so the tweet was the parishioner would be like the person involved in a laboratory in a research institution and god is the truth and if you're not there for the truth uh eventually the the institution's not going to make it it's just going to kind of dissolve
because at the end of the day if you don't have passion for research if you're not passion for the truth uh what's the point i don't know england just seemed like the united states but whiter uh but by the way can you guys remind
zhanti uh well i mean i know you're guchu right uh-huh are you like half patel half bonnie i'm just guessing yeah yeah did i guess right yeah yeah that's exactly right [Laughter] i don't even know man [Music] all right today the pleasure of speaking
with razip khan he's one of the top science bloggers in the world um he writes about genetics history and evolution on his blog unsupervised learnings and he has a podcast of the same name um and you can find it at brazil.sup stack dot com
so uh raziv thanks for coming on the podcast that was my pleasure man yeah yeah so can you give my audience a little bit of background about you uh how you got into all this stuff yeah um you know i've always been interested in
topics like history uh demographics etc and um i've also been interested in science i have a scientific background scientific training and over the last 20 years uh genetics has become just a really big deal uh in terms of you know just as a tool
to do various things whether it's in the biomedical space or historical inference and um you know so obviously i'm interested in demographics historical inference and um you know genetics is a tool i can use as a geneticist and so i do um
so you know like uh like like as we're recording right now i um decided to do a bunch of pairwise genetic distances between populations and stuff just because i could for a post you know so uh you know i i do a lot of things by myself where i replicate what's been done
um yeah so i mean that's a lot of what i do yeah okay interesting um all right so i just like to jump into it so uh my first question is assuming there's no gene editing uh in the near future what is the long-term equilibrium for intelligence look like so there's like
multiple visions right like one one view is like you know charles marine coming apart you have uh you know you have fat tails because there's assortative meaning another is there's like a slight dysgenic effect because there's lower
fertility among higher intelligence people um so what does the equilibrium look like if there's no gene editing more like the second in terms of not in equilibrium yet uh we're not going to have an equilibrium until you know the reproductive differentials
equilibrium they will at some point you know but it could be centuries um so like at this point um people with genes for educational attainment tend to delay child bearing to the point where a lot of them do not have children you know
because they invest in educational attainment in the short term so you know they don't have as many children and their generation times are longer like the math isn't difficult there right um so right now there's strong negative selection
not strong there's there's negative selection on genes for educational attainment i mean everyone who's looked at it says that at least in the developed world right yeah is this something we can expect in the long term because like naively i would expect like
people who are more intelligent as long as there's you know some sort of selection pressure in the long term um you know like there should be selection for um i guess educated smart uh people because they they will just have the cognitive tools to
uh you know actually uh reproduce or you know survive and thrive right as long as like some smart people want to survive and thrive yeah i mean yeah survive and thrive is one thing but have a reaper have reaper have offspring is a different thing
uh you know the incentives in our society um are such that a lot of people believe that thriving is being child free or you know what usually happens i think is people want to establish themselves in their 20s and they don't want to put too many too
much thought i mean at least you know professional managerial you know college educated people and then in their 30s they start thinking about it and sometimes people wait too long now there's fertility issues or just they just wait too long they can't find
someone else you know so um yeah and in the long term obviously there's a limit there's a limiting principle but you don't need to be that bright to you know survive and have a lot of children and on the contrary um there's clear evidence that
uh not being bright is good for your reproductive output so you know yeah the movie about 2006. so what the movies call 2006 no 2006 idiocracy oh i see um what explains the level of endogamy you see in um between india and jyotis like
indian subcast because you have a very excellent blog post about this and yeah so apparently as you say there's genetic evidence that for thousands of years that these these jaatis like living in the same village you know they're not
intermarrying they're not having uh kids together um you know even within the context of like you know slaves in america this is not a thing that happens right yeah sally hatming's uh you know uh thomas jefferson's um yes so like i i don't know how how is it
possible for a thousand what kind of social structure could lead to this yeah nobody really knows uh there's a short answer so the the math is like you know there's like there's evidence from from andhra pradesh south india david reich looked
at it and it's like if you run the math it's like oh like their endogamy rate is like you know point you know it's like 99.5 per generation like you know super high so i mean you know when when i was younger um you know the endogamy rate for like black americans was like 95
which is high and today it's like 85 you know but you know five percent is like ten times bigger than what i'm talking about you know yeah like you said uh average black americans 20 european and ancestry et cetera et cetera
so um it's just like there's really high barriers in the indian subcontinent in terms of like how it can be maintained one thing that i i wonder about is um infanticide um perhaps i mean maybe just like the social taboos uh reproductive fitness is really low i
don't know i i it doesn't uh you know for humans it doesn't make sense but the data is what it is um indians just are really good at endogamy for some reason um you know whereas in other populations the general pattern is um you know i mean
you see someone you're like oh they're fine you know yeah yeah one thing least you know you know it's just i guess you know this isn't uh it's not rocket science it's universal human nature right but somehow indians were able to escape that
no one know really no one really knows why i mean i've had multiple um gymnastics come up to me and be like what's up with this i don't know and he's like why are you asking me and i'm like well i mean you know you're brown so maybe you know
it's like they're trying to figure out whether there's a secret sauce here because it's just not it doesn't make any sense for a uh for a mammal where the males in particular are highly um collisions you know and ideal so i mean are there any hypotheses out
there about that i try to explain this uh not really i mean you know it's like oh like caste system blah blah you know but again i mean you know sexual exploitation of lower caste women by uppercast men has been a thing so i do wonder like what's up with that i mean
there are some cases where you see things so like on the nare the nayer group in kerala um you know many of them many of the women traditionally not always but they have these relationships with uh kerala brahman's number theory brahmins
