Dwarkesh Podcast - Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

Razib Khan is a writer, geneticist, and blogger with an interest in history, genetics, culture, and evolutionary psychology.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.Podcast website here.Follow Razib on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodesThanks for reading The Lunar Society! Subscribe to find out about future episodes!Time Stamps(0:00:05) Razib's Background(0:01:34) Dysgenics of Intelligence(0:04:23) Endogamy and Genetic traits in India(0:08:58) Similar Examples of Endogamy(0:14:28) Why So Many Brahmin CEOs(0:19:55) Razib the Globe Trotter, Geography Expert(0:25:04) Male/Female Genetic Variance(0:30:04) Agricultural Man and Our Tiny Brains(0:34:40) The Church of Science(0:42:33) Professorship, a family business(0:44:23) Long History(0:52:42) Future of Human-Computer Interfacing(0:56:30) Near Future of Gene Editing(0:59:19) Meta Questions and ClosingPlease share if you enjoyed this episode! Helps out a ton! Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

All right. Today, the pleasure is speaking with Razib Khan. He's one of the top science bloggers in the world. He writes about genetics, history, and evolution on his blog, unsupervised learnings. And he has a podcast of the same name. And you can find it at brazeeb.substack.com. So, uh, Razib, thanks for coming on the podcast. That was my pleasure, man. Yeah, yeah.

So can you give my audience a little bit of background about you, how you got into all this stuff? Yeah. I've always been interested in topics like history, demographics, etc. And I've also been interested in science, have a scientific background, scientific training. And over the last 20 years, genetics has become just a really big deal in terms of, you know, just as a tool to do various things, whether it's in the biomedical space or historical inference.

And, you know, so obviously I'm interested in demographics. historical inference, and, you know, genetics is a tool I can use as a geneticist, and so I do. So, you know, like, I think I was already recording right now, I decided to do a bunch of paraguized genetic distances between populations and stuff, just because I could for a post, you know? So, you know, I do a lot of things by myself, why I replicate what's been done. And yeah, so I mean, that's a lot of what I do. Yeah.

Okay. Interesting. All right. So I just like to jump into it. So my first question is, assuming there's no gene editing in the near future, what is the long-term equilibrium for intelligence look like? So there's like multiple visions, right? Like one, one view is like, you know, Charles Murray coming apart. You have, you know, you have fat tails because there's a sortative mating.

Another is there's like a slight dysgenic effect because there's lower fertility among higher intelligence people. So what is the equilibrium? look like if there's no gene editing? More like the second, in terms of not an equilibrium yet. We're not going to have an equilibrium until, you know, the reproductive referentials equilibrate. They will at some point, you know, but it could be centuries. So, like, at this point, people with genes for educational attainment

have to delay childbearing to the point where a lot of them do not have children, you know, because they invest in educational attainment in the short term. So, you know, they don't have as many children and their generation times are longer. Like, the masses are difficult there, right? So right now, there's a strong negative selection. Not strong. There's negative selection on genes for educational attainment. Everyone who's looked at us does that, at least in the developed world.

Right. Yeah. Is this something we're going to expect in the long term? Because, like, naively, I would expect, like, people who are more intelligent. as long as there's some sort of selection pressure in the long term, there should be selection for, I guess, educated, smart people because they will just have the cognitive tools to, you know, actually reproduce or, you know, survive and thrive, right?

As long as like some smart people want to survive and thrive. Yeah, I mean, survive and thrive is one thing, but have offspring is a different thing. You know, the incentives in our society are such that a lot of people believe that thriving is being child-free or, you know, what usually happens, I think, is people want to establish themselves in their 20s, and they don't want to put too much thought.

I mean, at least, you know, professional managerial, you know, college-educated people. And then in the 30s, they start thinking about it. And sometimes people wait too long. There's fertility issues or they just wait too long. and they can't find someone else. You know, so, yeah, in the long term, obviously, there's a limit. There's a limiting principle, but you don't need to be that bright to, you know,

survive and have a lot of children. And on the contrary, there's clear evidence that not being bright is good for your reproductive output. So, you know. Yeah. There's a movie about that in 2006, so. The movie is called 2006? No, in 2006, idocracy. Oh, I see.

what explains the level of endogamy you see in between Indian jathis like Indian subcasts because you have a very excellent blog post about this and so apparently as you say there's genetic evidence that for thousands of years at these these jathies like living in the same village you know they're not intermarrying they're not having kids together you know even within the context of like you know slaves in america this is not a thing that happens right like You have Selle Hatming's, you know, Thomas Jefferson's misguress. So, like, I don't, how is it possible for thousands of people? What kind of social structure could lead to this?

Yeah, nobody really knows. It is a short answer. So the math is like, you know, there's like, there's evidence from Ander Pradesh, South India, David Reich looked at it. And it's like, if you run the math, it's like, oh, like their endogamy rate is like, you know, point, you know, it's like 99.5% per generation. like, you know, super high. So, I mean, you know, when, when I was younger, you know, the endogamy rate for like black Americans was like 95%, which is high. And today it's like 85%, you know? But, you know, 5% is like 10 times bigger than what I'm talking about, you know?

Yeah, like you said, average black Americans are 20% European and ancestry, et cetera, et cetera. so it's just like there's really high barriers in the Indian subcontinent in terms of like how it can we maintain one thing that I wonder about is infanticide perhaps I mean maybe just like social taboos reproductive fitness is really low I don't know I it doesn't you know for humans it doesn't make sense but the data is what it is Indians is just a really good at endogamy for some reason you know whereas in a other populations, the general pattern is, you know, I mean, you see someone, you're like, oh, they're fine, you know? Yeah, yeah. One thing least to know, you know, it's just like, you know, this isn't, uh, it's not rocket

science, it's universal human nature, right? But somehow Indians were able to escape that. No one no really, no one really knows why. I mean, I've had multiple genesis come up to me and be like, what's up with this? I don't know. And it's like, why are you asking me? And I'm like, well, I mean, you know, you're brown. So maybe you know.

It's like they're trying to figure out whether there's a secret sauce here because it's just not, it doesn't make any sense for a, for a mammal where the males in particular are highly, um, belligerous, you know, and ideal. So, I mean, are there any hypotheses out there about that I try to explain this? Not really. I mean, you know, it's like, oh, like cast system, blah, blah, blah, you know. But again, I mean, sexual exploitation of lower caste women by upper caste men has been a thing.

