Author: Razib Khan

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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…

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…

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…

I listened to the above on a podcast. To be frank it was a bit ho-hum. To non-brown listeners some of the stuff was surprising, but I had heard most of it elsewhere before, and Varsha Venkatasubramanian is not particularly heterodox, so her “UC Berkeley” affiliation immediately indicated a lot of her answers to the…

A British journalist talks about the political scene in the United Kingdom

Khanversation Episode Number Sixty

An econblogger on trans-Pacific relations in 2025

Episode number fifty-nine of the Khanversation

Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away

Khanversation number fifty-eight

Autumn chill edition

2500 BC DNA closes old case, poses new questions about prehistory

Hope in the age of AI

Unsupervised Learning Journal Club #8

Episode fifty-seven of Khanversation