Some people have asked me what I think about Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. I haven’t finished it, but now I understand why it is one of the most assigned books for undergraduates: it’s concise yet facile superficiality would appeal to a know-it-all twenty year old. What’s more disturbing, though I guess not surprising, is that Imagined Communities communities is a book that I’ve seen name-checked for years by various public intellectuals. Did they read the book?

It’s not that the book is incredibly wrong. It’s just that there’s not that much there in my opinion.

Been enjoying sampling the Philosophize This! podcast.

Pleistocene North African genomes link Near Eastern and sub-Saharan African human populations. Haven’t blogged it because I haven’t read the supplements.

Relationship between Deleterious Variation, Genomic Autozygosity, and Disease Risk: Insights from The 1000 Genomes Project.

Whole-Genome-Sequence-Based Haplotypes Reveal Single Origin of the Sickle Allele during the Holocene Wet Phase. This is big.

‘Serial Bomber’ Is Suspected in Explosions That Have Put Austin on Edge. Twitter was useless yesterday as most of the people seemed more enraged at the media for not laying the blame on white supremacists or Muslim radicals, as opposed to those getting killed or injured.

Cohort-wide deep whole genome sequencing and the allelic architecture of complex traits.

Feeling like I should reread The End of History and the Last Man. Feels like history has started again….

Some people ask me about how I read fast. Part of the answer is that I read a lot in a specific area at the same time. Also, you can read fast if you know a lot about a topic. For example, a substantial portion of Who We Are and How We Got Here involves going over four and three population tests. I know what those are, so I read those sections quickly.

Finally going to hunker down and figure out which plugin is causing the 500 error on this website.

Just a reminder, please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Sticher and review it (positively). I’ll stop with the flogging when people no longer tell me “Oh, I didn’t know you had a podcast!”

This week we’ll I’m interviewing Milford Wolpoff (that is, what’s going live).

I finally met my old friend Ramez Naam in the flesh. Ramez’s publisher sent me his book More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement in 2005. One thing led to another, and somehow he’s guest blogging on Gene Expression!

CRISPR as we know it did not exist in 2005. Things have really changed since then, and for the better, at least from the perspective of genetic engineering. It’s as if some of the stuff in More Than Human is coming to life.

I also recommend his book The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet.

Ramez is more optimistic about the future than I am, though cautiously so. I hope he’s right, and I’m wrong. I fear he’s not.

My concern is not with technological innovation. That will happen. It’s with maintaining social stability due to the immiseration of what was the middle class in developed societies. Also, the bourgeois version of the New Class seems to lack empathy toward the future lumpen….

SEC Charges Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes With ‘Massive Fraud’. “Fake it ’till you make it” will keep happening if there are no follow-up criminal charges. Holmes may not have gotten away the con, but she was a paper billionaire for a while and funded R & D with the cash that they raised on lies. One moral some are going to take away is that she took a big risk and failed, but it was one that perhaps needed to be taken.

Adaptive landscape of protein variation in human exomes.

Genetic dissection of assortative mating behavior.

Conor Lamb Wins Pennsylvania House Seat, Giving Democrats a Map for Trump Country. I’m pretty bullish on a Democrat takeover of the house. The country will swing back. That being said, I’m also bullish on the idea that the Democrats are their own best enemy, and divisions and lack of coherency in their plan going forward will mean they won’t be able to capitalize on their electoral windfalls over the next few years.

This week’s episode of The Insight is up, 23andMe, the FDA, and Our Genomic Future. We have some potential guests lined up. One of whom is Stuart Ritchie, author of Intelligence: All That Matters.

Please subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher, and leave us 5-star reviews! 

St. Patrick’s Day is coming up. I’ll be avoiding drunk people on the streets of Austin. But I also want to point out that my “side-hustle” DNA Geeks has an M222 t-shirt available. In case you don’t know, that’s the legendary Niall of the Nine Hostages’ possible haplogroup (a sublineage of R1b). About 10% of Irish men are M222.