So I do wonder, like, what's up with that? I mean, there are some cases where you see things. So, like the Nair, the Nair group in Kerala, you know, many of them, many of the women, traditionally, not always, but they had these relationships with Karala Brahmins, not Mathiri Brahmans, that weren't marriages, but they were like consort. There were consorts and, you know, Carol, I think the Nairns also did polyandry and other things. But, you know, you see the Nairus, you see, like, a range of, like, genetic distance to not with three Brahmins, and that's just because they're biological fathers. I mean, I don't know if they call them fathers, but, you know, I mean, are of that group. So there are exceptions to this.

But, you know, like you're coming me, yeah, like, in general, in general, I can, like, look at someone. But most Indians, like, figure out, like, what their community, as they say is from. It's just, like, not, like, typical. You know, most of, most of the world's not like that. It's basically like if all of India is, like, populated by people like Ashkenazi Jews. You know, very, very endogenous people. Because people are like, you know, people are like, oh, well, there's no other example. And I'm like, actually, there is, like, Ashkenazi Jews, the Roma, who themselves are of part Indian origin.

You know, there's a few examples. The issue is just like having a whole society like this is pretty weird. Yeah. That is the innovation. It's like, oh, let's have a whole society that's stratified. So, you know. Yeah, it's very interesting. Speaking of Ashkenazi Jews, so I thought your post on that was very interesting.

And, you know, you talk about how, you know, before Jews were kind of liberated and grew up in the 18th century. Or sorry, it was the 19th century? There just wasn't that. Yeah, early 19. achieve. Yep. There wasn't that much of achievement. And it kind of made me wonder, are there, like, are there some other population groups in the world today that are, that were bottlenecked by a similar process, and who are also very endogamous that, you know, once they get to a point of prosperity and, uh, and liberation that Jews went through in 19th century, you know, in the future world is we talking about how they're outputting a greater portion of the world's cultural heritage. Um, like, you know, like, you know, like, parts of the world that are just going through industrialization now and might have like small populations like Austroana's Jews, right? Is there potential for like a new astronautese Jew in the next century or two? I guess what I'm asking.

So what you need is. So Ashinau Jews are highly endogamous were. Yeah. And, you know, they emerged in the context of Central East Europe as a middleman minority. You know, what the whole thing is like, you know, her ready Jews dressed like Polish-Nish, nobles, you know, because they worked for these Polish nobles as factors and tax collectors and administrators and whatnot. So I guess you have to look for something like that. One, you know, this isn't totally equivalent because a dog meeting is not a big issue here,

but like Fujanese, you know, Chinese from Fujian have traditionally done better on examinations, going back a thousand years, going back to Song Dynasty. So there were like affirmative action quotas on people from Fujian. So if you look at, like, who, so Fujib people basically, a lot of the rich Chinese, not all obviously, but, you know, traditionally like in Hong Kong, the elite families are, you know, Shanghai is some Fujinese. And so like these coastal, southeast coastal people in China have traditionally been extremely enterprising. And central government in China has often clamped down on them. Obviously, this government is not. The modern economy cannot.

And so I think these populations might come into their own, you know? Yeah. Although, didn't you write somewhere else that the Chinese government for a long time, like not just, you know, the CCP, but like, I guess China, you know, in Chinese history, there's been many instances of the government trying to get rid of, like, genetically distinct groups by, I guess, breeding them into the larger stock. So potentially that reduces the, of some outlier endogamous group.

Yeah, so in China, the only equivalent, like the U.S. the U.S.S.anasi Jews are the Haka in South China, and the Haka are descended from northern Chinese migrants, and so they speak like a dialect of Mandarin, northern Chinese, you know, dialect in the south, like in Guangdong, where the Cantonese and Taishuanese are. And, you know, they still kind of tend to intermarriage. I mean, they're spatially isolated. But, you know, again, like, the Haka, the Haka are not, like, Austroxanese Jews and having an ideological reason for their endogamy.

You know, Chinese, lineages, some extent like Indian lineages, but are paternal. You know, so your identity and who you are, your clan is determined by who your father is. So, you know, that's, I mean, you might have a lower status if your mother is an ethnic minority, like Zhuang or Uyghur or something like that, but, you know, informally, but still, officially, you're part of the plan. And so that's, I think, how assimilation has happened. Genetically, people Guangdong, like the Cantonese, like, they have a minority of, you know, indigenous or South ethnic group, you know, ancestry.

Some of their practices are clearly not Han Chinese, especially, like, certain marriage practices, certain things that women do. and most of the gene flow is probably from females, from non, from non-Han that were assimilated in the area. So, yeah, the Han identity is very assimilative. North of, north of the Yang-Zi, pretty much every Han sample that I have

has a little bit of West Eurasian ancestry. South of the Yanzi, none of them have it. And so I think most of that West Eurasia is probably assimilated Mongols and other things like that. Because the Mongols are about 10%. Assimilated Mongol, yeah. that's what it is. Because the Mongols are about 10% West Eurasian, and the

tell for me is about 1% of northern Chinese Han men have R1A 0.5%. It's not super high, but R1A is, you know, mostly kind of Indo-Iranians and Slavs. And Mongols have it. They have the Indo-Iranian

version because they assimilated Scythians and Sarmatians and other Iranian step people. So I think that's probably where that comes. comes into the Chinese. And, you know, you can go back to the Tobit Turks and other groups after the fall of the Han dynasty, you know, 1,500 or actually 1,700 years ago, 17,800, 800 years ago. I mean, I think that's when they started introducing that genetic element to northern China.