that weren't marriages but there was like consort there were consorts and uh you know carol i think the neighbors also did polyandry and other things but you know you see the nerves you see like a very range of like genetic distance phenomena
brahmins and that's just because their biological fathers their fathers i mean i don't know if they call them fathers but you know i mean are of that group so so there are exceptions to this um but you know like like you're telling me yeah like in general in
general i can like look at someone uh most indians and like figure out like what their community as they say is from which is like not like typical you know most most of like most of the world's not like that it's basically
like if if all of india is like populated by people like ashkenazi jews you know very very indonesian people because people are like you know people are like oh well there's no other example and i'm like actually there is like astronomy jews the roma who
themselves are of part indian origin you know there's there's a few examples the issue is just like having a whole society like this is pretty weird yeah that is that is the the innovation it's like oh let's have a whole society that's stratified so you know
yeah it's very interesting um uh speaking of ashkenazi jews i thought i thought your uh i thought your post on that was very interesting and you know you talk about how um you know before before jews were kind of liberated in europe in the 18th
century or sorry it was the 19th century there just wasn't that early 1990s yep um there wasn't that much jewish achievement and it kind of made me wonder are there like are there some other population groups in the world today that are that were bottlenecked by
a similar process um and who are also very endogamous that you know once they get to a point of prosperity and uh and liberation that jews went through in 19th century you know in the future we'll just be talking about how they're
outputting uh a greater portion of the world's cultural heritage um like you know like parts of the world that are just going through industrialization now and might have like small populations like astrology jews right um is there a potential for like a new
astronomical jew in the next century or two i guess what i'm asking so what you need so optionally jews are highly endogamous were yeah and um you know they they emerged in the context of central east europe as a middle man minority
um you know what what the whole thing is like you know her ready jews dress like polish nobles you know because they worked for these polish nobles as factors and tax collectors and administrators and whatnot um so i guess you have to look
for something like that one you know this isn't totally equivalent because uh dog means not a big issue here but like fujianis you know chinese from fujian have traditionally done better on examinations going back a thousand years go back to song dynasty
uh so there were like um affirmative action quotas on people from yeah so if you look at like who so fuji people basically a lot of rich chinese not all obviously um but you know traditionally like in hong kong uh the elite families are um
you know shanghaiees some fujianese and so like these coastal southeast coastal people in china have traditionally been extremely enterprising and central government in china has often clamped down on them obviously this government is not the modern economy cannot and so
i think these these populations might come into their own you know yeah although didn't you write somewhere else that the the chinese government for a long time like not just you know the ccp but like i guess china you know in
chinese history there's been uh many instances of the government trying to um get rid of like genetically distinct groups by i guess breeding them into the larger stock so potentially that reduces the odds of some uh you know outlier endogamous group
yeah so in china the only equivalent like like that you would see an astronomy juice or the hakka in south china and the hakka are descended from northern chinese migrants and so they speak like a dialect of mandarin um northern chinese you know dialect in
the south like in guangdong where the cantonese and taishanese are and you know they're still kind of tender i mean they're they're spatially isolated but you know again like um the hakka and the hakka are not like optimizing
jews and having an ideological reason for their endogamy uh you know chinese uh lineages it's almost not like indian lineages but um are paternal you know um so your identity and who you are your plan is determined by who your father is
so um you know that's i mean you might have a lower status if your mother is an ethnic minority like zhuang or uyghur or something like that but you know informally but still officially you're part of the plan and so that's i think how assimilation has happened genetically
people in guangdong like the cantonese like they have a minority of um you know indigenous or south south ethnic group you know uh ancestry some of their practices are clearly not han chinese especially like certain marriage practices certain things that
women do um and most of the gene flows probably from females from non from non-han that were assimilated in the area so yeah the han identity is very speculative north of um north of the yangtze pretty much every han sample that i have has a
little bit of west eurasian ancestry south vianzi none of them have it and so i think most of that west eurasia's probably assimilated mongolians and other things like that because the mongols are about 10 assimilated mongol yeah i think that's
what it is because the mongols are about 10 west eurasian uh and the towel for me is um you know like about one percent of northern chinese han men have uh r1a maybe 0.5 it's not super high but um r1a is you know mostly founded in iranians and slavs and mongols have it
they have the indo-iranian version because they assimilated scythians and sarmatians and other iranian step people so i think that's probably where that comes into the chinese and you know you can go back to the toba turks and and
other groups after the fall of the han dynasty you know 1500 or actually seventeen hundred years ago seventeen eighteen hundred years ago i mean i think that's when they started introducing that genetic element to northern china north of yangtze uh-huh interesting um
by the way i said there's uh going back to india there's been a lot of talk about how a lot of american ceos of big tech companies are indians specifically uh for you know from brahman jaates um is there is there some particular reason that
that seems to be happening what seems to can you repeat that again well why are a lot of uh big tech ceos indians and specifically a lot of them from uh brahmin uh you know brahmins yeah well the guy from twick talks not he's um well i mean i think the the the
indian explanation which you probably know is like brahma's illiterate there are symbolic manipulators um and so obviously you know if you work at microsoft or google um and they tend to be particularly south indian brahmins actually
as opposed to north indian brahmanas aren't that many of those um and this goes back to the colonial period actually um south indian brahmins would migrate to the cities of north india to work in the indian civil service you know the reverse would not happen
so um you know this is like a long-standing issue or issue a phenomenon of south indian english-speaking prominent leads in particular availing themselves of technology higher education you know tamil brahmans for example are very
well represented in engineering and software and that's obviously the pipeline that indian americans are going in into a ceos highly represented um you know so i think um you know the ceo microsoft and ceo of google are both south indian brahmins