‘Tomb Raider’: Fans Slam Criticism of Alicia Vikander’s Body. There are two points that I want to make. First, at 5’5 inches, Alicia Vikande is of a very normal height (Angelina Jolie was two inches taller). She’s not physically imposing, and she has a very narrow waist as well. Her figure is “boyish.” Second, since the 1990s there has been a shift in male action stars toward being more shredded/athletic as opposed to jacked-up and exaggerated in their physicality. This is a very different Lara Croft for a very different time.

I decided to check out the new public library today. Saw the book The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Culture Differences in World History. I hate the overuse of the term “invention” in book titles, but when I noted the beginning covered China, I got it. Too often books that are Eurocentric turn out to be more data than narrow/inference, and they rig the data ahead of time to support their thesis (see, Inventing the Individual).

I also got Constructing the World (a David Chalmers book), The Bible and Asia: From the Pre-Christian Era to the Postcolonial Age, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece, The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. That’s ranked in order of likelihood that I’ll get through them.

Also, Philip Jenkins has a new book, Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That Made Our Modern Religious World. Jenkins is a great scholar, I admire his work a lot. But I think I’m going to take a break from religious history, since I know a fair amount about the topic.

Polygenic scores and tea drinking.

Exposing flaws in S-LDSC; reply to Gazal et al.. Working your way through this literature is often pretty useful, so start at this commentary.

National Geographic has a special on race and what not. One piece being shared is kind of interesting, These Twins, One Black and One White, Will Make You Rethink Race. Here’s an important quote:

In genetic terms, skin color “is not a binary trait” with only two possibilities, Martin notes. “It’s a quantitative trait, and everyone has some gradient on this spectrum.”

Historically, when humans have drawn lines of identity—separating Us from Them—they’ve often relied on skin color as a proxy for race. But the 21st-century understanding of human genetics tells us that the whole idea of race is a human invention.

If you’ve read this blog you know I’ve blogged about “black and white twins” for over ten years. Also, I think a lot of the debunkings of race are pretty facile. But that’s not what I want to talk about. Rather, one of the things that are unmasked unwittingly in pieces such as this is how deeply Eurocentric these conversations are. It’s as if public intellectuals and journalists that write on this topic either don’t know any non-white families or they pretend that they don’t. The “humans” and “Us” implicitly points to white European systems of racial classification (e.g., East Asians relied on skin color somewhat, but since they are not much darker than white Europeans, they also included hair color, to distinguish the Dutch from the Portuguese, and large noses and body hair, to distinguish from themselves).

Twins with different skin tones are striking. But almost any South Asian, black American, or Latino, or Southeast Asian, or even East Asian, can tell you that there is a wide range of pigmentation within many families. Basically, unless you are in a homogeneous European social environment, where most everyone has very light skin on a global scale, you will see the variation of pigmentation within families. Both my parents have large sibling cohorts, and in both of them there are cases where the difference in complexion between siblings is in the same range as the two fraternal twins highlighted in the piece.

Of course, journalists who work for National Geographic or The New York Times know people of varied ethnicities and probably see that there is pigmentation variation within those families. They just pretend as if they don’t for these sorts of pieces which debunk race, and the readers pretend they don’t know this information as well as they take it in in a self-satisfied manner and nod sagely.

I haven’t had much time to read Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. But those who say it’s quite like The Better Angels of Our Nature seem correct from how how far I’ve gotten.

My timeline has been swarming with debunkings of Enlightenment Now from all ideological angles. The best responses to these can usually be found in Saloni’s timeline (from her), who is “Pinker’s bulldog.”

Ex-Muslim TV‘s Twitter account is irritated that some of its stuff is now labeled “sensitive material.” The day before this came up I noted that one of my posts that Jerry Coyne retweeted about Islam and apostasy was also labeled “sensitive material.”

