Nathan Lents: Sex, truths and gender wars
An evolutionary biological look at sex across the animal kingdom and in current culture wars
RKUL: Time Well Spent 2/2/2025
Almost end of winter of edition
Wealth, war and worse: plague’s ubiquity across millennia of human conquest
Unsupervised Learning Journal Club #1
Khanversation #28: The decline of Europe, the rise of the Far Right, the prospects for Trump term 2 and Euro economic stasis
Guest Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry of Policy Sphere.
Daniel McCarthy: American conservatism after Trump (and before)
The intellectual history of post-World War II conservatism
When civilization control-alt-deletes: prehistoric Europe’s false dawn and long reboot
Reflecting on Europe’s lost 5,000-year-old first draft
Dan Hess: the fertility collapse
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib has a wide-ranging conversation with Dan Hess, the man behind the More Births account on social media. An engineer with a large family in the DC area, Hess’ essays on topics like Israelis’ hig…
Brian Chau: welcoming the AI-age and DeepSeek
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Brian Chau, who writes at the From the New World Substack. A graduate of the University of Waterloo and former software engineer with a background in pure mathematics, today Chau is execut…
Brian Chau: welcoming the AI-age and DeepSeek
Two years into the AI-age, and no doom in sight
Khanversation #27: Birthright citizenship, DEI revoked, Greenland dreams and D.C. vibeshift
Khanversation episode twenty-seven
Khanversation #26: “Get a Job!”, Rufo vs. the anons, David Lynch and anticipating Trump 2.0
Khanversation episode twenty-six
John Hawks: 2024 in Neanderthals, Denisovans and Hobbits
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, third-time guest John Hawks returns after two years to discuss what we’ve learned in paleoanthropology since he and Razib last talked. Hawks obtained his PhD under Milford H. Wolpoff, and is currently a…
John Hawks: 2024 in Neanderthals, Denisovans and Hobbits
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, third-time guest John Hawks returns after two years to discuss what we’ve learned in paleoanthropology since he and Razib last talked. Hawks obtained his PhD under Milford H. Wolpoff, and is currently a…
Why There Will Not Be a Beige Future
Skin colour, genetics, race, and racism.
Tade Souaiaia: the edge of statistical genetics, race and sports
A statistical geneticist dives into genetic architecture and genetic controversies
David Mittelman: pushing the genomic frontier in 2024
Three years ago David Mittelman came on Unsupervised Learning to talk about emerging possibilities on the frontiers of genomics, and his new startup at the time, Othram. Since then, Othram’s work has been featured widely in the media, incl…
In Search of Indo-Europeans in 2024: of Catacombs and Corded Ware
On this episode of Unsuperivsed Learning reviews what we know about Indo-Europeans as 2024 comes to a close. This is prompted by a new preprint Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-Europea…
We are what we speak: Indo-European phylogenetic and linguistic trees concur
2024’s biggest ancient DNA findings flesh out Proto-Indo-European trunk, branch and roots
Megan McArdle: American food culture, artisanal to industrial
This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Megan McArdle, author of The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success and Washington Post columnist and op-ed board member. McArdle was raised in New York City and attended R…
Shadi Hamid: pessimism on Palestine but hope in America
The eternal conflict and the decline of identitarianism