Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Katherine Brodsky is today a freelance writer who in the early 2000's was the founder and editor-in-chief of an online culture magazine that was registering 600,000 pageviews a month while herself still an undergrad. In this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib explores a life lived online, from the dot-com bubble to the social media era. Brodsky, whose Substack is Random Minds, is an observer of culture from a peripatetic vantage point, a Canadian working in the American film industry, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants watching her parents' homeland ravaged by war, and a public relations professional who moonlights as a commentator and photographer.

Though an early adopter of internet technology who became a "content creator" before that was even the phrase, Brodsky over the last few years has been hitting the shoals of social media culture as her classical free speech-oriented liberalism and journalistic devotion to a bare modicum of objectivity run up against the realities of 2020's "moral clarity" where strident viewpoints are prized. Razib and Brodsky agree that Nicholas Carr's 2010 book The Shallows already has the character of a Cassandra-like prophecy, as the internet has become a tool not for mental liberation but for enslavement to impulse and the mob. Brodsky outlines her polestar when observing and commenting on the culture, which emphasizes a level of detachment or sympathy for the "other" that is sorely lacking in much of mainstream 2020's discourse.

This week takes The Unsupervised Learning podcast in a somewhat different direction. In response to a common listener request, Razib takes on his first "one-man-show," digging into his stores of knowledge of the population genetics of ancient peoples and tribes, delving into the significance of abstrusely labeled clusters like "Ancient North Eurasian" (ANE) over 60 minutes. But as anyone following this substack will anticipate, first a caveat: in these heady days of endless ancient DNA discoveries and attendant revisions to long-standing convention: everything is provisional. Razib notes that his assertions are not written in stone, as new work from researchers like Laurent Excoffier adds fresh nuance and intriguing detail to the broader evolutionary picture every few months.

This podcast takes a geographical approach, surveying Eurasian, African, Oceanian and New World populations over the last 20,000 years since the Last Glacial Maximum. Razib covers not just how populations interrelate and how they emerged, but he also touches on unique aspects of physical appearance, adaptations and natural history.

• Spanish hunter-gatherer had blue eyes and dark skin

• Cheddar Man: Mesolithic Britain's blue-eyed boy

• Population genomics of Mesolithic Scandinavia: Investigating early postglacial migration routes and high-latitude adaptation

• Ancient human genome-wide data from a 3000-year interval in the Caucasus corresponds with eco-geographic regions

• The Formation of Human Populations in South and Central Asia

• Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

• Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans

• Mysterious East Asians vanished during the ice age. This group replaced them

• Earliest Americans Arrived in Waves, DNA Study Finds

• Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East

• Divided by DNA: The uneasy relationship between archaeology and ancient genomics

• Ancient DNA and deep population structure in sub-Saharan African foragers

• Ancient Admixture in Human History

The recent killing by Ayman al-Zawahiri, erstwhile leader of al-Qaeda, brought many Americans back to awareness of an era that has been fading, the decade of the "War on Terror" that dominated geopolitics after the 9/11 terrorism attack. The World Trade Center bombings galvanized Americans, setting the stage for our disastrous invasion of Iraq and American meddling in Muslim nations worldwide. But while 9/11 drove a closing of ranks against radicalism across much of the West, a small minority drew different lessons. A radical faction of European and American Muslims, converts and those raised in the faith, instead made common cause with al-Qaeda, and its later offshoot, ISIS.

Jason Walters is one of those young men who reacted to 9/11 very differently from the rest of us. Raised in the Dutch Bible Belt by a Netherlands-born mother and an African American father, Walters was raised nominally Christian but later converted to Islam. Sixteen years old when 9/11 occurred, Walter's faith moved in a radical direction, and in November of 2004 he was involved in a terror attack in The Hague. Imprisoned shortly after that, Walters emerged a free man in 2013, having shed his Muslim identity.

In this episode, Walters joins Razib to discuss his cultural and racial background and how that might have fueled his radicalization. Though Walters avers that racial issues had little importance to him growing up, it is clear his mixed and cosmopolitan origins left him more attracted to an ideology that eventually alienated him from the rest of Dutch society. He talks about his discovery of Nietzsche, Plato and Heidegger in prison and how philosophy brought him out of Islam, giving him a new understanding of himself and his place in the universe. Razib and Walters also probe the importance of 'system thinking' and 'rationality' in the religious orientation of Salafist converts in the West.

Despite the fundamental reality that the US exists thanks to a rebellion against the power of the British Crown in the 1700's, for the last century, the two dominant English-speaking powers have enjoyed a relatively positive geopolitical relationship. Whereas the US is younger, Britain has settled into the role of junior partner, as the daughter nation outstrips the parent in economic, military and cultural reach.

And yet despite the commonalities between these two Anglo-Atlantic polities, there are also profound differences rooted in history. Chief among them, Britain, particularly England, has vastly more history than the US. The oldest church still in use in England, St. Martin's, dates to the last quarter of the 6th century AD, whereas the oldest building still in use in the continental US dates to 1610 AD, Santa Fe, NM's Palace of the Governors.

In this podcast episode, Razib discusses the history and culture of England with Ed West, author of the Wrong Side of History, an eminently writerly Substack that is ideal for a connoisseur of all things ancient (or at least medieval) and English. West, the author of many books on English history, expands on the importance of figures like Alfred the Great, Athelstan, the forgotten first true king of all England, and the Magna Carta, the document that set the template for later English political history, and possibly set the course toward the liberal democracy that dominates the world today. West also argues that Britain today has lost much of its distinctiveness as it becomes swallowed by America's cultural and political currents. He also contends that Britain is now importing subcontinental Hindu-Muslim rivalries into the British political system, as Hindus and Sikhs vote Conservative, while Muslims are aligned with Labour.