Basically if Muslims find it offensive, it might be subject to scrutiny from Twitter. This may or may not be defensible from Twitter’s perspective in a business sense, or ethically. But it’s just the reality we have to deal with, though I would like to know which school of Islamic jurisprudence Twitter relies on to gauge sensitivity and offense. I suspect it will be the Hanafi fiqh due to its liberal utilization of qiyas, which allow’s Del Harvey’s minions more free play.

The nation-state is dying. What will come out of its ashes? I suspect empire by another name….

Eden in the East is a weird book. Written in the late 1990s before modern-day genomics, its central thesis about the origin of Southeast Asian people in Pleistocene Sundaland seems likely to be wrong (at least most of their ancestry). But the author, a polymath medical doctor, marshals an enormous amount of archaeological and textual data supporting old ideas of cultural diffusionism, much of it plausible.

Despite my skepticism of the general theses promoted, reading Eden in the East is useful insofar as you need data and interpretive sieve for the swell of ancient DNA.

The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point is eliminating many majors and adding new ones. This is eliciting a lot of outrage on Twitter.

Public universities are funded by the public. If they aren’t fulfilling the public role then things will have to change. Unlike many people, I don’t shed too many tears about the elimination of some of these majors because most graduates of them are stupid and uninformed (some of them actually have a less accurate view of the world coming out than before they arrived at university).

Here’s the breakdown:

Expanding programs	Change into majors	Discontinuing the programs
Chemical Engineering	Aquaculture/Aquaponics	American Studies
Computer Information Systems	Captive Wildlife	Art – Graphic Design will continue as a distinct major
Conservation Law Enforcement	Ecosystem Design and Remediation	English – English for teacher certification will continue
Finance	Environmental Engineering	French
Fire Science	Geographic Information Science	Geography
Graphic Design	Master of Business Administration	Geoscience
Management	Master of Natural Resources	German
Marketing	Doctor of Physical Therapy	History – Social Science for teacher certification will continue
		Music Literature
		Philosophy
		Political Science
		Sociology — Social Work major will continue
		Spanish

 

Let’s set aside the fact that some of these programs, such as sociology and American Studies, are often de facto political action outfits. As someone who has talked to people who have history degrees from universities of various prestige and stringency, institutions of higher learning are doing a really shitty job inculcating knowledge into these kids. Or love of the topic. Also, their critical faculties aren’t the best. Too much critical theory, not enough critical thinking. Recitation doesn’t cut it.

Aquaculture and aquaponics is a vocational program of study which isn’t sexy, but at least it aims to impart skills. That’s what a lot of these kids need.

So my buddies at DNA Geeks unveiled a new t-shirt, Pipe(tte) Dream.

I kind of thought it was funny, but it turns out there’s some demand for stuff like this. Is bench biology still a thing? I guess so…. Anyway, if you are interested, click on through!

Evolutionary inferences about quantitative traits are affected by underlying genealogical discordance. This is an important preprint. Read it.

The Silicon Valley elite’s latest status symbol: Chickens. Some of the people caught up in this are quite self-aware: Citroen’s 19-year-old son, Luca, who grew up around the family business, puts it this way: “Being able to say you have chickens says, ‘I have a back yard,’ and having a back yard says, ‘I have space.’ And having space means you have money, especially when it comes to Silicon Valley real estate.” Chickens are a “hard to fake” signal of wealth. Yeah (the Romans had sacred chickens).

My main hope is that some of these rich Silicon Valley hobby-farmers pick up a copy of Introduction to Quantitative Genetics. It would do them some good (and perhaps the world?).

Do any readers have a review copy of She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity? It’s Carl Zimmer’s new book and the publisher is out of galleys.

Speaking of reviews, I’ll be writing one up for Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past for a publication most of you have heard of. Have to put the “writer hat” back on for a bit. Between my job, my intellectual interests, and family, I haven’t put much effort into that.