North of the Yangtzee. Uh-huh. Interesting. By the way, so there's, going back to India, there's been a lot of talk about how a lot of American CEOs of big tech companies are Indians, specifically, from Brahman Ajotis. Is there

some particular reason that that seems to be happening? Wait, what seems to happen? Can you repeat that again? Well, why are a lot of big tech CEOs, Indians,

and specifically a lot of them from Brahmin, you know, Brahmins? Yeah. Well, the guy from Twik talk is not, he's body in. I mean, I think the Indian

explanation, which you probably know, is like, Brahms are literate, they're symbolic manipulators. And so obviously, you know, if you work at Microsoft or Google, it tend to be particularly South Indian Brahmins, actually, as opposed to North Indian Brahmins. There aren't that many of those. And this goes back to the colonial period, actually. South Indian Brahmins would migrate to the cities of North India to work in the Indian Civil

Service. You know, the reverse would not happen. So, you know, this is like a longstanding issue or issue of phenomenon of South India English-speaking Brahman in particular, availing themselves of technology, higher education. You know, Camel Brahmins, for example, are very well-represented in engineering and software. And that's obviously the pipeline that Indian Americans are going into as CEOs, highly overrepresented. You know, so I think, you know, the CEO of Microsoft and CEO of Google are both South Indian Brahman. they're both telegu Brahmins.

There's some, there's some, like, debates, I think, whether, whether the guy at Microsoft is a Brahman online. Because I don't know. I can't tell these sorts of things. I mean, I can, but not, like, I don't have a good instinct.

You know what I'm saying? But anyway, yeah, so I think Brahms are, you know, like Ashkanazi Jews, you know, they analogize them, folks, particularly South Indian Brahmas. I think we do have to distinguish that, because I, you know, you know, like, one of you heard about, like, a Guju Brahman

or a UP Brahman, you know, it's like, Those people just stay where they are. You know, they're not, you know, they're local landed elites, but they're not, like, well-known outside of the Indian subcontinent. To be honest, within the Indian subcontinent, right? What explains that? I mean, so I read a part of the set there. He's the Microsoft CEO, Sottenadella, and he talked about how his, like, that parents were, like, these Marxist philosophers, you know, Brahmin philosophers.

But anyway, so what explains why these North-Southis? Indians were, I guess, complacent, and these South Indians were abailing themselves of, you know, the resources. Yeah. I mean, so I think that U.P. and Bihar in particular are the elites. They tend to be, they tend to like to be big fish with small ponds. So it's not like there's like Rosh put Thakkar's all over the world either from the UP, right? Punjab is different. There's a lot of Punjabi's all over the world of various groups.

You know, a lot of jots, agricultural, farmers, in the Central Valley, Katradi is all over the place, you know. In contrast, in UP, Vihar, these North Indian states, there's less dynamism, less cultural dynamism. Behavioral economic literature shows a strong preference for zero-sum gains, wanting to be at the pinnacle of the local. This is not always true, you know, but they prefer to be at the pinnacle, the local power structure, rather than taking a risk going somewhere else

where they might not be at the peak. You know, it might be way more well off in the aggregate, but, you know, they wouldn't be at the peak. And so, for example, someone like Chandra Sehkar, of Chandra Sehkar Limit, he's a Tamil Brahmin by background. Obviously, he settled in the United States eventually. But, you know, I think he was born in Lahore. His dad was working for the Indian Civil Service. And, you know, if you read his biography, they experience, like, some kind of discrimination, you know, prejudice being South Indians in the North and then Chandra Sankar went to the United States and just during the time of segregation,

you know, and they tried to like put him in the blacks only area in St. Louis, like for some sports games. There's just like all sorts of things that happen, you know, and then he experienced prejudice at the handler of I think Arthur Eddington in particular was pretty prejudiced against Indians and their ability to contribute to physics. So is that the guy who approved Einstein's, uh, the approved relativity right? Okay. Yeah, yeah, I think empirically, yeah, yeah. So, yeah. But, I mean, at least that's Chandar's sake.

Like, you know, you don't know if it's like 100% true that anything was really, you know. Who knows? Because sometimes it turns out that there's personal beefs going on. I think anything never told his side. He died a long time ago. Chandersenkaar lived until like, it wasn't it like until 10 years ago? I think he died 10 years ago. Yeah, I think.

Oh, no, not 10 years ago. Like, 1995, so a while, though. Yeah. Yeah. 95. 25 years ago. But yeah, I mean, he was still, I mean, so he was still around when I was in high school. I remember someone did a report on him and, you know, it was hard to find information back then, but, you know, you could. He was still around giving quotes. So, yeah.

Does the work you do involve a lot of traveling? I mean, you're writing out all these different areas of world and, you know, they're anthropological and genetic history. I wonder if that if that requires you or if it helps you to like just travel to all these places or are you able to do that just from, just from here. I do most of the United States. I mean, I've traveled a little bit, but not too much. I'm not a big traveler internationally. I'm not, you know, I'm not, yeah, I don't, I don't do that.

Some people do, you know, Spencer Wells, who I worked with former boss. He's, you know, traveled all over the world and, you know, natural geographic and stuff. That adds a lot of local color in terms of things you see, things you know, whenever we talk about the Eurasian step, he's been there a lot. So, you know, you can add a lot to that. In a few places, I mean, I don't know if you read the Finland series. I've been to Finland, you know. So there are certain things that I know about Finland.

I've been to Finland. I've been to Italy. I don't know. England just seemed like the United States, but whiter. You know, so, I mean, there wasn't like, ooh, like, whoa. Like, I really understand the British people now. I'm just like, okay, they're drinking a lot. I think I'm not surprised by that.

just judging by, you know, like all those British sitcoms and TV shows where they're like drinking in the morning, I get it now, you know, so. Huh. Yeah. So that's one thing I was wondering is knowing all that should know about the history of these different places, do you feel that when you visit a place or when you learn more about a place, you're like, oh, what they're doing today, that makes sense to me, like why it is the way it is, given what I know about, you know, the roots of what happened in that place thousands of years ago? Or does it feel that it just kind of random? No, it's not random. Sometimes they do. I mean, there's sometimes where it's like, you know, someone does this or their family does this.

And I'm like, oh, it's because this. They're like, what? Oh, you know, like they don't, because you don't know the antecedents of, you know, we don't know the antecedents of everything. We do. And so a lot of times I do. And, you know, I mean, the thing was like, you know,

for example, like Americans are really ignorant in geography. So, uh, so 2019, I'm a scientific conference in America, American society, human genetic. You know, I'm meeting these people, you know, you're not working in your meeting. So I met this Chinese geneticist. She's, I think she's in grad school in the United States, and I was like, oh, like, where are you from?

