Month: August 2017
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Roman cultural history has almost no demographic imprint
Several friends have asked that I weigh in the recent dust-up between Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mary Beard. I haven’t for a few reasons. First, I can’t really be bothered to go incognito and see every detail of Taleb’s argument, as he has me blocked on Twitter (he called me a fucking idiot or something…
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Open Thread, 08/13/2017
Busy with kids and life. But perhaps time to read Peter Turchin’s Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History. I was skeptical when Peter presented this idea years ago. Less so now. I’m on the eclipse train. The whole family will be chasing it soon. Paul Thompson is on Twitter. If you read…
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The revolution which came to archaeology without archaeologists?
The recent letter to Nature, Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, has elicited some response from those outside of genetics. The first author of the paper linked to these two, Who are you calling Mycenaean? and On genetics and the Aegean Bronze Age. One of the common elements to both reactions was that the…
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Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World is a monthly deal
Just a heads up to readers, Amazon Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World is $1.99 right now. I’d highly recommend you get this book if you are interested in this general topic. Here is my review from about seven years ago.
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But evolution converges!
Stephen Jay Gould became famous in part for his book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. By examining the strange creatures in the Burgess Shale formation Gould makes the case that evolution is a highly contingent process, and that if you reran the experiment of life what we’d see might be…
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Jon Snow + Daenerys Targaryen far creepier genetically than you know
If you have been following Game of Thrones you have been noticing that there is a brewing romance between Jon Snow, King in the North, and Daenerys Targaryen, the aspiring claimant to her father’s Iron Throne. Of course there is a twist to all of this: unbenknownst to either, Jon Snow’s biological father is Daenerys’…
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Open Thread, 07/06/2017
I know that George R. R Martin has stated that the ending to A Song of Ice and Fire is going to be bittersweet. R. Scott Bakker’s conclusion to the Aspect Emperor tetralogy ends with a bittersour ending. Fair warning. Also, the writing of the last third of The Unholy Consult was good in terms…
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Manufacturing Chinese history cheaply
In Ross Terrill’s The New Chinese Empire he makes the assertion that Mao Zedong was the heir of the moralist Confucian tradition, while Deng Xiaoping’s stances looked more toward pragmatic Legalism. I don’t want to rehash why Terrill presented this strange framework as a central thesis in his book. Rather, there was an instance that…
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But editing embryos is normal science!
The media is writing breathless stories about the recent CRISPR “embryo-editing”, In Breakthrough, Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation From Genes in Human Embryos. The paper is out in Nature, Correction of a pathogenic gene mutation in human embryos. My major confusion is that this is normal science. The breakthrough was the discovery of the power…
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When the ancestors were cyclops
The Greeks are important because Western civilization began with Greece. And therefore modern civilization. I don’t think the Greeks were “Western” truly; my own preference is to state that the West as we understand it is really just Latin Christendom, which emerged in the late first millennium A.D. in any coherent fashion. Yet without Classical…
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The great genetic map and history of China
About 20 percent of the world’s population is Chinese (and since over 90% of Chinese citizens are ethnically Han, so by Chinese here I mean Han to a first approximation). In comparison to other non-European groups a fair amount of genetics research has been done with Chinese populations. But in comparison to their overall numbers,…