The material over the ideological
I come not to praise or bury Max Weber. Rather, I come to commend where warranted, and dismiss where necessary. The problem as I see it is that though a meticulous scholar, Max Weber is the father of erudite sophistry which passes as punditry. Though he was arguably a fox, his genealogy has given rise […]
Ancient Egyptians: black or white?
One of the most fascinating things about ancient Egypt is its continuity, and our granular and detailed knowledge of that continuity. We can thank in part the dry climate, as well as the Egyptian penchant for putting their hieroglyphs on walls and monuments (as well as graffiti!). And we can also thank the fact that […]
Open Thread, 5/29/2017
The above talk from David Reich is very good. Highly recommended. Chris Wickham’s Medieval Europe is pretty good, though it is very similar to his The Inheritance of Rome and Framing the Early Middle Ages. Rod Dreher finds out it is highly like he has some African ancestry from a slave ancestor. This seems to […]
Bitter Libyan Fruit
In Mary Beard’s excellent SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome she describes an “empire of obedience” that emerged in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. This refers to the often ad hoc arrangements of Roman rule and hegemony which preceded the explicit imperial period, when domination was bureaucratized and formalized. Sometimes it seems that the […]
The Canaanites walk among us: ancient DNA edition
Ancient DNA from here to there: Ancient DNA has illuminated many things, but there is a logic as to what topics and questions it tackles. The focus on northern Eurasia is clearly a function of the probability of preservation, though techniques of extraction are getting better and better. I can’t imagine how we’d ever get […]
20% of white non-Hispanic liberals are “pro-life”(ish)
Vox has a piece up, Democrats should start accepting pro-life liberals like me. It has this section: I am the only Christian on a great many of my friends’ Facebook feeds, and I am also the only Democrat on a great many other Facebook feeds. What I see is a need to stop taunting pro-life […]
Why many academic departments should be replaced with “think tanks”
Glenn Loury has an important essay up on his website, Self-Censorship in Public Discourse: A Theory of “Political Correctness” and Related Phenomena”. A classic “read the whole thing.” But I want to highlight one section: Sociologist James Coleman, perhaps the world’s leading scholar of educational policy, recalls that in 1976 the president and a number […]
At an inflection point of archaeology and genetics
People always ask me what to read in relation to the field of historical population genetics. In the 2000s there were a series of books which focused on the mtDNA and Y results from modern phylogeographic analysis. Journey of Man, Seven Daughters of Eve, The Real Eve, and Mapping Human History. But there hasn’t been […]
Across the chasm of Incommensurability
The Washington Post has a piece typical of its genre, A Chinese student praised the ‘fresh air of free speech’ at a U.S. college. Then came the backlash. It’s the standard story; a student from China with somewhat heterodox thoughts and sympathies with some Western ideologies and mores expresses those views freely in the West, […]
Applying intelligence to genes for intelligence
Carl Zimmer has an excellent write up on the new new Nature study of the variants associated with IQ, In ‘Enormous Success,’ Scientists Tie 52 Genes to Human Intelligence. The issue with intelligence is that it’s a highly polygenic trait for which measurement is not always trivial. You need really large sample sizes. It’s about ten […]
The co-location of the creative class
I have never read Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class. There are a few reasons for this. First, his thesis was so ubiquitous in the 2000s that a distillation was easy to be had for free. People would write about Florida’s ideas. And he’d talk about it constantly in interviews. Second, what was […]
America with the evil empire
Before Donald Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia my eyes were already preparing to start rolling. If there is one thing that brings Americans of all political stripes together, it is contempt for our alliance with Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, the American ruling class reaffirms and reiterates our alliance with the passing of every administration like clockwork. […]
Open Thread, 05/21/2017
Sorry database was down yesterday. Something weird happened that my scripts couldn’t pick up and I was traveling. Will update the scripts as needed.
Winning the battle against post modernism by losing the war for the soul of science
Over 20 years ago Paul Gross and Norman Leavitt wrote Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. To me the book was revelatory and a shock; my own experience with “anti-science” was mostly with Creationists. This was only a few years before the Sokal affair. In the wake of that it seems that […]
Pegging the human expansion of out of Africa
Genetic science is good at many things, but precise dates have not always been its strong suit. There are many reasons for this, and the possibility of variable mutation rates puts a major a barrier in our ability to get absolute precision. From what I can archaeology is a little better here, despite all the […]
The eternal Axial Age
As I have noted before one of the most interesting aspects of ancient Greek history is that in many ways the socio-political identities and outlook of the Hellenic people before and after the Bronze Age were probably as distinct as that between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. That is, the citadel culture of the Mycenaeans was constructed out […]
A problem with Fellowship of the Ring
Do you notice something off with this scene? Can you guess what bothers me?
Tales of the Chinese future past
In the first half of the 1990s I was an avid reader of David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series. This is before I knew much about Chinese history, or much about life to be honest. This vast epic future history is set in a world where a resurgent China dominates the world. Wars of genocidal extermination against […]
Notes on my social media fast
I turned on StayFocused last Thursday and set it for a week. I locked myself out of Twitter and Facebook. Because so many people now message via Twitter and Facebook I did check via Chrome on my phone once a day. But I didn’t check the stream of messages at all. Obviously a lot has […]
To be a scientific intellectual today
George Busy has put up note about changes in his career path, Meditation on the Caltrain. I took offense to this section: On top of this, there was the burgeoning realisation that no one actually reads the academic papers that I write. This is no moot point: writing papers is the main purview of a […]