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In this conversation, I discuss “cultural evolution” with Alex Mesoudi. The very term can be confusing and perplexing to some. After all, it seems intuitive that culture evolves and changes. But here Mesoudi and I discuss the science of cultural evolution, which is today a robust and interdisciplinary field (also see my conversation with Richard McElreath). Why do cultures vary? How fast and why do they change? What is the relation between genes and cultures? All these are topics that cultural evolution as a field addresses. The origins of cultural evolution go back to the 1970’s and 1980’s, in particular, with the research of three pairs of researchers: L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution E. O. Wilson and Charles Lumsden, Genes, Mind, and Culture Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, Culture and Evolutionary Process These scholars understood cultural evolution as a branch of population biology. More precisely, they leveraged evolutionary genetic modes of thinking and models and applied them to cultural processes. Boyd and Richerson in particular have continued working in this area (see Not By Genes Alone) and spawned a whole coterie of scholars. In a wide-ranging conversation, Mesoudi offers his opinion on topics as variegated as reductionism, the importance of theory, group selection, and the utility of memes. Also, I should mention that he’s written the literal book on the topic, Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences.

Today on this bonus episode of Unsupervised Learning I’m excited to talk to Patrick Wyman about his new book, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World. Full disclosure, I enjoyed The Verge, and a review will be posted from me on National Review Online within the next week. Wyman is the host of Tides of History, a podcast about history and assorted topics which I recommend to everyone (I’ve been a guest). If you’ve listened to him speak at length, you won’t be very surprised by the topics and style of writing in The Verge. The narrative does a great job balancing the academic with the engaging. After reading his book I was curious to ask Wyman about how he wove social and economic history into a persona-driven narrative. We talk at length about the particular details of the significance of the 40-year-period he covers, and whether Martin Luther was a necessary man (as opposed to just being sufficient). Patrick and I also tackle meta-historical questions such as the importance of “great men” versus forces-of-history, and whether the Protestant Reformation was inevitable due to technological changes. It’s a wide-ranging conversation, so if you are interested in the nitty-gritty of historical processes I think you’ll enjoy it. Cross-promotion: The six-part series on Finland is done, check it out: Part one: Duke Tales: shades of Finnish cultural weirdness in my own backyard Part two: Weirdness as a national pastime: culture Part three: Go West Young Siberian: genetics findings Part four: From deepest Siberia to Europe’s edge: more genetics Part five: Frontier Finns: cabins, rakes & Indians Part six: Finnish brains, baiting and bottlenecks: education and medical genetics

Last week we saw the debut of two new possible human “species”, one in Israel and another in China (read my post on the topic or listen to the podcast with Vagheesh Narasimhan). The team out of Israel did not explicitly name their find a new species, referring to it as the “Nesha Ramla hominin.” But it is clear reading between the lines that they believe they did discover a new species-level hominin. In contrast, the Chinese team did explicitly propose a new species, Homo longi. Whether you accept this or not, some paleoanthropologists argue that this is a problem, because this fossil fits the parameters of an older proposed species, Homo daliensis. It turns out species are a more knotty matter than we might think. With this is in mind I thought it was appropriate to post my conversation with John S. Wilkins, a philosopher of science whose specialty is the history of the idea of species (see his book, Species: The History of an Idea). He’s spent decades thinking about this concept, which spans thousands of years. This conversation surprised me because it turns out that the ancients weren’t as unsophisticated as I’d thought, and some of the sillier ideas of Creationists in relation to speciation are actually rather recent innovations. We also tackle the fact that geneticists and other biologists often have disagreements on what a “species” is, and whether it’s a useful concept in the end (perhaps?). If you are an American and don’t think discussions about what a species is matters, think of the Endangered Species Act. It turns out that a lot can ride on a “name.”  

