Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
-
Open Thread, 1/6/2022, Brown Pundits
Happy New Year!
-
Genetics of Maharashtra Deshastha Brahmin
A Maharashtra Deshastha Brahmin sent me his sample. He plots with the Maharashtra Kayastha. He’s much more like a South Indian Brahmin than a North Indian Brahmin. The Maharashtra Saraswat Brahmin seems more north shifted.
-
Shadi Hamid: Democracy in America and Araby
What is a democracy? Is American democracy in danger? And should we care about the possibilities for democracy in the Middle East? On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at Brookings, an assistant professor…
-
RKUL: Time Well Spent 01/01/2023
new-leaf edition and a one-day subscription discount
-
Your brain on books: themed readings lists for a 20-page-a-day habit in 2023
And a one-day 23% off discount on annual subscriptions
-
John Hawks: a year in paleoanthropology
Listen now (66 min) | John and Razib review the biggest findings of the year, and the year to come
-
South Asian nations
I dislike the “GDP wars” that sometimes crop up on this message board. Comparing India to Bangladesh or Pakistan is apples to oranges. India is economically a collection of nations, and the average can be misleading. That being said, a lot of the Indian commentators also seem to engage in a lot of cope when…
-
Nikolai Yakovenko: GPT-3 and the rise of the thinking machines
As 2022 draws to a close, the chat AI based on GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) has been taking the internet by storm, with millions of users beginning to ask it questions. Is humanity on the way to birthing a true artificial general intell…
-
The Hui Muslims, two pulses of “western” ancestry 1,000 and 500 years ago, mostly male mediated
There are 20 million Hui people in China. These are traditionally Chinese-speaking Muslims. Though they are found in every region of China (and in the Chinese Diaspora), they are concentrated […]
-
Merry Christmas!
I got a sample from someone where one parent was a West Bengal Sagdop, and another parent a Baidya with family origins in East Bengal. One hypothesis that I’ve see is that Baidya are basically Brahmins who lost their caste. Genetically this does not seem to be the case. Bengali Brahmins shift considerably toward the…
-
Posts of Substack past, posts of Substack present…
Merry Christmas, and some reading recommendations if you have downtime
-
Epigenetics, what it is, and ain’t
In case you didn’t see, I have a post on epigenetics up, You can’t take it with you: straight talk about epigenetics and intergenerational trauma, which will probably be my […]
-
Shadi Hamid: Democracy in America and Araby
Listen now (61 min) | A Muslim American intellectual reflects on religion and democracy in America, and his role in the culture wars
-
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…
-
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.…
-
Passing the civilizational purity test: India’s 3000-year caste straitjacket
Exploring varna, jati and endogamy in Indian genomes
-
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
-
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 …
-
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
-
A coat of many colors: medieval-DNA findings detect interwoven strands of Ashkenazi heritage
Digging into the exciting new findings from early Jewish samples