You probably know that Antifa went after Christina Sommers:

Diversity Dean at Lewis & Clark was present.She approached podium in middle of my talk & asked me to wrap up my speech & take questions. I was never able to develop my argument.Shouldn’t the dean have insisted protesters allow me to finish, rather than cut speech short? https://t.co/1d43iDeo7P

— Christina Sommers (@CHSommers) March 5, 2018

To be honest these forays by centrists (Sommers is a registered Democrat with libertarian leanings, similar to Steven Pinker) into the academy are starting to remind me of those ridiculous “debates” that Jews had to have with professional anti-Jews (mostly apostates) in the courts of medieval European monarchs. There were the outward forms of debate, but everyone knew what it was about (since Sommers and Pinker are from Jewish backgrounds perhaps that’s apposite).

Similarly, when the campus Left is against some speaker many people roll their eyes, and the administration makes the usual noises, but you know that the protestors are going to get a slap on the hands no matter how obnoxious or aggressive they are. For most academics, for various reasons, there are no enemies on the Left. Communists and Communist sympathizers like Angela Davis can be fulsomely praised with no worries about reputation, but those academics who think Sommers or Pinker are making reasonable points have to furtively communicate on secret direct message groups.

That’s where we are.

I now understand why Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities has been assigned to so many undergraduates: it’s a short and simple book. It’s depressing but unsurprising that it could be so influential. More on that later.

The criticisms that Enlightenment Now doesn’t really delve into the intellectual archaeology of the Enlightenment are spot on. But this seems a case where the title is a bit off, but the text itself is solid. I have seen on Twitter quotes about how Pinker has apologia for the Tuskegee experiment. My prior at this point about these sorts of invidious accusations is that they’re lies. For a variety of reasons, people lie about Steven Pinker. That’s sad, but we live in a world where liars prosper, so it shouldn’t be surprising.

My podcast with Spencer, The Insight, has been pretty successful so far. I just submitted it to a bunch of podcast directories this weekend to cover bases. Our goal is to get highlighted by iTunes, so if you haven’t, subscribe and leave a good review! (also, there are only three reviews on Stitcher so far)

We interviewed Chris Stringer a few weeks ago. This week we’re trying to get Milford Wolpoff recorded (to be posted next week). We have some ideas about guests we might have on. Currently, we want to mix personal genomics/biotech, genetics, and paleoanthropology. I think I want to mix in some straight history at some point, since so much ancient DNA is starting to percolate into that field.

Retweets Are Trash. Basically, the argument is that if you get rid of RTs some of the toxic effects of Twitter are dampened. Skeptical, but hopeful.

How Twitter Lost The Internet War. The most important part is the assertion that Twitter has a lot of tech-debt that it hasn’t retired or discharged, and that’s why it hasn’t been able to solve its troll problem in a non-manual manner. I have a hard time crediting this. But perhaps that’s how it is?

Turkey Is Turning Into the Next Pakistan. Being totally honest, it’s hard for me to believe that the media hasn’t been underplaying this story. Back when ISIS was a thing, Turkey was turning a blind eye to thousands of foreign fighters that were streaming into Syria. Even if Turkey isn’t pro-Islamist (and it kind of is), they are clearly backing Sunni Islamists who will impose a nasty majoritarianism if they ever win. Not that the anarcho-communist Kurds we’re backing would be any better in the long run.

Ultimately in Syria, I can’t begrudge ethnoreligious minorities for siding with the Assad regime against the rebels. And, I can’t begrudge the Sunni population their reliance on militants who are more fierce and principled in defending them and their interests against the government. But we’ve been through Iraq twice. Our Saudi ally has birthed monsters over the past generation. We turned a blind eye when our ally of convenience in the 1980s, Iraq, engaged in gas attacks against Iran and the Kurds.

We need to learn, and just stop. Stop!

On the lookout for Kindle deals in books. Here’s what I got recently:

* The Rise and Fall of Communism.
* Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization
* The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.

I have a lot of books on Communism that I need to read!

Interesting paper, Understanding the factors that shape patterns of nucleotide diversity in the house mouse genome.