Last week two new hominin fossils were published in the scientific literature, and extensively reported on in the media. “Dragon Man”, discovered in Harbin, China, and dating to 140,000 years ago is claimed to be a new species that is the closest to the modern human lineage. Meanwhile, the hominin discovered at Nesha Ramla in Israel dates to 120,000-140,000 years ago, and it seems most similar to Neanderthals (though its tools are no different from modern humans to the south and west in Africa). I’ve given some thought to the implications of these results, and how to interpret them. But I wanted to get the sense of another geneticist, my friend Vagheesh Narasimhan. I’ve talked to Vagheesh before in relation to his blockbuster paper, The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia. My goal for this podcast was to “nerd out” on human evolution from a genomics perspective, and see if he had the same impressions that I did of these papers. Vagheesh Narasimhan We discussed population structure in Denisovans, the importance of ancient DNA and proteins, whether the “Out of Africa” theory even makes sense, as well as new work on methylation patterns in the genome and predicting physical characteristics. I did bring up statistical power in “skull science,” and both of us expounded on why DNA, in particular, is so powerful as a method of inference in comparison to traditional morphology. It was an hour spent slashing back and forth across these two papers and circling around from a genetic perspective. Both of us agreed that we can’t conclude Dragon Man is closest to modern humans. Past paleoanthropology podcasts: Chris Stringer: 1,000,000 years of human evolution Chris Stringer on paleoanthropology in 2020 Chris Stringer and The Human Revolution Multiregionalism is Dead...Long Live Multiregionalism! A conversation with John Hawks: a life in paleoanthropology John Hawks on Neanderthals: part 1, part 2 Lee Berger and the Dawn of "Big Data" in Paleoanthropology

Richard Hanania is the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI). He also runs a Substack and a podcast that are “must-read/listen.” Richard is perceived as something of a contrarian, so I wanted to ask him about Israel and its role in American politics because he has opinions on that topic somewhat outside of the mainstream. But since I scheduled this podcast he’s “blown up” due to a piece he wrote, Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law. Eliciting responses from the Right and Left, this is the sort of work that has made Richard’s name. He goes where angels fear to tread. His profile has certainly gotten higher since I got to know him several years ago. He was recently on the Tucker Carlson show. On this podcast we talk about: The incessant attention given over to the Israel-Palestine conflict in the USA His thesis that in relation to “wokeness” culture is downstream of politics The inevitability of Chinese dominance in the 21st century The mass hysteria in reaction COVID-19 What it’s like running a “Think Tank”

By popular demand, Samo Burja is my first repeat guest on this podcast. You’ve been asking for him, so when he wrote a great piece in Palladium Magazine, Why Civilization Is Older Than We Thought, I had to ask him back on. Much of the piece is specifically about Göbekli Tepe, an ancient site in Turkey that predates the Neolithic, dating to 11,600 years ago. Burja focuses on how our preconceptions shape how we understand the world and interpret data. For example, at first, archaeologists thought that the site must date to the Byzantine period, 1,000 years ago, based on the nature of the monumental objects. Their artistry and grandeur seemed beyond the ability of ancient people, let alone Paleolithic ones. The bigger picture is that perhaps we misunderstand our Paleolithic past because we assume that Pleistocene hunter-gatherers were similar to relict populations in the Kalahari, the Congo and the Andaman Islands. The reality is that during the Pleistocene, hunter-gatherers occupied the rich, fertile lands now occupied by farmers. Their societies and cultures may have been much more sedentary than we can imagine today. Burja suggests that the elements of agriculture and complex society may be much older than we today assume. They might even go back to the beginning of modern humans outside of Africa, 50,000 years ago. Get ready to challenge your priors!

I’ve known Ramez Naam since 2003 when he wrote More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. Back then he was leading a team at Microsoft, and moonlighting as a writer. Over the last twenty years, he’s changed careers, and become a full-time writer and speaker. He’s the author of three science fiction books, Crux, Apex, and Nexus. Ramez has also written The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. It’s because of the last book that he’s become an expert on the future of solar technology. Ramez has been predicting the ubiquity of cheap solar power for a decade now. In this conversation, we talk about a variety of issues he’s tackled over the past few decades, as well as my own concerns about the future of the planet. Was he too optimistic about the future of biotech in the early 2000’s? How about solar energy in 2010? I also ask him about the coming “limits to resources” prognostications that we hear about every decade or so. Are we going to run out of phosphorus? Finally, I ask Ramez to speak on the fact that climate catastrophism has become very fashionable in elite circles, and how that affects our ability to tackle the challenges of the 21st century. Ramez Naam is the type of person you listen to closely, even if you have a disagreement with what they say.

