s likely that you’ll get relative matches that might be useful. More precisely, a database of ~1 million means that there is a ~90% chance of at least one 3rd cousin match. There’s even a 25% chance of a 2nd cousin match! A database of ~5 million gives a 75% chance of a 2nd cousin match, and ~10 million gives a 90% chance of a 2nd cousin match. These are around the range of the databases of 23andMe and Ancestry right now.

As the authors say: “it’s a question of deciding the circumstances under which we as a society want these familial searches to be used.”

Tales of Human Migration, Admixture, and Selection in Africa.

The evolutionary history of human populations in Europe. Preprint by Iosif Lazaridis.

There are a certain number of traditional liberals with a libertarian bent who I’ve always admired. Nadine Strossen is one of those (Wendy Kaminer is another). Strossen is out with a new book, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Inalienable Rights). It strikes me this is conservative in the literal sense in that she is attempting to defend a late 20th-century liberalism which is now on the wane.

The Liberal Media Can Have Ideological Diversity Without Conservatives. Two sections jump out at me. First, “the social conservative’s view on fetal personhood is unfalsifiable — and does boast a significant constituency — but it doesn’t generally lend itself to novel or engaging debates.” The issue with abortion is not about debating, as much as it is important to not always put forward writers who implicitly assume that the pro-choice position is the only view that one might entertain. I’m skeptical of some of the leaps that pro-life writers make based on their political position…but then, I’m not pro-life. It’s important to at least know the views of other people.

Second, the author suggests that Left-wing socialists who believe that the people should control the means of production (as opposed to simply redistributive socialism as is the case in Scandinavia) should be given a fair hearing, though they observe “concentrating financial power in the state apparatus has often been an invitation to tyranny.” Yeah. That.

Pretty straightforward establishment liberals, such as Matt Yglesias, are starting to assert that publications like The Atlantic and The New York Times are equivalent to National Review, in their ideological valence (the argument being that they shouldn’t have to hire conservatives since they’re liberal publications). Conservative critics have long asserted this, but now liberals are agreeing.

Conservatives have lost the universities and the press. Both these institutions don’t even make a pretense at evenhandedness at this point. The broadly liberal center is eroding. I suspect that people like Nadine Strossen will be viewed in the future like Cato the Younger.

Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast, Mohenjo Daro. People don’t really know much.

Interviewing Carl Zimmer for the podcast this week. Taking suggestions for questions to ask him (we have a finite time so might not get it in….)

 

One of the strange things about getting old is that your friends start to become kind of a big deal. Matthew Hahn has a new book out, Molecular Population Genetics. If there is one single reason I keep blogging, it’s to get awareness of the field of population genetics to spread beyond the small circle who are “in the know.” I joked on Twitter that buying this textbook is like spending money to talk to Matt about pop-gen, and that’s surely worth it.

Another one for the stack!

Speaking of worth it, Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire is definitely worth a read. Not done, and I’m not sure it’s better than The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. Perhaps my issue is that exogenous shocks are to be expected in my view of the world. Though the details in The Fate of Rome are novel, the general thesis and framework were what I’d assumed were taken for granted.

What Happens When Geneticists Talk Sloppily About Race. I don’t think that David Reich was sloppy…though the op-ed was edited in a way that was confusing. That being said I’ve heard through the grapevine that some prominent human population geneticists may write a response to David’s op-ed, which is something I want to see. Part of me still thinks that these vigorous public discussions are important (another part of me just thinks that when Sulla or Marius take over all this old-fashioned fixation on truth will be irrelevant).

One thing stated in the piece above is that regular people have a Platonic model of race. This is true. But it is also a fact that geneticists have not done a good job of explaining to the educated public what population structure is, and why it’s not trivial or arbitrary. I know this from personal experience over 15 years interacting with people about genetics online (some of the funniest interactions are on Facebook where a person of professional class background/status “genetics-splains” me about how I don’t understand the extent [lack] of human genetic variation and how arbitrary population cluster identity is).

With The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia I obviously think we have the broad outlines of the peopling of South Asia in hand. There will be lots of detailed elaborations of how/what happened, but I think the big picture is nailed down.

That being said some of the objections remind me a lot of Creationist tendencies. Creationists often focus on weak points and hammer in on them over and over.

One of the weird things about Indian genetics is that a lot of people think new research will overturn Hindu nationalism. But I know several Hindu nationalists, and privately they tell me that most Hindu nationalists don’t care about these abstruse issues, and many of the more intellectual ones don’t have a major problem with the science.

GEDmatch, Ysearch and the Golden State Killer.

Anthropogenic habitat alteration leads to rapid loss of adaptive variation and restoration potential in wild salmon populations.