She was just like, oh, I'm from a city between Beijing and Guangdong, like exactly in the middle. Okay, so here's my train of thought. So I immediately blurt out Wuhan. She was like, whoa, how'd you guess that? You know, so one, she was shocked that I knew of Wuhan, that I knew of Wuhan. right? But most Americans don't.

Two, Shanghai's in the middle. But if she was from Shanghai, she would say Shanghai. So it had to be another city. I happen to know that there's a high-speed rail line between Beijing and Guangdong, between Guangzhou, and its middle point is Wuhan. So I knew Wuhan was exactly at the middle, right? And so I was like, you know, these are the sort of things. I mean, it's like, ooh, like an American, it's like super amazing because we don't know any geography.

her friend was like, you know, I was like looking at him. I was like, oh, you're pretty tall. Like, you know, are you from North Chinese? Like, yeah, yeah, I'm from the Eastern. I'm like, Shandong. And then he was just like, whoa, how'd you know that? I'm like, what's the easternmost province? I mean, I mean, it's just an educated, do you know what I'm saying?

If someone's like, someone's like has like, um, they're talking about chowda, you know, and drink a tonic and it's like wicked smart. And I'm just like, are you from Boston? They're like, whoa. That's wicked crazy. How'd you know that? And I'm just like, uh, you know what I'm saying? But it's because I know, like, everybody outside of America rightfully assumes that Americans do not know anything about where they're from, like nothing.

Yeah. And so it's just like an incredible party trick with an American accent to be like, you are from Praha. You know, they're like, what? You know. But by the way, can you guess my Jati? Well, I mean, I know you're Guzhu, right? Uh-huh. but I couldn't I didn't guess it

I don't know by the name I mean you look at are you like half Patel half Bonnie I'm just guessing yeah yeah did I guess right yeah yeah that's exactly right why do that I don't even know man my mom my dad

my dad is Patel and my mom is Monia yeah okay all right that's exactly correct okay guys this was not a conspiracy between us like he literally like just I didn't know that question was going to be asked and I actually didn't have any. I just looked at him and I was just like, this is my educated guess.

Right, right. So that alone should justify your subscription. Yeah. Okay, so I've had this question about, you know, the greater male variance theory for a long time, which is that, so basically the idea is men produce more geniuses but also more idiots. So I've always wondered, like, why is that the case? because you would so is there some there must be some mechanism that like just increases the variation like you know gives you a higher odds of being a genius but at the cost of higher odds of also being an

idiot that is like more activated than men right like why what is a trade off that involves if you activate this trade off you might have a higher odds of becoming a genius but also a higher odds of becoming an idiot yeah um so i mean you got like BS a little bit of a molecular mechanism I haven't looked at in detail in a while, but one of the hypotheses is, for example, we have one X chromosome. So with X chromosomes normally with women, there's inactivation of one X chromosome randomly in the cell, right? Or in the tissue or whatever, in the tissue, it's in barbodies, right? So every cell has an X chromosome, and they tend to clump where it's like there are these bar bodies, like X chromosomes that are inactivated. They're not expressing.

They're like uchromatic. People are going to be like, oh, my God, like he's getting uchromatic and heterochromatic mix. I was going to mix up. Okay, I'm not a molecular genesis. But anyway, so like one of the X chromosomes has to inactivate, and that's random. Okay?

So let's say a woman has like a major mutation in the X chromosome. You know that like she has another copy, right? But, you know, it could be that in that cell there's a malfunction because the other copy is the one that's inactivated. the one that's functional. Now, if you're a man, there's no choice. It's only one X chromosome. Right?

So obviously, that's limiting the degree of freedom, right? And so if that's a good copy, if it's got some good stuff going on there, well, that's good. But if it's got bad stuff going on there, well, you're screwed. So, I mean, the easiest explanation for why at the low end men have problems is probably, okay, well, we have a load of deleterious alleles. on our X chromosomes that are not masked, because we only have one of them, right? So that's one thing. In terms of we are the heterogametic sex.

So we're the sex that has, like, so in birds, I think it's the opposite. Or I know it is the opposite. Females are the heterogametic sex. The sex determination happens to them. And males have like the equivalent of two X. ZW, and I think the males are ZZ. Anyway, so that's one issue.

And when you think developmentally, you know, we all start out as females. The female is the template. And so men have to go through extra processes. So at the end of life, it's the opposite. Like women go through menopause, which is a proactive physiological shutdown, not just like a long, slow decline. Like we go through in our reproductive processes. But at the beginning of life, I think it's to the end of the first trimester. we go through this testosterone burst, right?

SRI, the sex, you know, the sex chromosome, you know, the sex determining region kicks in, and we become male, we become masculized. So when you have a situation, when you have extra developmental steps, hey, guess what, that can mess things up. Okay? So we also have higher testosterone.

Testosterone is antagonistic to immune response. So there are more males born than females. probably because the Y chromosome of the male, the sperm of a male, Y chromosome, is lighter than when it has an X chromosome. Okay? So probably male sperm, quote, male sperm, have an advantage in speed.

There's about 104, 105 males born for 100 females, but in utero, there's a strong suspicion from people that have done sampling on miscarriage, miscarried fetuses that males are overrepresented. So we actually start out with a bigger advantage. And we're already called because of our genetic abnormality, something on the order of like 10 to 50% of fetuses, miscarry. It's still kind of not clear with the total numbers because it's really hard to track miscarriages early on, right? And so that explains like the downward, the low end.

