10,000 years of selection (in Western Eurasia)

Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Zineb Riboua, a research fellow and program manager of Hudson Institute's Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. She specializes in Chinese and Russian involvement in the Middle East, the Sahel, and North Africa, great power competition in the region, and Israeli-Arab relations. Riboua's pieces and commentary have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, the National Interest, the Jerusalem Post and Tablet among other outlets. She holds a master's of public policy from the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. She did her undergraduate studies in France, where she attended French preparatory classes and HEC Paris' Grande Ecole program. Her Substack is Beyond the Ideological. Razib and Zineb Riboua discuss the concept of Third Worldism (following up on an earlier podcast), its historical context, and its contemporary relevance. Riboua explains that Third Worldism positions the decolonizing world as a historical actor seeking revenge and redistribution from the West, emphasizing the West's role in global South underdevelopment. They explore its manifestations in politics, particularly in the US and Europe, and its influence on foreign policy, highlighting the role of Israel as a central issue. Riboua also touches on the economic and political challenges faced by Iran and the Middle East, and the evolving dynamics of Islam in global politics.  

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Brianna Wu. Wu is an American video game developer, programmer, and political activist best known as the co-founder and CEO of the independent game studio Giant Spacekat. Raised in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, she attended the University of Mississippi to study journalism and political science but withdrew in 2001 without earning a degree in order to pursue early entrepreneurial ventures. After establishing herself in the tech industry and leading the development of the 2014 indie game Revolution 60, Wu became a prominent advocate for marginalized groups in gaming, a role that expanded significantly after she was targeted during the Gamergate harassment campaign. She later transitioned into political organizing, running for the U.S. House of Representatives in Massachusetts as a Democrat in 2018 and 2020, and co-founding Rebellion PAC to support progressive political initiatives. In the last few years Wu has been pivoting more toward the center, expressing concerns about the power of the anti-Israel faction on the Left. Razib and Wu discuss their political differences, he, being on the political Right his whole adult life, and, Wu, a partisan of the Left. Wu makes the affirmative case for a liberal Left vision of American politics, a welfare state without express support for socialism. They also discuss the excesses of both the woke Left and the MAGA Right, and Wu challenges Razib on the actions of state-level Republicans. She argues that for many Americans the Right presents no option, because it does not welcome many identity categories as the Left does.  

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib has a wide-ranging conversation, again, 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' high birth rate have gained the attention of X. He has an account that has come from a few hundred followers to more than 45,000 in less than 4 years. His tweets have been boosted by Elon. Today Razib and Hess start the conversation talking about East Asia, and its massive fertility crisis. Hess makes the case against urban density, observing how low fertility is in some of these Asian cities in particular. Razib also brings up economic and cultural creativity, as he and Hess ruminate on the consequences of reduced dynamism due to an aging population. Hess also argues that we cannot rely on evolution to fix our demographic imbalances; the source nations of immigrants are experiencing demographic collapse as well.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to geneticist Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou about two papers, Ancient DNA evidence for the history of the Albanians and Uniparental analysis of Deep Maniot Greeks reveals genetic continuity from the pre-Medieval era. He is an entomologist and evolutionary biologist specializing in insect morphology, biomechanics, bioacoustics, systematics, and taxonomy. Born in Greece, Davranoglou earned a B.Sc. (Hons) in Zoology from Imperial College London (2012–2015) before completing a DPhil (2015–2020) in insect morphology and biomechanics at the University of Oxford under supervisors Graham Taylor and Beth Mortimer. He is currently a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (with support from the John Fell OUP Fund), where he investigates the evolutionary origins of sound production in hemipteran insects. He also serves as Curator of Hemiptera and a senior researcher at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv. Over the course of the episode Razib and Davranoglou cover the intersection of history, archaeology and genetics. Who are the Greeks of the Mani peninsula, south of Sparta? Are they particularly "genetically pure" compared to other Greeks, and what is their connection to the ancient Greeks? How do Albanians differ from other Balkan populations and what are their deep origins? The podcast explores genetic results that demystify the demographic history of the southern Balkans, and two of the deeply indigenous peoples to the region.

It's been a minute since we've had Nikolai Yakovenko on the podcast. Yakovenko is a former professional poker player,and was a research scientist at Google, Twitter and Nvidia. With a decade in computer science, Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the large-language-model revolution that has driven to prominence companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind, and an ecosystem that has birthed hundreds of smaller startups. He is also the founder of DeepNewz, an AI-driven news startup. On this podcast, Razib and Yakovenko talk about the current top of the line "frontier labs," OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google's DeepMind, why xAI has faltered, and the reality that only DeepSeek in China seems up to challenging the American firms. Yakovenko notes that AI's transformative impact is mostly in the massive capital influx into the sector, as well as becoming a ubiquitous part of the software engineer's toolkit. They discuss how programming without an AI-assist is now likened to "raw dogging" coding, while artificial superintelligence seems a rather distant prospect. The technology is getting better, but predictions of the doomers seem not to have panned out.  

