Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site

Political pundit and scientist Sean Trende

A saga of human survival gives “indigenous,” “native,” “homeland” new meaning

Khanversation number sixty-three

Today Razib talks to Noah Smith, an American economist-turned-blogger known for his commentary on economics and public policy. His blog, Noahpinion, is one of the most popular on Substack. He earned a PhD in economics at University of Michigan and served as an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook  University before leaving academia to become a full-time writer. He…

A statistical geneticist discusses the controversies and advances in his field

Today, Razib talks to Coltan Scrivner, a behavioral scientist, horror entertainment producer, and author, whose work centers on the psychological and evolutionary roots of our fascination with darkness, horror, and true crime. He is affiliated with the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. Scrivner also serves as the executive director of the Nightmare in the Ozarks Film…

Khanversation episode sixty-four

The return of the repressed

Heritage Foundation Groypered

Deep Learning and Human Evolution

Today Razib talks to Nate Soares the President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). He joined MIRI in 2014 and has since authored many of its core technical agendas, including foundational documents like Agent Foundations for Aligning Superintelligence with Human Interests. Prior to his work in AI research, Soares worked as a software engineer at…

Sometimes you fall into things. Indian population genetics is not a major interest of mine that looms large, but I know a fair amount about the topic, and people seem to be looking to me to say something about recent developments. I have admitted that I am close to completing a major article in an…

x

A quick follow-up on my previous post, Genetical observations on caste. 1) I am aware that the term “caste” was introduced by Europeans. Which is why I used the terms jati and varna. That being said, a word is a word. I you can replace the word with a symbol. 2) I am not very…

In the early 2000s FOXP2 was dubbed the “language gene”. It was a sexy story. Humans exhibited accelerated adaptive evolution on this locus in relation to our relatives. Additionally, vocally oriented lineages such as birds and whales were also subject to the same process. But over the past five years or so I’ve heard a…

How Bangladesh Made Abortion Safer The government’s effort to help Rohingya victims of wartime rape has lessons for the world. The article has some historical backdrop: The systematic sexual violence against the Rohingya reminded many in Bangladesh of their own painful history: During Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971, the Pakistani military and local collaborators…