Monthly Archives: February 2018

This week Spencer and Razib discuss the Out of Africa theory, Neanderthal admixture, and The Human Revolution with Chris Stringer, Head of Human Origins Research at London’s Natural History Museum.

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Yesterday I talked to a friend who has a review copy of Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. They gave me a preview (their overall assessment was positive). I haven’t personally asked to get a copy because, to be honest, I thought there […]

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In the 1970s Richard C. Lewontin wrote about how the allozyme era finally allowed for the testing of theories which had long been perfected and refined but lay unused like elegant machines without a task. Almost immediately the empirical revolution that Lewontin began in the 1960s kickstarted debates about the nature of selection and neutrality […]

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The new paper on ancient DNA from elephants, mammoths and mastodons, A comprehensive genomic history of extinct and living elephants, is pretty cool. It leverages next-generation sequencing and ancient DNA, to reconstruct the demographic history of several species of elephants, extant and extinct. The major core finding is that ancient DNA along with better data […]

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I periodically check up on Amazon’s monthly deals. Though the science section is usually pretty thin, the history deals are more numerous. A lot of them are not too good, or are reprints of very old books. But now and then you get a scholarly and dense work which is magically priced at below $2.00. […]

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Reading Enlightenment Now. Seems fine enough. Will say more when I get done. I will say it’s strange to see how many people really hate the book (presumably without reading it?) and hate Steven Pinker. And curiously, it’s a pretty broad and ecumenical hate, from the respectable Left to the respectable Right. There is also […]

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Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is one of those books I haven’t read, but should. In contrast, I have read Azar Gat’s Nations, which is a book-length counterpoint to Imagined Communities. To take a stylized and extreme caricature, Imagined Communities posits nations to be recent social and historical constructions, while Nations sees […]

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The above tweet captures the essence of something that occasionally happens in science: a revelation that transforms our understanding of the possibilities of the real. 2010’s Neanderthal genome paper did that, transforming a field which was mostly skeptical or cautious of Neanderthal gene flow into modern lineages, to one that was accepting of the likelihood. […]

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It’s been a big week for “Cheddar Man” and the science around him. I already talked about the issue blog-wise for my day job. Additionally, Spencer and I did a podcast on the topic (if you haven’t, please subscribe and leave positive reviews and ratings on iTunes and Stitcher; next we’ll post our conversation with Chris […]

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This week, Spencer and Razib do a deep dive into the early history of the British Isles, focusing specifically on the famous “Cheddar Man.” Who were the first Brits, and what did they really look like?

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There are many debates about the period after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the late 5th century. For example, did it “fall” in the first place? I believe that the concomitant p0litical, social, and economic changes do warrant that word. But another question concerns the “barbarians,” who were mostly German peoples (there are […]

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It’s been a lot of cheddar the past few weeks. Or should I say Cheddar Man, the 9,150 year old Mesolithic subfossil from the area of Cheddar Gorge in England. This individual is important because it’s the oldest remain of such high quality found in Great Britain. And, in the late 1990s, as reported in […]

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George R.R. Martin Throws Even More Cold Water on Winds of Winter Dreams. Basically, it looks like he will come out with a different book first. It’s hard to imagine him squeezing out the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire before that in 2018. There were two years between A Game of […]

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The Guardian has a piece by Arathi Prasad, Thanks to Cheddar Man, I feel more comfortable as a brown Briton. Dr. Prasad is a geneticist, so the science is pretty decent (she’s probably seen the documentary ahead of time too). But there is a curious quirk here and it reveals something about human psychology: modern […]

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There’s a new preprint, Inference of population structure from ancient DNA, which uses explicit demographic models to make inferences about ancestry. I haven’t dug into the guts of the math, but, the outputs are quite interesting. What seems to be obvious is that Western Eurasia has a much richer set of models to choose from […]

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Since I’m flogging Enlightenment Now, I thought perhaps I should remind readers that Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich is out in 1.5 months. For years people have asked me about a book to read to understand what genetics has to […]

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Spencer and Razib discuss Charles Darwin’s scientific impact on our understanding of evolution, and delve into the mechanism by which selection – both natural and sexual – produces biological change.

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In the open thread, I made a casual comment that I’ve become a bit more skeptical of market efficiencies lately. Remember, in the perfect market, the profit of the firms should converge upon zero. Is this to anyone’s benefit? Obviously, it is to the benefit of the consumer. But what happens in the long term […]

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Whenever you look at a map which shows the distribution of Y chromosomal haplogroup R1b you see two areas where the frequency seems very high. First, Western Europe has a very high frequency. Before 2010 it was commonly assumed that R1b was the heritage of late Pleistocene European hunter-gatherers. Around 2010 deeper analysis suggested perhaps […]

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Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress is now out. I plan on reading it this weekend front to back. Over the past few years, it’s not a secret that I’ve become more skeptical of the possibilities for humanism and progress. The case for reason and science are obviously clear, […]

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Razib Khan