The 500 errors on this site are due to a plugin and some of the issues with porting this blog over a few months ago. I need to allocate a day to figure this out, but I’ll do it. The same issues with the South Asian Genotype Project. I will update it. But I need to have four or five uninterrupted hours, and that’s just hard to come by.

SXSW should be interesting this week. As per usual I’ll avoid most of the festivities.

Reading Enlightenment Now. Seems fine enough. Will say more when I get done.

I will say it’s strange to see how many people really hate the book (presumably without reading it?) and hate Steven Pinker. And curiously, it’s a pretty broad and ecumenical hate, from the respectable Left to the respectable Right. There is also more measured criticism on the merits from academics.

Land of Promise, by Michael Lind, is a book I’ve mentioned several times. It is broadly within the mainstream “big government Left.” But, I don’t think I’ve observed that it ended on a curious note. It used the term “chain migration” and argued for a shift toward skilled migration. Lind also asserts that low skill immigration pushes down wages of low skill Americans.

Land of Promise came out in 2012. The 2008 financial crisis looms large. But we’ve moved a lot when it comes to immigration even since then… Not sure if the editors would let Lind leave that section in if he was writing today because it’s pretty much consonant with Donald Trump’s positions.

The Inside Story Of How An Ivy League Food Scientist Turned Shoddy Data Into Viral Studies. Another story from Buzzfeed on the Wansink story. Some assertions:

* Brian Wansink is a “good person” by normal definitions.

* His ultimate aim as a scholar is something most people would agree with. That is, he wants people to eat healthier.

* Any single aspect of his behavior in this article, p-hacking, recycling papers to lower ranked journals, sloppiness, and trying to get the media to pay attention to his research, is not that exceptional. It’s the magnitude and synergistic complementation.

* There are serious issues with the incentives for academics today, whether it be within the field (quantity of publications as opposed to quality), and the media (publish stuff that the media wants to believe).

The Wansink affair is a really great illustration of the symptom. But the structural problems are still there.

Reading a bit of the The Classical World: The Foundations of the West and the Enduring Legacy of Antiquity. But really I think perhaps Robin Lane Fox’s The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian does it better. But we’ll see.

Picked up Stephen Oppenheimer’s Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia. The thesis seems kind of crazy, but I’m curious and doing some research for a future podcast.

Tania Joya did an interview, ISIS Ex-Wife Speaks to the Secular Jihadists.

Tania gets a lot of space in Graeme Wood’s The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State, but she’s apparently writing her own book. I’m pretty curious, because Tania and I have a lot in common, but are also different in many ways. She grew up in a British Bangladeshi household, and one of the major things she mentions in the interview is how oppressively capricious and controlling her parents were. To be honest I related to this…but as a male, I’m sure my experience was much milder. Additionally, British Muslim communities are isolated and regressive in a way that American Muslim communities never are (in fact, outside of a few places like Hamtramck, Michigan, there aren’t American Muslim communities as such). That also comes through in what Tania says.

Spencer wrote a blog post today which is worth checking out, R.I.P. Great Leap Forward, which reflects his own historical progression and understanding on this topic. Our podcast with Chris Stringer should be up Wednesday night (so subscribe), and we touched on this somewhat (it was recorded before the paper landed, though Chris already knew about it). We’ll be talking to Milford Wolpoff this week, so we’ll see what he thinks.

One thing I want to mention offhand. Back in the 2000s, I had some online exchanges with “Mencius Moldbug”. They weren’t exactly hostile, but ultimately I dismissed him because he got a lot of details wrong. And, to be honest, I was kind of annoyed by his stupid cultists who would leave comments. Moldbug himself was and is a smart guy, but some of his acolytes were not.

In 2018 I do have to say that I think that though Moldbug was wrong on a lot of details, and still is, he had insight into something more general which I lacked. My deep pessimism about bourgeois liberal democratic civilization and the state of intellectual culture draws from the same well that he drew from, though I disagree on a lot of the details to this day (I also now am much more open to radical Leftist critiques as well).