Three years ago the Golden State Killer was arrested through genetic genealogy enabled by the new direct-to-consumer platforms. Over the past several years many more cases have been solved through new DNA techniques and database searches. But more recently, Montana and Maryland banned the practice. Six years after the original CSI went off the air, genomics and forensics have started to fuse into something new and far more powerful. David Mittelman is a scientist who is bringing “next-generation” genomics to the field of forensic genomics with his company Othram. We discuss the crimes he’s solved, his new website DNA Solves, and how genomic technologies are going to transform the field of forensics.

Three years ago the Golden State Killer was arrested through genetic genealogy enabled by the new direct-to-consumer platforms. Over the past several years many more cases have been solved through new DNA techniques and database searches. But more recently, Montana and Maryland banned the practice. Six years after the original CSI went off the air, genomics and forensics have started to fuse into something new and far more powerful. David Mittelman is a scientist who is bringing “next-generation” genomics to the field of forensic genomics with his company Othram. We discuss the crimes he’s solved, his new website DNA Solves, and how genomic technologies are going to transform the field of forensics.

James P. Mallory received in Ph.D. in Indo-European studies from UCLA in 1975 under the supervision of Marija Gimbutas. He is the author of In Search of Indo-Europeans, The Origins of the Irish, and The Tarim Mummies, and an emeritus professor at Queen’s University Belfast. Mallory devoted much of his career to understanding the origins of the Indo-Europeans. Over the first 30 minutes of he gives a magisterial overview of the question, the field, and where we are now. Mallory begins in the 18th century, proceeds through the 19th and 20th centuries, before finally arriving in 2015 when he was asked to review Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe by Nature. The arrival of ancient DNA transformed the whole field within just a few years, vindicating some of Mallory’s conjectures and commitments, but leaving others even more clouded. We discuss whether the Hittites and Tocharians remain “mysterious,” and how surprising it was that the Corded Ware were basically Yamnaya despite striking differences in their material culture. Mallory also discusses the nature of data analysis in a field like archaeology, where material culture can transform overnight, and richness (the last Neolithic societies of Europe) can give way to the poverty of remains (the Corded Ware). It turns out most of what we know about the Yamnaya and Corded Ware are from their burials because that’s all they left. It’s a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation.

Dr. Marie Favereau is an associate professor at Paris Nanterre University. Her academic work has been on the Mamlukes of Egypt and the Mongol Golden Horde. Most recently, she is the author of The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World. I recently reviewed it for UnHerd, What the Mongols did for us: The Golden Horde wasn't barbarous, it created the modern world. Dr. Favereau and I discuss the origin of the Golden Horde, the Mongols of the northwest who ruled much of Eastern Europe for centuries, and its evolution over several centuries. I was particularly curious about various things I’ve read about the Golden Horde in relation to other branches of the Mongol Empire. Was it the poorest? Was it marginal? Was it basically a Kipchak Turkic Khanate that had a Mongol veneer? There are many truisms that are punctured in this conversation. For example, though the Golden Horde was poor in people, it was rich in resources. On a per-capita basis, it’s quite possible the Mongols of the Golden Horde were the richest west of China. The Golden Horde exported slaves to the Middle East and controlled the fur trade that had once been the purview of Novgorod the Great. The Golden Horde was not on the margins of world history but actually drove it. We discuss extensively the role of the Horde in shaping the orientation of Russia and Russian history. It is likely that the preponderance of the subjects of the Horde were Slavic-speaking Orthodox Christians, and the Mongols and the Princes of Moscow had a very productive relationship for centuries. The rewriting of this history has been one of the great projects of Russian nationalism over the last few centuries. Finally, we discuss future projects and avenues of research.

