Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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Joshua Lipson, Aric Lomes and Leo Cooper: the medieval origins of the Ashkenazim
On this very special episode of Unsupervised Learning I talk to three guests, Josh Lipson, Aric Lomes and Leo Cooper, about their contribution to a new paper, Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated th…
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Caste in the Indian subcontinent: the wages of Manu
A new post on caste at my Substack. I don’t think I have much more to say on this topic on the high level; the DNA data is now what it is. More details will come in, but we have the general outline. It is now up to social historians to make sense of it.…
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Passing the civilizational purity test: India’s 3000-year caste straitjacket
Exploring varna, jati and endogamy in Indian genomes
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You can’t take it with you: straight talk about epigenetics and intergenerational trauma
The true story of a powerful molecular process and how pseudoscience co-opted it
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Michael Bonner: Iran’s Sassanid Empire
Most Americans are vaguely aware of a few rulers of ancient Achaemenid Persia: Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, whether from the Bible, from historically grounded films like 300, or in the rare case, from reading Herodotus’ The Histories. More recently, Iran …
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Nikolai Yakovenko: GPT-3 and the rise of the thinking machines
Listen now (62 min) | A machine-learning engineer reflects on the cultural and ethical challenges of artificial intelligence
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A coat of many colors: medieval-DNA findings detect interwoven strands of Ashkenazi heritage
Digging into the exciting new findings from early Jewish samples
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The multiculturalist Empire
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’ Persians: The Age of the Great Kings is a narrative history of the Achaemenid Empire and ancient Iran which is brisk but detailed. Some of the writing is […]
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RKUL: Time Well Spent 12/12/2022
It’s almost Christmas edition
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Open Thread, 12/9/2022, Brown Pundits
What’s going on?
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Joshua Lipson, Aric Lomes and Leo Cooper: the medieval origins of the Ashkenazim
Listen now (104 min) | A new paper upends and clarifies questions about the origins of the Jews of Europe
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Eurocentrism, the West, and white supremacy
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan’s Substack, https://razib.substack.com, and original video content. What does it mean to be Eurocentric? What does it mean to be a white supremacist? What does the…
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A vision for solving India’s caste social crises
My personal belief is that jati-varna was one of the major reasons that India did not Islamicize more than it did. These sub-elite solidities “absorbed” external shocks and mediated individual relationships with the world. Collective entities like this are common across the world, but the genetic distinctiveness of these groups is like nothing you see…
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The the origins of the false moral panic about caste in the USA
Caste discrimination in the US, again…Brown University bans caste discrimination throughout campus in a first for the Ivy League. These stories are strange and silly on some level. But they are serious on another level. Multiple young brown American men have told me that they have been asked about their caste by white colleagues, usually…
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Faces of women of the world
I’m going to use Midjourney to add art to my Substack, but sometimes you get obsessed with stuff. I decided to generate images of female faces with the prompt: beautiful [ethnicity/nationality] woman, portrait, photograph, cinematic, white wall Then I picked what I thought was the most neutral face focused of the four images. I upscaled…
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Quillette Social, January 7th, 2022
I’ll be at the Quillette Social on January 7th, 2023. For about 5 minutes I’ll probably talk, along with the other guests. The list includes: Claire Lehmann Jon Kay Jamie […]
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Western Hunter-Gatherer woman, Neolithic farmer man, Yamnaya man
The last day or so I’ve been using Midjourney to create AI art. The reason is not that I’m artistic, I’m not really at all. Rather, I want to create […]
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Proud of Rho Khanna
Recently Ann Coulter mentioned that Indians don’t have the same concept of free speech that Americans do. That is totally true and evident on these message boards. Ann’s concern is that the Indian-enriched tech work-force won’t see any problems with censoring offensive speech since that’s the norm in their society. That being said, my chest…
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The unreal voyages and trials of Madagascar’s Malagasy people
Of rice and men
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You can’t make this up: Madagascar, how our planet’s strangest island was settled
The unreal journeys of Madagascar’s Malagasy People