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Christopher Rufo. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. A contributing editor at City Journal, author of the New York Times bestseller America's Cultural Revolution, and 2025 Bradley Prize recipient, he also serves as a New College of Florida board member and Distinguished Fellow at Hillsdale College. He is also co-host of the podcast Rufo and Lomez. Raised in Sacramento, California, Rufo graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service in 2006 and a Master of Liberal Arts in Government from Harvard Extension School in 2022. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and children. Razib and Rufo first discuss his California upbringing and the idyllic environment of the Golden State. They discuss what they both love about California and why it matters for the US as a whole. Razib brings up the contrast with Texas, where the weather and scenery are less attractive, but pro-business and pro-housing regulatory framework has attracted many migrants from California. Rufo then details exactly what he's uncovered about the poor governance in his home state under Gavin Newsom. They also discuss the prospects in the current governor's race, and whether California's pathologies can ever be fixed.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to physicist Gregory Cochran. Cochran is best known for his work in human evolution, often at the intersection of biology, anthropology, and history. Trained in physics, he later turned to population genetics and became widely known through collaborations with researchers like Henry Harpending, producing influential but controversial work on recent human evolution, including the idea that natural selection has accelerated in the Holocene. Cochran has also been a prominent public intellectual, co-authoring the book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. He writes at the blog West Hunter. First, Razib and Cochran examine the controversy surrounding Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia, including Davide Piffer's complaint that the authors did not cite his work. Then, they review chapter-by-chapter the arguments in The 10,000 Year Explosion, from Cochran and John Hawks' prediction that Neanderthals likely admixed with modern humans, to the importance of agriculture in driving adaptation in human beings and the ecological context of the increase in Ashkenazi intelligence.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Russ Greene, who promoted the idea of "Total Boomer Luxury Communism." Greene currently serves as the Executive Director of the Prime Mover Institute, a public interest organization and think tank he launched to advocate for American energy dominance. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow for the Economy at the Stand Together Trust. In this role, he managed a grantmaking portfolio centered on federal regulatory affairs and strategic litigation, with a strong focus on classical liberalism and critiques of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) corporate frameworks. Greene also directed brand defense and government affairs for CrossFit Inc. He has a Bachelor of Science in International Politics from Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. Greene and Razib talk about the fiscal insolvency of Social Security in six years, and the shift of the federal budget to focus on transfers from younger generations to older ones. Greene also talks about the fiscal situation in the developed world more generally, out of the United States, and the general issues engendered by massive pension systems. They discuss the history of past changes to benefits programs for senior citizens, and how it puts the squeeze on all other areas of the budget.  

The full episode is available here: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/10000-years-of-selection-in-western Despite the preprint being out for two years, Akbari et al.'s Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia publication in Nature this week has resulted in a massive media response. Though Razib has discussed this work before, he thought it would be useful to review it, and put it in context in a new monologue.  

Today Razib talks to Matthew Schmitz, a journalist who previously served as an editor at the religious journal First Things. He is the cofounder of the online magazine Compact, alongside Edwin Aponte and Sohrab Ahmari. He currently serves as editor of Compact, religion editor of Washington Post Opinions, and co-host of the podcast Against the Grain. Compact His essays on politics and culture have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Claremont Review of Books. A native of O'Neill, Nebraska, Schmitz is a graduate of Princeton University. First, they discuss Schmitz's piece in the Washington Post, The unreligious religiosity of Christian identity politics. Here Schmitz articulates the view that the nationalist-inflected Christianity exemplified by many MAGA and MAGA-adjacent figures is quite different from the sincere but earnest evangelicalism of the older religious right. Rather, it is more performative, more civilizational, and tied into white identity politics. Additionally, it turns away from the philo-Semitism that has been typical of the American religious landscape. Schmitz and Razib also address the rise and fall of the New Atheism over the last 20 years, from the decline of public Christian faith as the center of the body politic, the rationalist critique and the marginalization of both by woke social-justice political theology. They also discuss the difficulties and travails of religious pluralism in the US today, including the tensions caused by the arrival of large numbers of Hindus in places like Texas, where they erect statues to their gods, including the semi-monkey divinity Hanuman.