Dr. Kristian Kristiansen has been at the forefront of the synthesis between archaeology and ancient DNA. That new joint field has allowed for a deeper understanding of the transition to Indo-European languages in Northern Europe 5,000 years ago. In 2015 he was a co-author on Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia, which established that there was a massive migration of the steppe people into Europe that resulted in the emergence of the Corded Ware culture, the likely predecessor of most subsequent Indo-European groups. More recently, he has been thinking about the exact process by which genetic replacement and cultural transformation might have occurred. Unfortunately, some of his ideas have been misinterpreted by the media, leading to the bizarre piece in The New Scientist, Story of most murderous people of all time revealed in ancient DNA. On the podcast, we address this piece, the misunderstanding that led to it, and the blowback Dr. Kristiansen received. Of course, he also articulates the reality that as scholars one must be faithful to the data, and there is evidence of aggression and violence on the part of the Corded Ware. It just isn’t the case though that they were special or unique in this regard. Additionally, Dr. Kristiansen talks about the fact that there are various ideologies that have attempted for decades, and continue to the present day, to co-opt his discipline, as well as new results from ancient DNA. More generally, we talk about how ancient DNA has transformed his profession, and how it has brought to the mainstream views he and Dr. David Anthony have held for decades. Like Dr. Anthony, Dr. Kristiansen was taken aback by the magnitude of the migration, which has made him rethink some of his assumptions. His group also was instrumental in discovering that the early Indo-Europeans brought the plague, and we discuss the role it may have played in the collapse of “Old Europe.” Finally, he outlines the theory and data that the Corded Ware were patrilineal and exogamous, and how that explains their adaptability and the maintenance of their steppe cultural traditions and identity.

David Anthony is an emeritus professor of Hartwick College and now a collaborator with David Reich at Harvard. Over the past four decades, Anthony has been involved in exploring the origin and rise of Indo-Europeans from the perspective of archaeology, most especially in his magisterial 2007 book The Horse, The Wheel, and Language. In the 2010’s he began collaborating with geneticists. He provided many of the Yamnaya samples for 2015’s Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe. This paper vindicated Anthony’s argument that the Yamnaya spread westward into Europe in the early Bronze Age. But even he was shocked by the enormous genetic impact of these people. We talked about the past few generations in archaeology and its attitude toward migration, as well as possible future directions, including the domestication of the horse. Anthony also mentions the intriguing working title for his next book: The Dogs of War.

45% of humans speak an Indo-European language. English is Indo-European. Hindi is Indo-European. The language of the ancient Hittites was Indo-European. This is one reason the origin and expansion of this language family is so interesting to so many. Thomas Olander is an associate professor of Indo-European studies in Denmark. He has a deep interest in the question of when and where the Proto-Indo-European speakers flourished. In the podcast we talk about different hypotheses in terms of the “homeland problem” (Pontic steppe vs. Anatolia), the issues historical linguists have with Bayesian phylogenetics, and the impact of ancient DNA in clarifying long-stand disputes. I also push Thomas on what we do, and don’t, know, at least from his view as a historical linguist. Mentioned: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World In Search of the Indo-Europeans Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say

In the winter of 2021, I noticed a minor controversy regarding ‘academic cancellation’ around Gregory Clark, an economic historian at UC Davis. Representative pieces are Glasgow University in row over decision to invite guest speaker Gregory Clark, and Why is the woke mob so scared? The Free Speech Union put together a petition, Letter to Adam Smith Business School About No-Platforming of Professor Gregory Clark Signed by Over 70 Academics, signed by numerous public intellectuals after his talk was canceled. This was not entirely surprising. In 2014 Clark submitted a piece to The New York Times, Your Ancestors, Your Fate, which outlined some of his findings in his book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. His conclusion was that social status was far more persistent across lineages than economic historians had realized. This contention drew some sharp reactions. The Chronicle of Higher Education published a review headlined For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls. As it happens, I know Greg a bit from my time at UC Davis, and I sent him an email and asked if he’d talk about the controversy. He agreed and cleared up the major points. The crux of the issue is that he had taken to the headline “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls” (his earlier book was A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World), and his use of the phrase “bell curve” in the talk’s title had engendered the perception he was a eugenicist. Thankfully we did not spend most of the conversation on the controversy. Greg was more bemused than alarmed. Rather, we explored Greg’s descriptive finding, very high long-term persistence of social status across lineages, and discussed possible reasons for this, including genetic factors. Is Greg Clark a “genetic determinist”? We discuss. You decide.