I bring this up partly because one of the things that convinced me to ignore Moldbug was his rejection of data which conflicted with his priors. For about 10 years it has been rather obvious to me looking at the literature and my own data analysis that most ancestry in Southern Italy and Sicily does not derive from migration from the east which dates to Roman antiquity.

The blogger at Eurogenes has posted the result from a Sicilian Bell Beaker individual. You can see that modern Sicilians are shifted away from the Bell Beaker Sicilian, who is more skewed toward the EEF cluster. But it’s pretty obvious that the shift has not been predominant. Modern Sicilians tend to have some ancestry which is certainly North African, and perhaps Greek. And the Sub-Saharan African in some individuals, which probably arrived during the Islamic period, is hard to miss. But most of their ancestry seems to date to before the Roman period.

And Sicily is the “best case” for predominant replacement in Italy.

DNAGeeks is now selling a Neanderthal shirt which honors their artistic abilities.

I put a poll up on Twitter asking about the species status of Neanderthals. I am a lumper, so I’m between two and three.

It’s kind of weird that people are explaining that there are “species concepts” to me in the comments. I thought answer 3 makes it pretty clear I’m aware of that.

I watched Black Panther. I liked it. It looks like it will make a lot of money. I wouldn’t be surprised if it results in copy-cat films. They probably won’t make a lot of money because they won’t be good films, and then Hollywood will go back to doing what it always did.

Also, I found out that there’s another Mission Impossible film. Tom Cruise is the new Dick Clark of our era.

Apparently, there isn’t a character for the word “problematic.” That’s good.

But I’m reading Judith Butler’s Gender Troubles soon. You might find that strange, but I’ve read Christian and Muslim apologetis too.

I just found out that @insitome has a weekly podcast about human genetic history: https://t.co/yzNY3dyVmb. I just listened to the one with @razibkhan and @spwells, on what changed since the publication of Journey of Man and now I’m looking forward to listening to the others!

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) February 11, 2018

The podcast that Spencer Wells and I are doing, The Insight, now has got eight episodes up. It’s nice that people are stumbling upon it now. Additionally, we’re pretty satisfied with the uptake. So far. To break out of our “core” audience we need more people to know about us.

First, please subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher or Google Play. Second, mention the podcast on social media. Tell your friends. Third, we have the next two or three podcasts planned, we’re still taking suggestions for ideas and possible guests (so far we’ve had John Hawks and Joe Pickrell on).

I now have Amazon Associates for Canada and the UK. The links to US Amazon items I post on this page should now change depending on your IP.

Cheddar Man changes the way we think about our ancestors. This is a pretty good article. But a few points. First, anyone who followed the literature would have predicted that Cheddar Man would contribute ~10% of the genomes to modern Britons and that he would lack alleles for light skin, but have them for blue eyes. I can’t believe any of the researchers were shocked in light of the La Brana etc. results. Second, we’re not extremely confident that he had very dark skin after the past few years when it’s clear pigmentation genetics involves more than just a few major loci. Seeing as how selection methods have detected lots of sweeps for skin lightening alleles over the last 5,000 years in Northern Europe, it seems implausible that they were as light as modern Northern Europeans, but not necessarily dark.

Spencer and I will probably an episode of The Insight on Cheddar Man after the documentary is out on the 18th (and the paper, probably in Nature).

No, it shouldn’t be. It is un-Islamic, misogynist, cruel, and anti-human. https://t.co/s2WIN0AeKq

— Mustafa Akyol (@AkyolinEnglish) February 11, 2018

I’ve blogged on female circumcision/FGM before. There are variations of opinion within Islam on this practice. It is mandatory, meritorious, or there is no comment. Muslims from areas where this is not practiced, such as South Asia or the Maghreb, naturally assume that this is a “cultural practice” that has nothing to do with Islam.

This is simply false. The Shafi school of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence considers female circumcision obligatory, for example. The complicated issue is that a) not all women subject to female circumcision/FGM are Muslim, for instance, in Africa, including Egyptian Copts b) not all Muslims are subject to the practice, obviously. These facts allow all sorts of confusions and obfuscations to emerge.