they're both telugu brahmins there's some there's some like debates i think whether um whether the guy at microsoft uh is a brahmin online because i don't know i can't tell these sorts of things i mean i can but not like i don't have a
good instinct you know what i'm saying but um anyway yeah so i think brahmins are you know like ashkenazi jews you know they analogize themselves particularly south indian problems i think we do have to distinguish that because that you know
like one of you heard about a guju brahmin or a up brahman you know it's like those people just stay where they are you know they're not um you know they're they're local landed elites but they're not like well known outside of the indian
subcontinent or you know to be honest within the indian subcontinent from what i can see what explains that i mean i sorry i read um i i read a part of he's the microsoft ceo said nadella and he he talked about how his like uh parents were like these marxist
philosophers you know roman philosophers um but anyway so what explains um what explains why these north indians were i guess uh complacent and these uh south indians were availing themselves of uh you know the resources are the elites they tend to be they tend
to like to be big fish in small ponds so it's not like there's like raj put soccer's all over the world either from up right uh punjab is different there's a lot of punjabis all over the world of various groups uh you know a lot of jots uh as
agricultural is farmers in central valley countries all over the place you know um in contrast in up behind these north indian states um there's just like there's less dynamism less cultural dynamism the behavioral economic literature shows
like a real strong preference for zero-sum gains um wanting to be like at the um at the pinnacle of the local this is not always true you know but they they prefer to be at the pinnacle of the local power structure rather than taking a risk going into
somewhere else where they might not be at the peak you know they might be way well more well off in the aggregate but you know they wouldn't be at the peak and so for example someone like um like chandrasekhar of chandrasekhar limit
he's a tamil brahman by background obviously he settled in the united states eventually but um you know i think he was born in lahore his dad was working for the indian civil service and you know if you read his biography they experienced like some kind of
discrimination you know prejudice being south indians in the north and then chandrasekhar went to the united states and just during the time of segregation you know and they tried to like put him in the blacks only area in st louis like for some uh
sports game just like all sorts of things that happened you know and then he experienced prejudice at the handler of i think arthur eddington in particular was was pretty pretty prejudiced against indians and their ability to contribute to physics so
um is that the guy who approved einstein's uh or the improved relativity right okay yeah yeah i think empirically yeah yeah so yeah but i mean i mean at least that's chandrasekhar take like you know you don't know if it's like 100 true that
anything was really you know who knows because sometimes it turns out that there's personal beefs going on i don't think anything ever told his side he died a long time ago chandrasekhar lived until like it wasn't like until 10 years ago i
think he died 10 years ago yeah i think oh no not 10 years ago like 1995 so a while though yeah yeah 95 so 25 years ago but yeah i mean he was still i mean so he was still around when i was in high school i remember someone did a report on him
and you know it was hard to find information back then but you know you could he was still around giving quotes so yeah um does the work you do involve a lot of traveling i mean you're writing about all these different areas of the world uh and you know their
anthropological and genetic history uh i wonder if that if that requires you or if it helps you to like just travel to all these places or are you able to do that just from uh just from here i guess i do most of the united states i
mean i've traveled a little bit but not too much i'm not a big traveler internationally i'm not a you know i'm like yeah i don't i don't do that um some people do you know spencer wells who i worked with former boss uh he's you know traveled all over the
world and you know with natural geographic and stuff that adds a lot of local color in terms of things you see things you know whenever we talked about the eurasian step he's been there a lot so you know he can add a lot to that um in a few places um if
if i mean i don't know if you read the finland series i've been to finland you know so there are certain things that i know about finland i've been to finland i've been to italy i don't know england just seemed like the united states but whiter you know so
i mean it was there wasn't like oh like whoa like i really understand the british people now i'm just like okay they're drinking a lot i think i i think i am not surprised by that just judging by you know like all those british sitcoms and tv shows where they're like
drinking in the morning i get it now you know so huh yeah so that's that's one thing i was wondering is knowing all that should know about uh the history of these different places do you feel that when you visit a place or when you learn
more about a place you're like oh i what they're doing today that makes sense to me like why why it is the way it is given what i know about you know the the roots of what happened in that place thousands of years ago or does it
feel that it just looks kind of random no it's not random sometimes you do i mean there's sometimes where it's like you know someone does this or their family does this and i'm like oh it's cause this they're like what oh you know like they don't because you
don't know the antecedents of you know we don't know the entities of everything we do and so a lot of times i do and you know i mean the thing was like you know for example like um americans are really ignorant in geography so uh
um so 2019 i'm a scientific conference american society human genetics you know i'm meeting these people you know you're just not working you're meeting um so i met this uh chinese geneticist she's i think she's in grad school united states and i was like oh like
where are you from she was just like oh i'm from a city between beijing and guangdong like exactly in the middle okay so here's my my train of thought so i immediately blurred out wuhan she was like whoa how'd you guess that you know okay so what she was shocked
that i knew what that i knew of wuhan right because most americans don't two shanghai is the middle but if she was from shanghai she would say shanghai so it had to be another city i happen to know that there's a high speed line rail
line between um beijing and guangdong its middle point is wuhan so i knew wuhan was exactly in the middle right and so i was like you know these are the sort of things i mean it's like ooh like an american it's like super amazing because we don't know any
geography like her friend was like you know i was like looking at him i was like oh you're pretty tall like you know are you from north chinese like yeah yeah i'm from the east and i'm like shandong and then he was just like whoa
how'd you know that i'm like what's the easternmost province i mean i mean it's just an educated do you know what i'm saying if someone's like someone's like has like um they're talking about chowder you know and drinking tonic
and it's like wicked smart and i'm just like are you from boston they're like whoa that's wicked crazy how'd you know that i'm just like uh you know but it's because because i know like everybody outside of america rightfully assumes that americans do not
