Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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Indian futures
Over at his Substack, Noah Smith has a pretty bullish take on India, Here…comes…INDIA!!!: The United Nations estimates that India has now surpassed China as the world’s most populous country — or, as we colloquially say, the world’s “largest” country. Obviously, crossing this threshold doesn’t mean much in practical terms. Being a tiny bit bigger…
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The collapse of the Bronze Age civilization
Listen now (48 min) | The end of the first global world
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70 years since Watson and Crick publish the structure of DNA
On April 25th, 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. This paper helped Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962 (Rosalind Franklin…
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Peter Nimitz: Seven Ages of Western Eurasia
Listen now (96 min) | Surveying the archaeological and genetic history of the last 11,700 years
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David McKay: AI and the end of the world as we know it
This week on Unsupervised Learning, Razib and his guest, David McKay, of the Standing on the Shoulders of Giants podcast (Razib was an early guest), discuss the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the prospects for artificial general intelligence …
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Introducing the GenRAIT Podcast
At the intersection of biology and technologyRecently we debuted the GenRAIT podcast, where we discuss the broad industry space that we aim to serve, the space where biology and technology merge together.You can listen to the podcasts at their dedicate…
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The once and future India
A lot of the media is writing about how India’s population is now, or will be any moment, bigger than China. The issue I always have with these narratives is India is a big country; UP has a total fertility rate of around 3, while West Bengal is closer to 1.5. I assembled data on…
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Perhaps the Indus Valley Civilization did descend from Zagrosian farmers?
On the limits of fitting complex models of population history to f-statistics: These results show that at least with regard to the AG analysis, a key historical conclusion of the study (that the predominant genetic component in the Indus Periphery lineage diverged from the Iranian clade prior to the date of the Ganj Dareh Neolithic…
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Open Thread – 04/14/2023 – Brown Pundits
Since Pandits and Kamboj always ask me if it’s true if they’re Iranian, Iran through the ages: civilization’s eternal crossroads and Pre-Persian Iran: from the invention of agriculture to the Aryan onslaught. Part 3 and 4 will land next week. I have a post (right now at 5,500 words) that I’m working on relating to…
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Alex Feinberg: former professional athlete and techie turned trainer
Listen now (50 min) | Leverage your instincts to build a better body and make better choices
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The modern human conquest of earth
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks about the rise of modern humans, from their beginning as just one population among a diverse set of human species, to the dominant and only remaining lineage of hominids in the present. His reflec…
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Cousin marriage in Bangladesh
This piece arguing for the end to cousin marriage in the UK in The Times (driven by Pakistanis) took me to a paper in PLOS One, Genetic and reproductive consequences of consanguineous marriage in Bangladesh: The mean prevalence of CM in our studied population was 6.64%. Gross fertility was higher among CM families, as compared…
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The Green Sahara and Fulani
Echoes from the last Green Sahara: whole genome analysis of Fulani, a key population to unveil the genetic evolutionary history of Africa: Background The Sahelian Fulani are the largest nomadic […]
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Adam Mastroianni: a history of experiments in social psychology
Listen now (57 min) | Is peer review a problem for science?
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Pre-Persian Iran: from the invention of agriculture to the Aryan onslaught
Prehistoric Iranians’ genetic roots and Indian entanglements
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RKUL: Time Well Spent 04/04/2023
April Showers Edition
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Iran through the ages: civilization’s eternal crossroads
Parsing Persian genetics
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Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate 20+ years later
Twenty-one years ago, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature was published. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, The Blank Slate firmly established Pinker as one of the major public intellectuals in 21st-century America; it fo…
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David McKay: AI and the end of the world as we know it
Listen now (67 min) | The rise of the machine…tools
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David McKay: AI and the end of the world as we know it
The rise of the machine…tools