Bracketing phenotypic limits of mammalian hybridization.

A few people have asked about the podcast. We skipped a week, but we’ll be back. Taking some feedback in relation to various aspects of the show. A common issue seems to be that my voice is too quiet though Spencer’s is “just right.”

Again, if you use Stitcher or iTunes please remember to give us positive reviews and 5-stars!

If you have ideas for shows, we’re game.

Finished She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. To be honest I was pleasantly surprised that the narrative wasn’t overly fixated on the ‘perversions.’ Sometimes it’s hard to move past that.

I think different people will benefit from reading the book differently. If you are a layperson a serial reading from front to back is optimal. She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is a long book, so this will take a while. But you need to do this to get situated. If you are a geneticist, you may benefit from jumping around chapters, and sampling what people in other fields are doing. Additionally, some geneticists would actually benefit from reading the historical chapters.

Started reading The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. Yes, it’s very good. Will see if it’s better than The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization after I’ve finished.

Thanks for whoever reviewed the podcast I cohost on iTunes and Sticher. If you haven’t done so, please do so!

Appreciate the feedback so far.

Found out today that India Today posted my review of Who We Are a few weeks ago! Pretty funny I didn’t see it.

Meanwhile, The Genetic History of Indians: Are We What We Think We Are? It looks like Indian scientists are bending before reality: ““How do I say it? See, I am a nationalist,” Rai says over the phone. “People will be upset. But that’s how it is. All the studies are showing that people came here from elsewhere.”

A friend asked again “how do I learn population genetics?” My opinion has not changed in the 15 years I’ve become interested in the field, read Principles of Population Genetics. If you need a gentle introduction, Population Genetics: A Concise Guide is probably that. But I read Principles of Population Genetics in 2004 without any formal training in the field. It’s not that difficult if you put time into it.

Supervised machine learning reveals introgressed loci in the genomes of Drosophila simulans and D. sechellia. Gotta do it on flies first!

California, Coffee and Cancer: One of These Doesn’t Belong. The cancer warnings in California are treated as a joke by the population. Unfortunately, there are real carcinogens out there.

Genomic SEM Provides Insights into the Multivariate Genetic Architecture of Complex Traits.

Almost done with She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. To be honest I’m a little relieved that there wasn’t that much focus on the “perversions” of heredity. Lots of interesting stuff. This is definitely a book that scientists and lay people could benefit from.

Carl is a great writer so he makes rather abstruse concepts clear and engaging to nonspecialists. As for those of us who have our noses close to the ground, we sometimes lose the bigger perspective. There is a lot of interesting research that he surfaces in She Has Her Mother’s Laugh that I wasn’t very familiar with, though I had probably read about it or seen it in one of his columns (or Ed Yong’s).

Met a lot of cool people, and touched base with others who I knew ahead of time, at the AAPA 2018. Compared to ASHG or even SMBE the conference was very white. I guess that’s why there were all the diversity sessions?

I had a lot of discussions with Lee Berger about science on a broad philosophical level. Unfortunately, specialization is such that it can be hard to communicate across disciplines such as human genomics and paleoanthropology. But as Lee brings enough samples into the open to do some real statistics I think that will change how constrained to the elect paleoanthropological knowledge is.

Lee’s son introduced me to the concept of South African barbecue. I haven’t had any yet, but I’m curious about it.

Lee will be on this week’s episode of The Insight. Again, please subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play. The last episode with Stuart Ritchie was our most successful yet in terms of traffic. We’re suspecting that Lee’s episode will do quite well as well. People keep finding the podcast by chance. We really need reviews to get featured by iTunes!

Spencer and I will probably shift back to a two-person conversation next week. We should probably do an AMA again soon.

Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans? Very interesting piece, especially for those of us who have read science fiction. But my issue is straightforward: humans have scrambled biogeography so much in such a short amount of time. I think any other industrial species would have done the same. Even after they went extinct, the phylogeographic chaos they wrought would remain.

It seems very likely that all Australian marsupials descend from one South American ancestor species. The explosive emergence of very different placentals all across Australia simultaneously in the fossil record would be quite suspicious (or red deer descendants in New Zealand).

I spent some time with the people who were associated in some way with the Reich lab a fair amount during the AAPA meeting. I also talked to a few friends about what they thought about David’s op-ed and book. It’s no surprise that there are legitimate human population geneticists considering writing a response of some sort. It’s also no surprise that even critics of David within the population genetics community think that the Buzzfeed op-ed was so bad that it makes it harder for them say something, as the water has been nuddied.