In terms of why there might be more male, quote, geniuses, I think the way you might want to look at it is there's really no reproductive value with the high-end. of value at the high end. It's just kind of like a freak thing. And if we're less developmentally stable, we can go off target a little bit more, is the way I think of it. There's no reason you need to have your IQV like once. There's no reason you need to be able to do algebraic topology easily. Okay? Yeah. There's no reason. And there is some evidence. There is some evidence in the genomic literature now with the most recent work that there is some enrichment for schizophrenia and other things with some of these educational containment genes like some there's some evidence yeah but is there some reason in the ancestral environment why i don't know having a brain

capable of algebraic topology would be advantageous like is there something that human would need to do okay and then a separate question i guess you can answer at the same time do be an explanation for why brain size decreased by like, what was it? 10% or something like that? We're just smaller. So our bodies got smaller. Like, when it got warmer, we got smaller,

but also agriculture seems to have given us really, really weak bones. We got more fragile, more grass aisle. We shrunk some with agriculture, and so that natural process of that, the smaller brains. I bet you average nutrition probably decrease some in terms

of, like, quality, as opposed to reliability and consistency that probably meant that, you know, smaller brain sizes are more optimal to survive through the same thing. We know smaller body sizes are, for sure. We know smaller body sizes are. There's been a lot of negative selection in Southern Europe and in Asia for small body size. And last I checked, it seems pretty clear that people in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent are shorter genetically. And some of it is like East Asian ancestry but like I mean clearly like Bengali are just a short people you know and if you just like me like people from Bangladesh or West Bengal in the West and

like they're chubby a.f because they get a lot to eat so it's not like genetics you know like I used to when I were not or not genetic but like environment I used to I was like when I was little people would say like oh well you know people you know your parents because my dad's short your parents didn't need a lot of meat and I was just like okay but like now that I know about genetics, nutrition, and class background, I'm like, no, like, my family is, like, you know, like, people were, like, obese in my family. Like, they had enough to eat. They didn't suffer from the Bengal famine. And also my family's Muslims, so they eat beef and they got protein. No, they're just short because it's genetics, you know. And why? Well, we know the Bengali population is Bangladesh. They have cholera resistance, obviously because, you know, the issues with flooding and water.

that's different than others Indians have gotten into populations there's some reasons why they're small too I don't know why Bengali are small but that's obviously true so sorry what's a link between cholera and height or color resistance I'm just saying like there's been studies in selection

there's selection for resistance to cholera in Bengal one of the canonical examples like the vibria whatever like that the microbe there's clearly strong selection because of the cholera over the last couple of centuries Yeah, and then what do you make of the self-discation hypothesis, the idea that there's like a, there's a set of genes that, I guess, they happen together.

They're associated in many different mammals with domestication, you know, like smaller jaws, males and males and males looking similar, and then, you know, less intelligence. There's a cluster of other things, but to basically the idea is that the same thing happened to humans during the agricultural revolution. What do you make of that idea? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a plausible. I think it hasn't really. it hasn't really panned out in terms of the genomics. Let's just put that way.

Because this hypothesis has been around for a generation and it hasn't really panned out in terms of the genomics. So I guess what I would say is like it could be that and let's see. Let's see. What I would say is it could be humans are special in some distinct ways, okay? Because it's been studied in foxes and other organisms extensively,

but it hasn't been, and dogs, you know, and there's a spackling. And some of the things, let's talk about what you're talking about. There's certain like spackling patterns, floppy ears, just really, really common patterns across mammals. because the same developmental pathways are tuned. We obviously don't have floppy ears and we don't show highball patterning. So I think it's a great idea. I just don't know for sure, like, how it operationalizes in humans. Just put it that way.

I mean, it's been a generation. We have genomic resources and it hasn't really, I haven't seen too much advancement in that direction. Gotcha. Okay, so this morning you tweeted, if everyone who attends a church thinks that the point of church is to bask in the war of the fellow parishioners rather than worshiping God,

the church won't last long. And then you followed that up with a tweet that said, in parentheses, I'm not talking about religion. So I generally don't know what you're referring in that tweet. I don't know if you meant to keep it

unsaid, but I was just kind of curious. Yeah, I was being stressed and I was just having a discussion, I'll tell you what it was. It's having a discussion with a scientist's friend of mine. We're talking about collegiality. in truth. And, you know, it's like sometimes, sometimes it seems like in science today,

and it's just not just online, but just in general, you know, like the community, and just like, you know, comfort, I guess, I don't know, is, like, prioritized. And a lot of it's fake. You know, science is like, it is like, it's like,

it's like, it's like, it's like management. consulting, it's up or out, you know? So all this stuff about like support and it's just fake, right? Like 1% of one percent of incoming graduate students will have like a tenured R1, research one, like top research one position, like, you know, relevant one, right? So all this stuff about how we were here to support you know, like we're here to like separate the week and chaff. So that's kind of like fake right there. But you know, there's a lot of talk about, you know, kind of a community and not making people uncomfortable and inclusion and equity.

And I'm just like, science is like super inequitous, right? It's not like, it's not like, um, it's not like pediatrics or something, right? Yeah, there are superstar pediatricians, but look, the average pediatrician makes a difference and pediatrician's a pediatrician. In science, you have like a few superstars who, I mean, like it's hyper-parretto principle, right? it's not like the 2080 it's like you know the 5 to 95 you know

so anyway it's just like a little strange there and you know the whole idea is like truth and you know I've you know I'm I just seen things where it's like oh like people are like that's just uncomfortable

you can't say that that makes people blah blah I'm just like one it's a very very widowing profession they haven't changed that no matter what you say like you can repeat these mantras but it doesn't matter

It's a winnowing profession. And the other thing is, you know, like if the science was here for the truth, like if that's not the primary focus, if you're here for like quality of life, you know, I don't know. Like, why are we funding it then?

You know, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. It's not only unequal in the sense that there's like a locket curve where a small minority of scientists make the largest, much larger portion of the total contribution to science,

but it's also unequal. I think it was you who said this or wrote about this. I don't know where I thought this, but professors, the career of professorship has the highest heredity in the sense that the highest correlation between the parent being a professor and child being a professor.

Yeah. Is that you? Yeah. I didn't, I mean, I probably retweeted it. I mean, that's not obvious. I didn't talk about it expensive because I was like, okay, everyone knows this. Everybody in science knows this.

My dad was a professor, by the way. But anyway, I'm not. I'm just saying that, like, everybody who, so one thing is, so I have a friend, you know, so people in science, people who go into graduate school and science academic science, they, you know, reason first generation is a thing is because it's so skewed toward professional managerial class people in general. It's very, very class bias, you know. So, yeah, anyway, it's very class bias, but even people who come from professional managerial backgrounds, if they didn't come from academia, they don't always know everything. So I have a friend who came from like very upper, upper middle class background. And, you know, he admitted, like, yeah, like, he had to learn some things in terms of what you do to make it in science. Because, you know, his, I think his dad's a lawyer. I think his dad's a lawyer. But, you know, so he knows, I mean, it's the same thing in medicine.