What are the relationship between Christianity, ancient paganism, and Western culture? Does mass secularization in the West presage a new pagan era? Where is “New Atheism” 15 years after its peak? These are just some of the questions Ben Bassett and I mull over. Bassett is an archaeologist but has a deep interest in ancient history. Three years ago he wrote: Progress and Polytheism: Could an Ethical West Exist Without Christianity? We also referenced Unbelievable? Is the God of the Bible a capriciously malevolent, misogynistic, sadomasochistic bully? Dan Barker vs Martin Kuhrt and The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible. Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World and Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics were also discussed. We live in a time of religious change. Both Ben and I believe it is important to look at the last great change in Western history to get a sense of the future.

Abdel Abdellaoui is a researcher in the Netherlands who works in the intersection of psychology and genetics. He’s a pretty active figure on social media, and because of his subject matter interests, he has become embroiled in a few controversies. When scientists talk about genetics and psychology, behavior genetics, the public listens and offers opinions. Over the course of our conversation, I discuss how he got into behavior genetics, and what the lay of the land in the Netherlands is like for academic science. We also discussed the Netherlands’ Twin Registery, and how useful it’s been for behavior genetics in that nation, as well as the plethora of data available to researchers in 2021. Abdellaoui’s 2019 paper, Genetic correlates of social stratification in Great Britain, stirred a bit of controversy, and I asked him why people thought it supported eugenics. We also discussed a recent preprint that he was a coauthor on, Natural Selection in Contemporary Humans is Linked to Income and Substitution Effects.

Gabriel Rossman is a sociologist at UCLA. The author of Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation, Rossman takes a deeply analytic toolkit to questions such as why 2005’s “My Humps” became a viral hit. The last 1/3rd of the podcast is devoted to discussing a recent paper that he is an author on, Network hubs cease to be influential in the presence of low levels of advertising. But first, we discuss other topics. Recently Rossman has been seeing a change in the intellectual and political climate in modern sociology, with a shift from the positive to the normative. We explore the disjunction between public perception of the field (very left-wing), and the reality of it (much more empirical and rigorous), and how the two are slowly converging. After a short digression on Napoleon Chagnon, I also asked him about how “knotty” our social networks are. How is it that some people seem to know many other people? Eventually, we do discussion advertising, influencers, and a reconsideration of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point twenty years on.

Listeners to some of my podcasts on human evolution often tell me, in a friendly enough manner, that the jargon is often tough going. To be frank I can actually empathize with this. It is difficult for me to keep up with all the paleogenetics, let alone the ins and outs of paleoanthropology. What’s the difference between ergaster and heidelbergensis? Are Denisovans a species? Where in Africa did modern humans emerge? There are dozens of questions like this. This is why I often touch base with Dr. Chris Stringer, an eminent paleoanthropologist who also happens to be incredibly accessible. Chris is the author of many books and hundreds of papers on human evolution. He is also vocal on Twitter. Since he is not shy about offering his opinion and assessment, I reached out to him to get his take on the past one million years of human evolution as it stands now. Chris was also an author on a recent paper, The Origins of Modern Human Ancestry, which serves as an excellent starting point for the discussion on this episode of Unsupervised Learning. We discuss: - What is Homo erectus? - Were Denisovans one species? - Where is “Out of Africa” in 2021? - How many species were present in Southeast Asia ten years ago? - Lots about the origins of anatomically modern humans

Tom Booth is an English archaeologist who has had great timing in his career, as he’s been riding the massive wave of ancient DNA findings out of Britain over the past decade. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6520225/