But the bigger issue is that if you are not Muslim it is not really coherent to say that something is a “cultural” practice as opposed to a “religious” one. Religion is part of the culture, and to a great extent on the reflective conscious scale the defining element of culture. Muslims disagree as to the religious acceptability of many practices. Those disagreements are cultural because Islam is cultural.

Land of Promise is a book I’ve mentioned many times. It’s one whose premises rub me the wrong way: the vigorous mixing of state fiat with the market. I’m not a fan of “industrial policy.” And yet I read the book because Michael Lind, the author, knows his history, and he’s honest about it.

I do think on some level I’m rethinking my commitment to the free market as opposed to institutions, and the short-term benefits of market efficiency set against the long-term advantages of social stability. That’s probably part of a general trend toward conservatism away from libertarianism.

Let’s Ban Porn. Don’t laugh. It took some boldness for The New York Times to publish something as laugh-out-loud implausible. But in the end, I think porn is the symptom. Really we as a culture don’t agree on what sex is supposed to be about. Without that agreement, porn is a sideshow.

Also, the proliferation of porn in the last 20 years hasn’t led to the explosion of sex crimes that critics on the Left and Right would have predicted.

Some of you may wonder about DNA Geeks. What’s the deal? Well, I can tell you that we are building a nice brand, and periodically there are traffic spikes. And the microscope is killing it.

The main sadness for me is that the ratio of R1b to R1a t-shirts sold is like 20:1. But I guess it’s quality over quantity?

While I was taking a Twitter break I got a few DMs about the latest controversy about hours worked by academics:

The stupidest thing on science twitter is how crazy and nasty people get over the idea that you have to work hard in science to succeed. Everybody knows you have to work hard and long to succeed, and yet everyone is willing to outright lie about the truth, lest you be publicly destroyed.

It’s pretty clear some people work fewer hours than other people and do fine. It’s also clear that other people have higher sweet spots in terms of return-on-time-worked. The problem is when people presume there’s a one-size-fits-all formula. I think it would be best if people reacted with a little more charity to those who extrapolate from what’s worked for them.

One of the things that reading Land of Promise has prompted in me is the need to read Matt Stoller’s book, when it comes out. Land of Liberty in many ways was a historical foil of Stoller’s article, How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul.

And yet both exhibit an intellectual honesty which I generally find lacking in the modern pundit class, agree or disagree.

Steven Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, is now being published a few weeks earlier. Apparently this now one of Bill Gates’ favorite books.

I’m a big fan of Steven Pinker. But I’ve become much more pessimistic than him over the past few years. Here’s hoping that Enlightenment Now turns that around.

DNA Geeks has a total site redesign! Check it out.

I haven’t been saying this on the podcast yet, but you should be subscribing to it on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play, and review and rate it. Spencer and I have a certain audience already, and we’d like to expand it.

This has probably always been so, but I’m really getting tired by the emergence of different verbal ticks in various socio-political subcultures. For example, when liberals say “my dude” -“bros”, it’s dismissal-by-identity. Both NRx, and what is now called the Altright, also have their own subculture languages, which makes understanding what they’re trying to say hard for outsiders. A feature or a bug?

Taking a Twitter break for a week.

For various reasons we focus Classical Greece and Rome, but neglect the Hellenistic period, with the exception of the biography of Alexander. If you want to read something besides Alexander to Actium, check Dividing the Spoils.

A heads up, this week on The Insight we’ll be talking to Joe Pickrell of Gencove. The main topic will be DNA and ancestry.

Is the United States the new Saudi Arabia? This stuff is crazy if you read books about “Peak Oil” in the 2000s. Also, I really don’t ever want to hear about this stuff from random guys who read these books and thought they had all the answers ever again.

DNA Geeks is now gearing toward more general STEM and items for children. The 100x LED Microscope for Mobile Devices has been quite popular, and shipping is right now free. Also, we have European vendors for our t-shirts, so shipping is cheaper and faster.