know anything about where they're from like nothing yeah and so it's just like an incredible party trick with an american accent to be like you are from praha you know they're like what you know uh but by the way can you guess my uh well i mean i know you're guju right
uh-huh but i i couldn't i didn't guess it um i don't know by the name i mean you look uh are you like half patel half bonnie i'm just guessing yeah yeah did i guess right yeah yeah that's exactly right i don't even know man but my mom my dad
uh my yeah my dad is patel and my mom is uh yeah okay all right that's exactly correct okay guys um this is not a conspiracy between us like he literally like just i i didn't know that question was going to be asked and i actually didn't have any i just
like looked at him and i was just like this is my guess my educated guess right right so that alone should justify your subscription um yeah um okay so i i've had this question about um you know the greater male variance uh
theory uh for a long time which is that uh so basically the idea is men produce more geniuses but also more idiots um so i've always wondered like um why is that the case because you would so is there some there must be some mechanism that like just increases
the variation um like you know gives you a higher odds of being a genius but at the cost of higher odds of also being an idiot um that is like more activated than men right like why what is the trade-off that um involves uh
if you activate this trade-off you might have a higher odds of becoming a genius but also a higher odds of becoming an idiot yeah um so i mean you gotta like bs a little bit about the molecular mechanism or like i haven't looked at in detail in a while
but one of the hypotheses is for example we have one x chromosome so with x chromosomes normally with women um there's uh inactivation of one x chromosome randomly in the cell right or in the tissue or whatever in the tissue region of our bodies right so
every cell has an x chromosome and they tend to clump where it's like they're these like bar bodies like x chromosomes that are inactivated they're not expressing they're like like euchromatic okay people are going to be like oh my god like he's getting
euchromatic and heterochromatic always get a messed up okay i'm not a molecular geneticist but anyway um so one of the x chromosomes has to inactivate and that's random okay so let's say um a woman has a major mutation
in the x chromosome you know that like she has another copy right but you know it could be that in that cell there's a malfunction because the other copy is the one that's inactivated the one that's functional now if you're a man there's no choice it's only one x
chromosome right so obviously that's from limiting the degrees of freedom right and so if that's good copy if it's got some good stuff going on there well that's good but if it's got bad stuff going on there well you're screwed so i mean the
easiest explanation for why the at the low end men have problems is probably okay well we have a load of deleterious alleles on our x chromosomes that are not masked because we only have one of them right so that's one thing um
in terms of we are the heterogametic sex so we're the sex that has like so in in birds i think it's the opposite or i know it is the opposite um females are the heterogeneic sex the sex determination happens through them and males have like the equivalent of two x's
zw and i think the males are zzz anyway um so that's one issue and when you think developmentally you know we all start out as females the female is the template um and so men have to go through extra processes so the end of life is the opposite like
women go through menopause which is a proactive physiological shutdown not just like a long slow decline like we go through in our reproductive processes but at the beginning of life i think it's the end of the first trimester we go through this testosterone burst right
sry the sex um you know you know sex chromosome you know the sex determining region kicks in and we become male we come masculinized so when you have a situation when you have extra developmental steps hey guess what that can mess things up okay
so we also have higher testosterone testosterone is antagonistic to immune response um so there are more males born than females probably because the y chromosome of the male a sexual the sperm of a male y chromosome is lighter
than when it has an x chromosome okay so probably male sperm quote male sperm have an advantage in speed there's about 104 105 males born for 100 females but in utero there's a strong suspicion from people that have done like sampling on
miscarriage miscarriage fetuses the males are overrepresented so we actually start out with a bigger advantage and we're already cold because of our genetic abnormality something on the order of like 10 to 50 percent of fetuses miscarry it's still kind of not clear with the
total number so it's really hard to track miscarriages early on right um and so so that that explains like i think the downward the low end in terms of why there might be more male quote geniuses i think the way you might want
to look at it is there's really no reproductive value with the high end it's just kind of like a freak thing and um if we're less developmentally stable uh we can go off target a little bit more is the way i think of it there's no reason you need you need
to have your iqb like once there's no reason you need to be able to do algebraic topology easily okay yeah there's no reason there is some evidence there is some evidence in the genomic literature now with the most recent work that there is some
enrichment for schizophrenia and other things with some of these educational attainment genes like some there's some evidence yeah but is there some reason in the um ancestral environment why i don't know having a brain capable of algebraic
topology would be advantageous like is there something that a human would need to do okay and then uh but it's a separate question i guess uh you can answer at the same time do we have explanation for why brain size decreased by uh like uh what was it
uh what was ten percent or something like that absolutely yeah it was just smaller so our bodies got smaller like when it got warmer we got smaller but also agriculture seems to have given us really really weak bones we got more fragile more gracile
we shrunk some with agriculture and so that natural process of that the smaller brains i bet you average nutrition probably decrease some in terms of like quality as opposed to reliability and consistency that probably meant that you know smaller brain sizes are
more optimal to survive uh through the assailants we know smaller body sizes are for sure we know small smaller body sizes are there's been a lot of negative selection in southern europe and in asia for small body size and um last i checked
it seems pretty clear that people in the eastern part of the indian subcontinent are shorter genetically and some of it is like east asian ancestry but like i mean clearly like bengalis are just a short people you know uh if you just like meet like people
from bangladesh or west bengal in the west and like they're chubby af because they get a lot to eat so it's not like genetics you know like i usually when i'm not or not genetics but like environment i used to i was like when i was little
people would say like oh well you know people people you know your parents because my dad's short you your parents didn't eat a lot of meat i was just like okay but like now that i know about genetics nutrition and class background
i'm like no like my my family like you know like people were like obese in my family like they had enough to eat they didn't suffer from the bengal famine and also my family is muslim so they eat beef and they got protein no they're just short because genetics