In some ways the reaction has made one of David’s major points: population geneticists need to offer their unvarnished opinions, rather than cosigning people in other fields who mangle their findings.

Some people feel that David “threw me under the bus” in his now infamous chapter. I don’t see it that way.

As many of you know (if you subscribe to my total content feed you know) I have a few other blogs, one of them Brown Pundits. It actually receives substantial traffic from India now. It will be “interesting” to say the least.

A population genetic interpretation of GWAS findings for human quantitative traits. Stuck in the weeds of ancient DNA these past few years I haven’t been paying attention to the storm of GWAS and PRS approaching.

Signatures of negative selection in the genetic architecture of human complex traits.

About ~2/3 of the way through She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. It’s what you’d expect from a Carl Zimmer book, threading history with rock-solid attention to science. So far he’s actually been a really good, if popular, history of science. I say popular not pejoratively, but because the thematic and chronological structure isn’t academic, but hinges on more personal stories, whether it Carl’s own family, or people, famous and not so famous, with genetic issues that passed on down through the generations.

The book isn’t out yet, but you can pre-order of course. The current plan is to get Carl on The Insight (Stitcher, Google Play and web).

Speaking of which, it’s doing really well right now.

Because I’ve been pestering you, some of you have left nice feedback for us, which is pretty important over the long-term. I’ll probably keep on this until we reach 100 reviews on iTunes.

Last week’s episode on the topic Jewish genetics is the biggest one so far in terms of single-week downloads, and this week’s conversation with Stuart Ritchie should also pull in some interest. We talk a fair amount about Stuart’s book, Intelligence: All That Matters, and depressing topics such as the decline in fluid intelligence over a lifetime.

We’ll probably be revisiting intelligence and genetics with a future guest soon, but in the short-term we’ll pivot toward paleoanthropology since the AAPA is going on this week. I don’t know anything about bones so I’m going to mostly check out the pop-gen sessions, and then ask John Hawks for a core-dump at some point near the end of the week for the rest.

Because most people are ignorant heathens the “read the supplements” t-shirt did not sell well. But I got one for myself (we don’t comp ourselves, so I paid for it fair and square!).

Many rely on Twitter and Google Scholar, but I want to remind people of Pubchase and SciReader. They’re still useful to finding things right outside of your core zone of interest.

I mentioned the book The Invention of Humanity before. I was reading it before switching to Carl’s book (I want to prep for a podcast and I’m also going to give the book to someone else), and it’s OK, but it has the same problem as Inventing the Individual: intellectual history which engages in a sequence of inferences and asserts their validity by fiat without any argument.

There’s a lot to learn from books like this, but that mostly involves facts, rather than arguments (whose premises and method I generally find unpersuasive).

Randall Parker said he liked The Fate of Rome better than The Fall of Rome. On that recommendation, I got The Fate of Rome, as  The Fall of Rome is arguably my favorite history book of all time.

We’ll see.

Ezra Klein and Sam Harris had a podcast debate. I didn’t learn much new in this debate aside from how the two view each other (lots of commentary on the comments of the other).

But one thing I have to say is that Sam Harris’ contention that America’s racial caste system was not historically rooted in a biological conception of racial hierarchy is a point I agree with. By the late 19th and early 20th century, the public rhetoric was based on such an understanding, but that understanding developed organically over time with the emergence of taxonomy and then evolutionary biology in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Its origins are far more ancient, and arguably primal.

Though Daniel Walker Howe’s magisterial What Hath God Wrought is not about race fundamentally, it is a useful work to try and get a sense of how our modern conceptions of the white supremacist republic may mislead us in terms of how it was initially conceived (as on many things, white nationalists and people on the extreme cultural Left agree on many things about early America, where I think they are being anachronistic).

I think most readers now get a sense I am rather pessimistic about concepts such as public reason and getting the populace on board with ideas through persuasion. But, self-styled intellectual elites should still try to cultivate less stupidity and ignorance than is the case today. We’re led too often in the public arena by fools who can’t do their own data analysis, haven’t read the history books they were assigned in college, and whose goal is to seem smart enough to trick the masses than actually impress themselves with what they’ve achieved. Though I guess for most people impressing oneself is about the bank account.

The Rakhigarhi publication is supposed to be here within a month or so. But that’s what I was told a month or so ago. At this point I don’t expect to be surprised. We need to think about archaeology, linguistics, and mythology.

For your amusement:

speak slowly i’m just an averageish bear pic.twitter.com/IVs7dhi4WL

— Razib Khan (@razibkhan) April 9, 2018

Genetic influence on social outcomes during and after the Soviet era in Estonia. Heritability increases with meritocracy. That’s what you’d expect.