Following many liberals on Twitter has confirmed my right-wing identity, though modified by policy beliefs. In particular, far Left people, such as Matt Stoller, seem to make coherent criticisms of capitalism and what it has wrought. Criticisms which I don’t always have a good answer for.

In contrast, moderate liberals, with their mild platitudes and thin policies are not persuasive, but their adherence to sex/race identity politics and smearing of all those to the Right of them as white supremacists means that it’s pretty obvious all of those who are “Other” need to band together as one when the time comes. We hang together, or we’ll go to the re-education camps separately.

The Follower Factory. This makes sense.

Why Ursula Le Guin Matters.

Nicholas Christakis is being treated pretty unfairly. I don’t expect that he’ll get satisfaction. This isn’t the age for honorable men.

Big Data Comes to Dieting.

The new gnomAD is pretty dope.

Dissecting historical changes of selective pressures in the evolution of human pigmentation. Not sure of the demographic model.

Sarah Haider on Secular Jihadists.

Don’t know when I’ll get to Kyle Harper’s book, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, but it looks very interesting (Patrick Wyman interviewed him for his podcast).

One thing though: climate always changes. It’s how organisms react to that change and why that is perhaps more informative. The way the Roman political order reacted the way it did to the exogenous environmental shocks had more to do with the nature of the Roman political order than the sui generis character of the shocks (they were going to happen….).

If you haven’t subscribed to my podcast with Spencer Wells, The Insight, you should (so far it’s on iTunes, Google Play and Stitcher). We’re coming out with episodes every week now. The next one will include Spencer’s recollections of the Paleolithic period of personal genomics, before 2005. We’re also recording a podcast with Gencove’s Joe Pickrell on ancestry testing this week.

DNA Geeks has more Gene Expression themed gear now, including a redesigned “Are you genotyped” shirt.

A new blog, mtDNAwiki.

An Ethnolinguistic and Genetic Perspective on the Origins of the Dravidian-Speaking Brahui in Pakistan. Have not read. Though I anticipated the conclusion over 5 years ago.

I contribute regularly to the Insitome Blog. So, No genetic test will tell you if you are Hispanic or Latino, was written after watching days of DNA-test reveals on YouTube. There’s a lot of education that needs to be done! As the Regional Ancestry product rolls out results expect many more blog posts (and probably explainers in podcast/video format at some point).

The convergences between the racialist Right and the identity politics Left have always been sad. But now that both are the waxing it’s quite sinister. For example, both would agree that science is Eurocentric in some deep way. And, both pay close attention to marriages which are racially mixed to draw broader lessons.

How genetics is unlocking the secrets of ancient human migration. On the Scandinavian hunter-gatherers.

Steven Pinker is one of my favorite public intellectuals. The Language Instinct is probably my favorite book from Pinker.

Last week I started seeing scientists who I respect(ed) starting to tweet that Steven Pinker, a moderately liberal academic of Jewish background, is a fan of Neo-Nazis. This stuff started to litter my timeline since I follow many scientists on Twitter. To find all the links and commentary, start with Jerry Coyne, who is a friend of Steve’s. All I have to say is that a substantial portion of the science Twittersphere is OK with bracketing Steven Pinker with Neo-Nazis. True fact.

I read Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts two years ago. I don’t remember much about that book though.

CBC under fire for documentary that says first humans to colonize New World sailed from Europe. There is less evidence for the Solutrean Hypothesis now than there was 20 years ago (in a relative sense). We also now know from ancient DNA that almost no Solutrean ancestry is present in modern Europeans.

If you don’t believe me, read this paper, The genetic history of Ice Age Europe.

At least most of my Twitter followers don’t seem to be anti-Pinker.

On Steven Pinker

— Razib Khan (@razibkhan) January 11, 2018

Having a hard time saying anything about Anhui of note. Perhaps that says something?

Genomweb story that mentions both my day-job and side-hustle.