you know and why well we know the bangla bengali populations bangladesh they have cholera resistance obviously because you know the issues with flooding and water um that's different than others has any indians have gotten into populations
there's some reasons why they're small too i don't know why why why bank dollars are small but that's obviously true so sorry what's the link between cholera and height we're calling there's no link i'm just saying like there's been studies in selection uh there's
selection for resistance to cholera in bengal one of the canonical examples like the vibrio whatever like that the the microbe there's clearly a strong selection because of the cholera over the last couple of centuries yeah and then what do you make of the
self-domestication hypothesis the idea that there's like a there's a set of genes that um i guess yeah they happen together they're associated in many different mammals with um domestication you know like smaller jaws um males and females uh looking uh
similar and then you know less intelligence there's a cluster of other things but so basically the idea is that the same thing happened to humans during the agricultural revolution what do you make of that yeah i mean i think it's a plausible i think um it hasn't really um
uh uh um it hasn't really panned out in terms of the genomics let's just put that way because this hypothesis been around for a generation and it hasn't really panned out in terms of the genomics so um i guess what i would say is like
um it could be that uh um and uh let's see let's see um what i would say is it could be humans are special in some distinct ways okay um because because like the it's been studied in foxes and other organisms extensively but um
it hasn't been and dogs you know and there's a spackling and some of the things let's talk about what you're talking about like there's certain like spackling patterns um floppy ears just really really common patterns across mammals because the same
developmental pathways are itunes we obviously don't have floppy ears and we don't show highball patterning so um i think this i think it's a great idea i just don't know for sure like how it how it operationalizes in humans let's put it that way
i mean it's been it's been a generation we have genomic resources and it hasn't really i haven't seen too much advancement in that direction gotcha um okay so this morning you tweeted um if everyone who attends a church thinks that the point of church
is to bask in the work of the fellow parishioners rather than worshiping god the church won't last long and then you follow that up uh with the tweet that said uh uh in parentheses i'm not talking about religion so i i genuinely
don't know uh what you're what you're referring in that tweet i i don't know if you meant to keep it uh unsaid but i was just kind of curious yeah i was being stressed and i was just having a discussion um i'll tell you what it was just having a discussion with a
scientist friend of mine we're talking about collegiality uh and truth and um you know it's like sometimes sometimes it seems like in science today um and it's just not just online but just in general uh you know like the community um
and just like you know comfort i guess uh i don't know is like prioritized it's a lot of it's fake um you know science is like it is like um is like uh it's like uh it's like management consulting it's up or out you know so all this stuff about like support and
it's just fake right like one percent of one percent of incoming graduate students will have like a tenured r1 research one like top research one position like you know relevant one right so all this stuff about how we're
here to support you know like we're here to like separate the wheat from the chaff so that's kind of like fake right there but you know there's a lot of talk about you know just kind of the community and not making people uncomfortable and inclusion and equity
and i'm just like science is like super inequities right it's not like it's not like um it's not like pediatrics or something right yeah there are superstar pediatricians but look the average pediatrician makes a difference and pediatrician's a pediatrician in science
it you have like a few superstars who i mean like it's hyper pareto principle right uh it's not like the 2080 it's like you know the five to 95 you know so um anyway it's just a little strange there and um you know the whole idea is
like truth and you know i've you know i'm i i've just seen things where it's like oh like people are like that's just uncomfortable you can't say that that makes people blah blah i'm just like in one it's a very very widowing
profession they haven't changed that no matter what you say like you can repeat these mantras but it doesn't matter like it's a winnowing profession and the other thing is um you know like if the science was here for the truth like if that's not the
primary focus if you're here for like quality of life you know i don't know like why are we funding it then you know i don't know yeah you know yeah yeah yeah it makes sense it's not only unequal in the sense that uh there's like a logic curve where a small
minority of scientists make the largest uh much larger portion of the total uh contribution to science but it's also unequal i think it was you who said this or wrote about this i i don't know where i saw this but um professors the career
professorship has the highest um heredity in the sense that the the highest correlation between the parent being a professor and your child being a professor yeah is that you yeah uh i didn't i mean i probably retweeted it i mean that's not that's obvious i
didn't talk about it expensive because like okay everyone knows this everybody in the science knows this my dad is a professor by the way but anyway i'm not but i'm just saying that like everybody who so um one thing is so i have a friend
like i'm you know so people in science people who go into graduate school and science academic science they you know reason first generation is the thing is because it's so skewed towards professional managerial class people in
general it's very very class biased you know um so yeah anyway it's very class biased but even people who come from professional managerial uh backgrounds if they didn't come from academia they don't always know everything so i have a friend who came from like
very upper upper middle class background and you know he admitted like yeah like he had to learn some things in terms of what you do um to make it in science because you know his i think his dad's a lawyer i don't remember i think his dad's a lawyer but
you know so he know i mean it's the same thing in medicine like i have a friend who's in medicine i think his parents are engineers and you know he's he said that they told him for medical school interviews it's going to count against
you that your parents aren't doctors because they just assume you don't know as much about like how to make it the profession right and so there's a tacit stuff that gets passed on like i have a friend he's um he is a research one
professor he doesn't have tenure and he has succeeded but he comes from a very working class background and by the time he got to the postdoctoral fellow stage which is after phd before professor he was like talking to people and they were talking about their
choices that they made as undergrads and blah blah he just thought to himself and you know he's um he's in like in his field he's in a top 10 institution he's not at like harvard but he's in the top so he's doing really well so i don't want to under undersell
how much he's accomplished but you know he literally told me he's like you know i just thought to myself i was like i never had a chance you know because he just i mean he did well obviously but like he never planned this way he never optimized his own