Slope or correlation, not variance explained, allow estimation of heritability.

Viktor Orban: Hungary PM re-elected for third term. 70% of the vote went to right-wing nationalist parties. Europe’s mainstream elite shouldn’t blame the people, they’re the ones who are promoting the worship of democracy as the only legitimate form of government. They need to blame themselves.

Comparison of phasing strategies for whole human genomes. Not a big surprise if you’ve tried this, but if you haven’t, a must read.

It looks like modal extra-pair paternity rates in human populations are in the range of 1-2%. Sorry aspiring cuckolds!

DNA tests for IQ are coming, but it might not be smart to take one. I talked to Antonio about this piece a few times. I didn’t have much to say with any insight. These tests aren’t ready for primetime because the prediction is pretty weak/worthless.

With a lot of this stuff realized phenotype is what matters. If I took a test and it said my predicted IQ was 90, or if I took an IQ test and it said that I was in the 15th percentile from the bottom, I wouldn’t reconsider whether I’m dumber than most people seem to think I am. I’d think that the tests were dumb.

Like genetic screening more generally this sort of stuff will become more important for newborns in the future because you don’t have a realized phenotype. Siblings different in intelligence. Some of this is random, but some of it surely dependent on genes. If children have different talents or competencies I suspect many parents will want to know as early as possible (my two oldest are young, but it’s already pretty obvious that my son is much stronger on visuospatial skills while my daughter has a better ability to abstract in a general sense).

Ancient DNA tracks the mainland extinction and island survival of the Tasmanian devil. The main issue I have with all these studies is the importance they put on climate. Climate changes. Often. That’s usually not a sufficient condition for extinction. People and the animals they bring around are.

I guessed that the supplements shirt would not be popular, judging by how many questions I get that would be answered by reading the supplementary text!

That being said, I bought one for myself. Of course, I would! (I’m going to post a photo of me wearing it when I get)

A Financial Times story about the Kalash. I filled in some dumb surveys and it allowed me to read for free. It’s a pretty good story.

When Gmail Launched On April 1, 2004, People Thought It Was A Joke. I’m starting to worry about our reliance on platforms. And that includes Gmail.

How to Talk About ‘Race’ and Genetics. David Reich responds in The New York Times.

There has been a lot of talk on “science Twitter” about the David Reich situation. Some of it in public. And some of it in private DMs. I am heartened personally to see that most people are defending him because he does not deserve the patronizing abuse that’s being directed at him.

I am not much in touch with David, though we have met in person, and exchanged a few emails about his work. It’s not breaking any confidence for me to say that he did not write Who We Are and How We Got Here to become famous. The book will sell well, but it’s not written in a manner that will make him rich. In any case, among his peers, he is already quite famous after all. As he noted in the introduction to Who We Are and How We Got Here he wrote it to speak to those outside of the community of human population geneticists who read and write scientific papers.

Since David has such a high-status people within the community are very careful about what they say about him if they have strong criticisms. Not only is it hard to argue that he’s ignorant of the science (after all, he is one of the major producers of science!), but he’s a powerful figure embedded in a powerful institution.

This is why when you examine the list of 60+ signatories to this op-ed in Buzzfeed, How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics, there are very few working geneticists on the list. I heard a rumor that there were actually a few genetic anthropologists willing to sign, but who didn’t agree with the final text and withdrew. And good for them, because this op-ed is a confused mess.

But, to be frank it’s entirely to be expected from a certain type of scholarship. Like many, I have expressed some concern and annoyance that geneticists engage in imperialism without consulting historians and archaeologists. But these are real disciplines with real facts and theories, whether those facts are undermined, and the theories shown to be false. There is something real to be grasped at. The Buzzfeed op-ed, in contrast, is by turns patronizing, incoherent, or just false.

The conversation has been bracing, but I’m not sure it’s moving toward any synthesis.

Complex traits are probably subject to Kurzweil’s The Law of Accelerating Returns. Stuff is moves slow, then faster, and then we’re slammed against a new world before we can adjust.

Here’s a poll I created:

“I’m a geneticist and in relation to the Reich op-ed I think…”

— Razib Khan (@razibkhan) April 2, 2018

Detecting signatures of positive selection along defined branches of a population tree using LSD. The day will come when ancient DNA papers will start to slow down in their rate of release and I’ll have to catch up on the selection literature (though to be fair, there’s only so many real targets of selection we’ll pick up).

Comparison of Genotypic and Phenotypic Correlations: Cheverud’s Conjecture in Humans.

Back to reading Enlightenment Now.

Excited that the AAPA meeting is happening in a few weeks in Austin. Will be meeting up with a few people.