Like, I have a friend he's in medicine. I think his parents are engineers. And, you know, he said that they told him for medical school interviews, it's going to count against you that your parents. aren't doctors. Because they just assume you don't know as much about like how to make it the profession, right? And so there's tacit stuff that gets passed off. Like I have a friend, he's, he has a research one professor. He does have tenure. I mean, he has succeeded, but he comes from very working class background. And by the time he got to the postdoctoral fellow stage, which is after PhD, before professor, he was like talking to people and they were talking about their

choices that they made as undergrads and blah, blah, blah, blah. He just thought to himself. And, you know, he's in like in his field he's in a top 10 institution. Not at like Harvard, but he's in a top. So he's doing really well. So I don't want to undersell how much he'd accomplish. But, you know, he literally told me. He's like, you know, I just thought to myself. I was like, I never had a chance.

You know, he just, I mean, he did well, obviously, but like he never planned this way. He never optimized his own life because he just, he didn't have that background, you know? Yeah. He just like, he never had a chance. So, you know, that is what he's, On the margin, it makes a big difference.

I think this is why there's a lot of virtue signaling from some people who, you know, like some of the most, where is it, there's a, like, there's a professor. I'm not going to name who it is explicitly, but people who follow academic Twitter will probably know who I'm talking about. They work in biomedical science, and, you know, they do periodic virtual signaling, just like standard progressive stuff. but like I think their uncle was like a Nobel Prize winner and they did research in their uncle's lab when they were in high school

so I mean this is a person who got a huge leg up by family I mean they're smart okay but okay like they knew exactly how to succeed in science because they had all the family connections in the world and you know so now I think they overcompensate I think she overcompensates to be honest that's what everyone assumes privately

that's what they say and I think it's probably true you know, there's other people like that where, you know, online, there's a couple, there's, there's, there's, there's one guy online who's like super super progressive, but a friend of mine told me he's like notorious dick, um, to his, to people in his lap where it's like, he's really bad boss, he's really mean, really demanding. So obviously he's just covering his butt, like, on social media. So anyway, like, my tweet was basically alluding to the fact that like, well, if you're not there for the right reason, if everyone's just there to like collect the salary or they don't know what to do with their life or like they like hanging out with this crew and being on the same like i don't know ideological team kind of like okay like what is the what is the point of science then you know what is the point of where why are you here why aren't you an accountant or a CPA or something like that i don't know it doesn't it doesn't make sense you know um you're supposed to be here for a higher calling uh and so okay so the tweet was the parishioner, the parishioner would be like the person involved in laboratory,

the research institution, and God is the truth. And if you're not there for the truth, eventually the institution is not going to make it. It's just going to kind of dissolve because at the end of the day, if you don't have passion for research, if you don't passion for the truth, what's the point? Yeah, yeah. There's just a professor. We both know, but obviously I'm not going to say who it is. And so his kids also want to become professors.

So the kid, they just graduated high school. And so they had a peer-reviewed published paper while they were in high school because, you know, obviously the professor had guided them so that they would be in a good position to become a professor themselves, right? So when you consider that kind of advantage and someone who just goes into college, like, oh, this subject seems interested to me. maybe I should consider a graduate academic career here. Obviously, there's like no comparison and just the level of advantage you have.

If you've been planning it out like that. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what's going on here. I've talked to multiple friends who are like in postdoc level and they just talk about like they can see over the last 10 years of massive inflation and publication where their postdocs now and like some of their graduate students have like two or three publications coming in. and like they didn't have any publications until they're like third, fourth year of graduate school. And they went to the same university.

So what's happening here? You know, and we, I mean, you know this. Like, okay, like in the past they didn't publish as much, but they did a lot of science. So this is, this is like one of those issues when you devise the metric to measure something. Eventually the metric gets distorted, right? It's just like the truth is. The metric's getting distorted. There are people who are like producing.

I mean, look, I mean, some of these researchers who are like, who have like 30 papers a year. What? What? You know? I mean, you're not contributing. You're just, you're not really contributing to it, you know?

So. Yeah. Yeah. There's like, there's like, there's like full-time bloggers who don't output as many blog posts as you are outputing papers, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So within the spheres that I travel and maybe that you travel in as well, like EA adjust and stuff, there's this idea that we are living in. of like a very important time in history. And then there's like a step function, right?

So that you have like different steps like agriculture, domestication, metallurgy, industrialization. And like we're at another step right now. So from all the people I know, you know the most about history, especially ancient history. So do you view history as a sort of a series of step functions, each one, the newest one more important than the last? Or do you view it as just like a sort of a gradual exponential exponential,

curve. Like, what is your view of, your long view of history? I think it's mostly gradual. We reified into a step, but I think we might actually be a step now. I mean, if the slope is steep enough, it's a step, right? So I think we might be at a step now. And there have been steps in the past. But mostly we reify. So the industrial revolution of my understanding from economic history is really more gradual and exponential than, like, quote, revolution. Agriculture was probably like that as well. Peter Turchin's work with some of his collaborators, indicates that the Axiol age was actually more gradual. Some of the coalescing of ideas, it wasn't like a step within one century, you know, around 600 BC or whatever.

So, you know, this is just a situation where most of the time I think we tend to like simplify this stuff. But, you know, right now, we live in an age of miracles that we don't take for granted because, you know, me, you everybody who are just scrambling. You know, we have supercomputers in our pockets. They're called phones. You know, we're doing, you know, science fictional video stuff. and my kids who are, like, my oldest kid is, say, 10, my youngest is like five, right? Something like that. So they're a little dubious about this idea.

Sometimes you use the phone for these non-video calls, and they're very confused why people would do that, and they're very skeptical of this idea that that's what this phone was actually originally designed for, you know? So, I mean, like, this is to the point where, it's like, okay, like, and like, also, like, they, um, they see a flip phone and they're very confused with how that could be a phone, like, what is this ancient technology from 2007? You know, so it's just like, you know, because we have like a, like a lot of people, we have like a desk full of phones, old phones that we never threw away because of whatever, right?