life because he just he didn't have that background you know yeah just like that he never had a chance so um you know that is what on the margin um it makes a big difference and i think this is why there's a lot of virtue signaling from
some people um who you know like some of the most um what is that there's a like there's a professor might name who it is explicitly but people who follow academic twitter probably know who i'm talking about um they work in biomedical science and
you know they do periodic virtual signaling uh just like standard progressive stuff uh but like i think their uncle was like a nobel prize winner and they did research in their uncle's lab when they were in high school so i mean this is a person who got a
huge leg up by family i mean they're smart okay but okay like they knew exactly how to succeed in science because they had all the family connections in the world and um you know so now i think they overcompensate i think she overcompensates to be honest
that's what everyone assumes privately that's what they say and i think it's probably true you know there's other people like that where um you know online there's a couple there's there's one guy online who's super super progressive but a
friend of mine told me he's like notorious dick um to his to people in his lap where it's like he's a really bad boss he's really mean really demanding so obviously he's just covering his butt like on social media so anyway like my tweet was basically
alluding to the fact that like well if you're not there for the right reasons if everyone's just there to like collect a salary or they don't know what to do with their life um or like they like hanging out with this crew and being on the same like i don't know
ideological team kind of like okay like i mean what is the what is the point of science then you know what is the point of where why are you here why aren't you an accountant or a cpa or something like that i don't know it doesn't it doesn't make sense
you know um you're supposed to hear for a higher calling uh and so okay so the tweet was the parishioner the parishioner would be like the person involved in a laboratory the research institution and god is the truth and if you're not there for the truth
uh eventually the institution's not going to make it it's just going to kind of dissolve because at the end of the day if you don't have passion for research if you're not passion for the truth uh like what's the point yeah yeah
uh there's this professor uh we both know but uh obviously i'm not gonna say who it is um and so his um his his his kids uh also want to become uh professors so the the the kid they just graduated uh high school and then so they had a peer-reviewed published
paper while they were in high school because you know obviously the professor had guided uh guided them so that they would be in a good position to become a professor uh themselves right so when you consider that kind of advantage and
someone who just goes into college like oh this subject seems interesting to me maybe i should consider a graduate academic career here obviously there's like no comparison and they'll ingest the level of advantage you have
if you've been planning it out uh like yeah i don't know i i don't know what's going on here um i've talked to multiple friends who are like in post-doc level and they just talk about like they can see over the last 10 years of massive inflation in publication
where they're postdocs now and like some of their graduate students have like two or three publications coming in and like they didn't have any publications until their like third fourth year of graduate school and they went to the same university so what's
happening here um you know and we i mean you know this like okay like in the past they didn't publish as much because they did a lot of science so this is this is like one of those issues when you devise a metric to measure something eventually the
metric gets distorted right it's just like a true reason the metric's getting distorted there are people who are like producing i mean look i mean some of these researchers who are like who have like 30 papers a year what what what
you know i mean you're not contributing you're just you're not really contributing to it you know so yeah yeah yeah there's like uh there's like full-time bloggers who don't output as many blog posts as you are outputting papers right yeah yeah yeah i mean uh
yeah yeah um okay so within the spears that i travel in maybe that you're traveling as well uh like ea adjust and stuff there's this idea that we are living in uh like a very important time in history and then there's like um
there's like a step function right so that you have like different steps like agriculture domestication metal energy um and industrialization and like we're at another step right now um so from all the people i know you you know the most about history especially
ancient history um so do you view history as a sort of um a series of step functions each one the newest one more important than the last or do you view it as just like a sort of a gradual exponential curve like what is your view of your long view of history
i think it's mostly gradual uh we we rarefied into a step but i think we might actually be at a step now i mean if the slope is steep enough it's a step right um so i think we might be at a step now um and there have been steps in the past
but mostly we rarify so the industrial revolution my understanding from economic history is really more gradual and exponential uh than like quote revolution agriculture was probably like that as well uh peter churchill's work with some of
his collaborators indicates that the axial age was actually more gradual um some of the coalescing of ideas it wasn't like a step within one century you know around 600 bc or whatever so um you know this is just a situation where most of the time i think we
we tend to like simplify it as a step but you know uh you know right now we live in an age of miracles that we don't take for granted because you know me you everybody we're just we're scrambling you know we have super computers in our pockets they're called
phones you know we're doing you know science fictional video stuff and uh my kids uh who are like my oldest kid is say ted my youngest is like five right something like that so they're they're a little dubious about this idea
sometimes you use the phone uh for these non-video calls and they're very confused why people do that and they're very skeptical of this idea that that's what this phone was actually originally designed for you know so i mean like this is to the point
where it's like okay like and like also like they um they see a flip phone and they're very confused with how that could be a phone like what is this ancient technology from 2007 you know so it's just like you know because we have like a like a lot of
people we have like a desk full of phones old phones that we never threw away because whatever right um and so like you know my kids saw the phone and they were like what is this thing and like it's cool and they're like i'm like oh that's a
phone and they're like no but a phone's square you know and um they have an old rotary like toy phone um they traditionally use it as a hammer you know it's just like they don't really know what the the form factor it's totally like weird for them so you
know um we are living through a radical change in terms of you know like our social technology or information technology like most your viewers probably know kurzweil information technology is exponential yeah so there are some radical changes going on right
now and we need to um think about what that means because i think we're like you know i mean vr is going to be a big deal so i i have said like i did say 20 years ago probably um because again like you know i know people
hope hold it will be okay with me saying i've known holden for 15 years you know uh holden karnovsky i think he's you know might be one of the people you're talking about about this century and i've said like this might be like the last century of
humans in a way that we would recognize or it might be a century of regression i i think that we are in a meta-stable state right now where i mean i'm looking at you right now and you look like a primate you know and you are a primate you know but like you
have access to all this technology like what's going on especially or not just in general like i look at myself when i see myself i don't see a primate i see receive you know what i'm saying but if you look at another person
it's just like really really like you know you think about it can be really really visible um um it's really really visible uh that um that you're an animal of like that particular lineage you know if you when you look at right you see where they move
you know you think about so like how long is this going to persist like we obviously evolved during the pleistocene and even earlier with a lot of our instincts now we have like the ability to destroy the world our civilization like we're not going to exterminate all
life on earth like that's just you know probably not even all humans you know there's probably going to be people in the southern hemisphere for sure that are going to survive but it will destroy our civilization and civilizations have destroyed in the
past have been destroyed in the past um by you know overreach you know but those civilizations had like local collapses local regressions and then they got like more we got more robust what sama burya would call social technology right
um so for example you see the chinese dynastic cycle uh it keeps shrinking every single time in terms of the chaotic in a rectum so one that means that the previous dynasty was its institutional structure is probably more robust to shocks and then
it can rewind itself back up uh relatively easily right so like the first big um first big unwinding is the shadow dynasty doesn't really count but let's do the job that's like 500 years decline here to warring states and then the hot you know the
the chin han dynasty then there's like like a 300 year period of collapse and then there's like a hundred fifty year period of collapse you know it just keeps shrinking every single time and so showing you that like the cultural social technology is
getting better information technology is getting better but now we're global and so like even if there's like a 50-year collapse i mean you know there's a lot of stuff that we're going to lose you know and you know samo and
others have talked about the fact that like we can't make rockets the way we could 50 years ago because a lot of those engineers are not you know and our military runs on like cobalt cobalt software that barely anyone can read it's like cuneiform
you know so it's like the babylonians like we laugh at them for like 2000 years i thought 1500 years 2000 years after the last native sumerian speaker died they were using sumerian liturgy you know but we are going to have a
situation soon where there's going to be almost no cobalt programmers but we have cobalt software base and so people are going to have to like you know train and like learn from these manuals these ancient texts from the 1970s uh how to i mean it's not like that
difficult it's feasible but the issue is like a timing and time um because you might not have enough programmers to service all the code that you have like so these are real issues that i think we have to deal with as primates who've organically developed
this technological system and are trying to figure out um how to make it work yeah yeah um sustain right uh yeah i i had ammo on just a little while back to discuss exactly these topics so for the listeners were interested definitely check out that episode yeah
and even with something like um you know cobalt or software engineering like somebody started uh computer science like even something that's that legible you know you can have a sort of implicit knowledge from previous programmers or
like how does the entire system work and you know this is like literally a written word right that's what a program is so that's super illegible compare that to other forms of manufacturing i i i know a guy who worked at a fertilizer plant and you know
maybe i should say this on air but he basically said like if somebody did something to this fertilizer plant that's like okay that's a famine right there right we've we've lost uh the source of nitrogen here um uh so yeah um oh so uh going back to you
made a very interesting comment about like we're at a point where we're using our computers to do magic but the person behind that computer is a primate um so do you see knowing what you know about genetics and uh the potential malleability of our
genetics do you see the future iteration as um as us adding on to or modifying or selecting on the same biological substrate or do you see the future iteration do they think it's more feasible that we just move on to uh entirely virtual um we're like m's
living on computers like which seems more feasible to you i mean it would be ironic if we're a simulation that uploads ourselves into a computer but anyway i don't want to get into that you know i don't want to get into that
um what's even more feasible i think that's in the in the okay like the biological program of redoing ourselves i think is like actually it's not straightforward in terms of like you know minimal risk there's going to be a lot of ball starts which is
going to be kind of crazy but i do think people will improve themselves okay i think they will edit themselves better over the next century um and but i think that there's going to be some integration with brain computer interfaces yes i do i mean i haven't
like followed it closely but you know i do move in some of the similar circles and i think you know brain technology interfaces are going to be a big deal and i think they're going to really change the game and i think that's going to be
um but but the issue there is like so i guess i think of gene editing to be honest more as like smithian growth where it's like you know increased efficiencies because we have the genetic variation now like we can make him smarter we have the
technology okay like we're not there yet i can see that though i mean we can all like understand the basic logic there like there is genre jonathan no man existed the experiment has been done yeah so we can aspire to create like a bunch of enormous okay that's great
now the issue is like um with like with the with the human computer interfaces that's never been done right so that is um that is like an innovation that's like you know uh technology driven growth that's increasing like the baseline productivity by like
crazy amount like that's that could be the possible quantum leap so um excuse me um that could be a big deal uh in a good way or a bad way and i think a lot of your listeners know about all the existential risk prices and artificial
you know we talk about like you know hostile ai and general artificial intelligence and all this stuff but i mean i mean perhaps it'll start with us you know perhaps skynet will be some uploaded crazy kid you know where it's like there's something maybe it's gonna be a
situation where it's like it's like going to the new world where you know there were attempts to go to like to the new world they didn't know the new world was there but there were people in the middle ages who left for the west and they never
obviously the ships just disappeared you know they died you know they died at sea right so there's going to be people who do things like going to mars doesn't mean high for mortality rates you know these sorts of things uh similarly with