And so, like, you know, my kids saw the phone and they were like, what is this thing? And like, it's cool. And they're like, I'm like, oh, that's a phone. And they're like, no, but a phone's square. You know? And they have an old rotary, like, toy phone. They traditionally use it as a hammer, you know. It's just like they don't really know what the form factor.

It's totally, like, weird for them. So, you know, we are living through a radical change in terms of, you know, like our social technology or information technology. Like most of your viewers probably know Kurtzweil, information technology is exponential. Yeah. So there are some radical changes going on right now. and we need to think about what that means because I think we're like, you know,

I mean, VR is going to be a big deal. So I have said, like, I did say 20 years ago probably. Because again, like, you know, I know people hope Holden will be okay with him saying that. I've known Holden for 15 years, you know? Holden Karnovsky, I think he's, you know, might be one of the people you're talking about, about this century.

And I've said, like, this might be like the last century of humans in a way. that we would recognize or it might be a century of regression. I think that we are in a metastable state right now where, I mean, I'm looking at you right now and you look like a primate, you know, and you are a primate, you know, but like you have access to all this technology. Like, what's going on? You know what I'm saying? Me especially or? No, just in general. I look at myself. When I see myself, I don't see a primate, I see

receive. You know what I'm saying? But if you look at another person, it's just like really, really, really, like, you know, you think about it. It can be really, really visible. It's really, really visible that, and that you're an animal of, like, that particular lineage, you know, when you look at the, you see where they move, you know, you think about, so, like, how long is this going to persist? Like, we obviously evolved during the Pleistocene, and even earlier with a lot of our instincts. Now we have, like, the ability to destroy the world, our civilization. Like we're not going to exterminate all life on Earth Like that's just, you know, probably not even all humans

You know, there's probably going to be people in the southern hemisphere For sure that are going to survive But we destroy our civilization And civilizations have destroyed in the past Have been destroyed in the past By, you know, overreach, you know But those civilizations had like local collapses, local regressions And then they got like more, we got more robust

With Samabria would call social technology, right? So for example, you see the Chinese dynastic cycle keeps shrinking every single time in terms of the chaotic interrectum. So one, that means that the previous dynasty was its institutional structure is probably more robust to shocks and then it can rewind itself back up relatively easily, right? So like the first big unwinding is, Zhao dynasty doesn't really count, but let's do the Zha. That's like 500 years

decline, bigger to warring states, and then the, you know, the Chin Han Dynasty. Then there's like a 300-year period of collapse. And then there's like a 150-year period of collapse. You know, it just keeps shrinking every single time. And so it's showing you that like cultural or social technology is getting better. Information technology is getting better. But now we're global.

And so like even if there's like a 50-year collapse, I mean, you know, there's a lot of stuff that we're going to lose. You know, and, you know, Sammo and others have talked about the fact that, like, we can't make rockets the way we could 50 years ago because a lot of those engineers are not, you know. And our military runs on, like, cobal software that barely anyone can read is a cuneiform. You know, so it's like the Babylonians, like we laugh at them for like 2,000 years or 1,500 years, 2,000 years after the last Native Sumerian speaker died. they were using Sumerian liturgy, you know. But we are going to have a situation soon where there's going to be almost no cobalt programmers,

but we have cobal software base. And so people are going to have to, like, you know, train and, like, learn from these manuals, these ancient texts from the 1970s. I mean, it's not like that difficult. It's feasible. But the issue here is, like, timing and time because you might not have enough programmers

to service all the code that you have. So these are really, issues that I think we have to deal with as primates who've organically developed this technological system and are trying to figure out how to make it work. Yeah, yeah. Sustain, sustain. Right. Yeah, I had Sammo on just a little while back to discuss exactly these topics.

So for the listeners who are interested, definitely check out that episode. Yeah, and even with something like, you know, Cobol or sophomore during, like somebody who started a certain computer science, like even something that's that legible, you know, you can have sort of implicit knowledge from previous programmers are like how does the entire system work. And you know, this is like literally a written word, right? That's what a program is. So that's super legible. Compare that to other forms of manufacturing. I know a guy who worked at a fertilizer plant and, you know, maybe I shouldn't say this on air, but he basically said like, if somebody did something to this fertilizer plant, that's like, okay, that's a famine right there,

right? We've lost the source of nitrogen here. So yeah. Oh, so, okay, Going back to you made a very interesting comment about like we're at a point where we're using our computers to do magic, but the person behind that computer is a primate. So do you see knowing what you know about genetics and the potential malleability of our genetics, do you see the future iteration as us adding onto or modifying or selecting on the same biological substrate or do you see the future iteration? Do they think it's more feasible that we just move on to entirely virtual, where like ends living on computers? Like, which seems more feasible to you? I mean, it would be ironic if we're a simulation that uploads ourselves into a computer. But anyway, I don't want to get into that, you know?

I don't want to get into that. What seems more feasible? I think in the, okay, like the biological program of redoing ourselves, I think is like actually, it's not straightforward in terms of like, you know, minimal risk. There's going to be a lot of false starts, which is going to be kind of crazy. But I do think people will improve themselves. Okay. I think they will edit themselves better over the next century. But I think that there's going to be some integration with brain computer interfaces. Yes, I do. I mean, I haven't followed it closely, but, you know, I do move in

some of the similar circles. And I think, you know, brain technology interfaces are going to be a big deal and I think they're going to really change the game and I think that's going to be but but the issue there is like so I guess I think of gene editing to be honest more as like smithian growth whereas like you know increased efficiencies because we have the genetic variation now like we can make him smarter we have the technology okay like we're not we're not there I can see that though I mean we can all like understand the basic logic there like there is John Monument existed the experiment has been done yeah so we can aspire to create to like a bunch of unknown man. Okay, that's great. Now the issue is like with like with a

human computer interfaces, that's never been done. Right. So that is that is like an innovation. That's like you know, technology driven growth that's increasing like the baseline productivity by like crazy amount. Like that's that could be the possible quantum. So, um, excuse me, that could be a big deal in a good way or a bad way. And I think a lot of your listeners know about all the existential risk crisis and artificial, you know, like we talk about like, you know,

hostile AI and general artificial intelligence and all this stuff. But I mean, I mean, perhaps it will start with us. You know, perhaps Skynet will be some uploaded crazy kid, you know, where it's like, maybe it's going to be a situation where it's like going to the new world where, you know,

there were attempts to go, to like, to the new world. They didn't know the new world was there. But there were people in the Middle Ages who left for the West and they never, obviously the ships just disappeared. You know, they died at sea, right? So there's going to be people who do things, like going to Mars, doesn't be high mortality rates, you know, these sorts of things.

Similarly, with like, these human computer interfaces, there's going to be high death rates. Like, basically people just disappear into the ether. But then the first person that gets in there, it's going to be like Christopher Columbus. or, you know, it's going to be a situation where they may be, like, actually, like, a very, very advantageous position. Instead of being a primitive prototype, they might, like, basically have all the, quote,

unquote, land in the cyberspace, right? Where it's like they do all the learnings really early on. They iterate, they pivot, and so they can be, like, you know, the god of that universe. I don't know. I'm just speculating here. But I'm trying to say that, like, I think the possibilities there are, like, pretty extensive, pretty high variance. And in the short term, what is the landscape of just, I guess, gene editing, polygenic

selection, what does that look like in the next 10 to 20 years? So, I mean, is there potential that, you know, you could, like, raise your kids IQ by one or two standard deviations? Or are these going to be, like, marginal improvements? Like, by the time I'm ready to have kids, what will it look like? Yeah, I think with gene editing, the intelligence thing is going to be like 20 years. I'll say 20 years, okay? Like, I think in the short term, gene editing really will do,

it will probably cure cystic fibrosis. Clear sickle cell. Like, these are like mandelian, quasi-mandelian diseases with large effect loci, and people are just have issues. And so, you know, there's always a delivery problem. There's always a problem with off-target effects, which goes on mutations, because of cancer.

But, you know, if you're cystic fibrosis, you're going to be dead by 45. You're going to take the risk, right? So I think that's honestly going to be the first thing. The first thing is going to be transfection or, like, you know, gene editing of adults for Mendelian disease. So that's the next 10 years. years. Okay? It's already happening now. They're already hearing people of malaria or sickle cell,

and I think they're working literally right now as we record on cystic fibrosis and ALS, you know, because they're just degenerative diseases that kill people in the prime of their lives. But, you know, 20 years, that's a long time. You know, we have 40-year-old IVF babies now, you know, I think almost 40. But so I think 20 years, yes, you will start to see parents editing the genes of their offspring. I think intelligence is like difficult because it's a polygenic trait with a lot of, a lot of different genomic positions. I wonder if they're going to go for other things first and then kind of work to it.

And then, you know, there's that theory that Armand Leroy was talking about it, but other people is like, it's not like what you should do is. focus for like focus on mutations and other things, try to fix those and see if that just inadvertently increases the, you know, intelligent. Rather than focusing on getting gain of function genes, which is like, okay, like, how do you identify those? Fix all of your copy errors. Because that's a finite number. Compare to the pedigree of the parents, look at the de novo mutations, look at the

parents' genova mutations against the idealized reference, et cetera, et cetera. That might be much more feasible. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I didn't know about that. Do you have an estimate for how many SNPs affect the variation and intelligence between people? Let's see.

How many SNPs? It's going to be an order of thousands. Okay. Yeah, it's, yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, so just some meta questions to close out on. So you've, you know, you distinguish yourself in your career by being somebody who's like an expert,

in history and an expert in genomics and life sciences more generally. Are there other fields where you think knowledge of history would be very useful in setting up like a separate niche? Because you have a niche in history in a genomics. But, you know, it would be hard to imagine, for example, if somebody knowing a lot about history and computer science, having a special niche, right? Yeah. So cultural revolution. Yeah, cultural evolution. That's what Joe Henrik and some of people wanted to do.

Yeah. So I think, I think like in cultural evolution, there's going to be a lot of gains because, you know, Peter Turchin, Joe Hendrick, these people are applying evolutionary principles to historical processes. And to have the empirical data set, to have the empirical data sets really important, and this is a really new nascent feel. So I think that that's going to be the big thing that I would think people should focus on. Peter said, like, oh, like, get anthropology knowledge.

Oh, my God. I don't think the short-term knowledge is super important. I think having a deep, deep, deep, thick knowledge about historical art. would probably be pretty useful. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Joe and his group are,

they're working in that. They're moving into history. They're doing some serious imperialism that's causing problems. Yeah. Causing problems out? Yeah. Just historians do not like the turf.

Turf infringement. That's what I'm saying. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And you, so you're one of the top bloggers.

on Substack and you have this like deeply technical blog on, you know, the science of genomics and other things, you know, that that's like, you know, you would think beforehand that your prior would be like, oh, like, how many people are going to be able to understand this or be interested in this? But in fact, you're, you know, you're one of the top people on Substack. Like, what is the experience of that been like? And like, has it surprised to you, the popularity of your work and everything? Honestly, no. Because, well, I mean, it's surprised.

Okay, I'm going to be honest. It probably surprised me, like, how many people are willing to pay. but people have been reading me for a long time. So I just kind of like professionalized it some. And yeah, it's been great. And it's really like helped me figure out what people are interested in in terms of what they're willing to pay for. And, you know, it's giving me some direction, I guess.

But I plan to do, I basically do what I continue to have done in various ways of the past and to the future. And, you know, like thinking, the startup world way I would pivoted iterate is what I'm thinking. And final question, do you have any advice for people who want to write about technical topics in a way that's very interesting to a broad audience? Okay, so you have to make it relevant to them somehow. So, for example, like let's say you want to write about signal detection.

I think, you know, text to speech type stuff. There are things people are super interested in. So, for example, people are super interested in oxymoron Jewish genetics. People are super interested in the genetic architecture of skin color. I mean, okay, why? I can talk about the genetic architecture of like, I don't know, something else, you know, and it wouldn't be as super interesting. So you have to find the domain that they're interested in and then apply your method, right?

So if you're interested in, so actually there's a substack on personality that talks about personality and using machine learning methods to classify personality. Okay, machine learning is technical, but personality is interesting. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, yeah, it's good advice. All right, Brazib. Thanks so much coming out of the podcast. Thanks for your time.