like these human computer interfaces there's gonna be high death rates like just basically people just disappear into the ether but then the first person that gets in there it's going to be like christopher columbus or you know it's going to be a situation where they
may be like actually like a very very advantageous position instead of being a primitive prototype they might like basically have all the quote unquote land in this cyberspace right where it's like they do all the learnings really early on they
iterate they pivot and so they can be like you know the god of that universe i don't know i'm just speculating here but i'm trying to say that like i think the possibilities they're like pretty extensive pretty high variance and in the short term what is the
landscape of um uh just maybe i guess gene editing polygenic selection what does that look like in the next 10 to 20 years so i mean is there potential that you know you could like raise your kids iq by one or two standard deviations
um or are these going to be like uh marginal uh marginal improvements like by the time i'm ready to have kids what will it look like yeah i think with gene editing the intelligence thing is going to be like 20 years let's say 20 years
okay like i think the short term gene editing really will do is will probably cure cystic fibrosis clear sickle cell like these are like mendelian mendelian diseases with large effect loci and people just have issues and so you know there's always a delivery problem
there's always a problem with off-target effects which can cause mutations could cause cancers but you know if you're cystic fibrosis you're going to be dead by 45 like you're going to take the risk right so i think that's honestly going
to be the first thing the first thing is gonna be transfection or like you know gene editing of adults uh for mendelian diseases so that's the next ten years okay it's already happening now uh they're already curing people of malaria or sickle cell
and i think they're working literally right now as we record on cystic fibrosis and als you know uh because they're just degenerative diseases that kill people in the prime of their life lives um but you know 20 years that's a long time um
you know we have 40 year old ivf babies now you know i think almost 40. but uh so i think 20 years yes you will start to see parents editing the genes of their offspring um i think intelligence is like difficult um because it's a polygenic trait
um with a lot of a lot of different genomic positions i wonder if they're going to go for other things first and then kind of work to it and then you know there's that theory that the arm on leroy was was talking about it but other people is like it's not
like what you should do is focus for like uh focus uh on mutations and other things try to fix those and see if that just inadvertently like increases the you know intelligent interesting rather than focusing on getting gain of function genes which is like okay like
how do you identify those uh fix all of your copy errors uh because that's a finite number look at compared to the pedigree of the parents look at the denova mutations look at the parents renova mutations against the idealized reference et
cetera et cetera that might be much more feasible yeah oh interesting yeah i didn't know about that do you have an estimate for how many snips uh affect the variation in intelligence between people uh let's see um [Music] how many snips
all right it's gonna be order of thousands um yeah so yeah yeah yeah um all right so just just some meta questions to close out on so um you've uh you know you distinguish yourself uh in your career by being somebody who who's like an expert in
history and an expert in genomics and life sciences more generally um are there other fields where you think uh knowledge of history would be very useful in setting up like a separate niche it's because like you have a niche in history and genomics um but you know
it would be hard to imagine for example somebody knowing a lot about history and computer science having a special niche right yeah yeah cultural evolution that's what joe hendrick and some of his people um yeah so i think um i think like in cultural
evolution there's going to be a lot of gains because uh you know peter church and joe henrik these people are applying evolutionary principles to historical processes and to have the empirical data set um um to have the empirical data that's really
important and this is a really new nascent field so i think that that's going to be the big thing that i would think people should focus on um peter said like oh like getting anthropology knowledge and oh my god i i don't think the short term knowledge was super
important i think having a deep deep not deep thick knowledge about historical arcs um um would probably be pretty useful yeah um interesting interesting joe and his group are they're working in that they're they're moving into history
they're going they're doing some serious imp imperialism that's causing problems yeah causing problems how yeah uh just historians do not like the turf turf infringement that's what i'm saying i see yeah yeah yeah right um and you so you're you're one of
the top bloggers on substance and you have this like deeply technical blog on you know the science of genomics and other things um you know that that's like uh you know you would think beforehand that your prior would be like
oh like how many people are gonna be able to understand this or be interested in this but in fact you're you know you're one of the top people like what is the experience of that been like and like has it surprised you the popularity of your work and everything
uh honestly no because uh well i mean a surprise okay i'm gonna be honest it probably surprised me like how many people are willing to pay but people have been reading me for a long time so i just kind of like professionalized it some um and uh
yeah um it's it's been great uh and uh it's really like helped me figure out what people are interested in in terms of what they're willing to pay for and uh you know it's giving me some direction i guess but um i plan to do i
basically do what i continue to have done in various ways in the past into the future and um you know like thinking startup world uh way i would pivot and iterate is what i'm thinking um and final question do you have any advice for people who are like wanting
to write about technical topics uh in a way that's like very interesting to a broad audience uh okay so you have to make it relevant to them somehow so for example uh like let's say you want to write about signal detection um i think you
know um text to speech type stuff is one there there are things people are super interested in so for example people are super interested in astronauts jewish genetics uh people are super interested in the genetic architecture of skin color i mean okay why
i can talk about the genetic architecture of like i don't know something else you know uh and it wouldn't be a super interesting so you you have to find the domain that they're interested in and then apply your method right so if you're interested in so
actually there's a sub stack on personality i think per that talks about personality and using um machine learning methods to classify personality okay machine learning is technical but personality is interesting right interesting okay yeah yeah that's good
advice all right brazil uh yeah thanks so much coming on the podcast thanks for your time that was my pleasure hey i hope you enjoyed that episode if you did you want to help support the podcast the most helpful thing you can do
is share it on social media and make your friends other than that please make sure to like and subscribe and click here for more content like this huge thanks to my co-founder grayson rousher for producing the show i'll see you next time peace [Music] you