On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib has a wide-ranging conversation with Dan Hess, the man behind the More Births account on social media. An engineer with a large family in the DC area, Hess’ essays on topics like Israelis’ high birth rate have gained the attention of X, with an account that has come from a few hundred followers to more than 30,000 in 2 years. Razib and Hess first review the birth-rate collapse seen worldwide in the past two decades. They discuss the relatively abrupt cultural pivot that has occurred since the turn of the century, with the end of the “overpopulation” narrative typified by Paul Erhlich’s Population Bomb, the rise of the “birth dearth” and the natalist movement. They talk about the most extreme cases of low total fertility rates (TFR) in Europe and East Asia, but also the decline in societies like the US, Latin America and the Middle East. Hess addresses both possible causes and possible solutions. They also discuss historical and demographic factors that impact fertility; for example, which religions have been the most pro-natalist? Hess also puts a particular focus on South Korea, the world’s most extreme case of a sharp decrease, with a TFR of about 0.70 children per woman (vs. 2.1 replacement), as well as exceptions to the rule like Haredi Jews and the Amish. Finally, Razib and Hess tackle why we should care about slower population growth in this century, from dependency ratios to the impact on cultural vitality.
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1:44:34
Brian Chau: welcoming the AI-age and DeepSeek
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Brian Chau, who writes at the From the New World Substack. A graduate of the University of Waterloo and former software engineer with a background in pure mathematics, today Chau is executive director of the Alliance for the Future, a think tank that believes artificial intelligence will transform our world for the better. Chau addresses the great “doomer vs. anti-doomer” debate, and argues for an anti-catastrosophist position. He also makes the case that increasing scaling has started to hit diminishing returns, and the expectation that artificial intelligence will continue to gain power purely through throwing more resources at the same problems. Then, they discuss the revolutionary impact of the recent advances DeepSeek has made in China (an issue he addresses on his Substack). Chau breaks down the technological nuts and bolts, as well as geopolitical and economic consequences.
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52:05
John Hawks: 2024 in Neanderthals, Denisovans and Hobbits
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, third-time guest John Hawks returns after two years to discuss what we’ve learned in paleoanthropology since he and Razib last talked. Hawks obtained his PhD under Milford H. Wolpoff, and is currently a professor in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. Hawks has also co-authored Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story and Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins with Lee Berger. Razib first presses Hawks on what we know about archaic human admixture into modern populations, and particularly what we’ve learned about Denisovans. They discuss how many Denisovan populations there were, how many Denisovan fossil remains we have, and why it has taken so long for researchers to assign a species name to this lineage of humans. Hawks also address the puzzle of the phenomenon of why there are at least two pygmy hominin populations in Southeast Asia. Perhaps humans too are subject to island dwarfism like many other mammals? Also, Razib wonders why Southeast Asia was home to such a startling variety of humans at once prior to the arrival of modern populations. They discuss all of this in light of the framework of Out-of-Africa, the recent spread of anatomically modern humans outside of Africa. Razib questions how robust this model is today given our understanding of modern humans’ extensive and repeated interactions with both Neanderthals and Denisovans. Finally, Hawks covers some controversies over fossils being sent into space that roiled the archaeological world last year.
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1:10:42
David Mittelman: pushing the genomic frontier in 2024
Three years ago David Mittelman came on Unsupervised Learning to talk about emerging possibilities on the frontiers of genomics, and his new startup at the time, Othram. Since then, Othram’s work has been featured widely in the media, including in a Law & Order episode, and the firm has solved thousands of unsolved cases, with nearly 500 public. For over a decade, Mittelman has been at the forefront of private-sector genomics research. He trained at Baylor College of Medicine and was previously faculty at Virginia Tech. Razib and Mittelman discuss the changes that the rapid pace of genomic technology has driven in the field of genetics, from the days a $3 billion dollar draft human genome in the year 2000 to readily available $200 consumer genomes in 2024. One consequence of this change has been genetics’ transformation into information science, and the dual necessities of increased data storage and more powerful, incisive data analysis. Genomics made information acquisition and analysis so easy across the research community that it allowed for the pooling of results and discoveries in big databases. This has pulled genetics out of the basic science lab and allowed it to expand into an enterprise with a consumer dimension. Mittelman also discusses the improvements and advances in DNA extraction and analysis techniques that allow companies like his to now glean insights from decades-old samples, with bench sciences operating synergistically with computational biology. Razib and Mittelman talk about how he has helped solve hundreds of cold cases with new technology, in particular, at the intersection between new forensic techniques and both whole-genome sequencing and public genetic databases. They also discuss the future of genetics, and how it might touch our lives through healthcare and other domains, passing from inference to fields like genetic engineering
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56:41
In Search of Indo-Europeans in 2024: of Catacombs and Corded Ware
On this episode of Unsuperivsed Learning reviews what we know about Indo-Europeans as 2024 comes to a close. This is prompted by a new preprint Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages, which finally establishes that populations in Northern and Southwestern Europe derived from a different steppe-origin population than the Greeks and Ilyrians of the Balkans, as well as Armenians. Razib talks about how ancient DNA is resolving long-standing disputes in historical linguistics, and coming down on the side of very particular sets of hypotheses. He discusses Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, and its models about the origins of Indo-European languages, and how they have been falsified by paleogenomics. Razib also steps through the relationship of particular Indo-European groups to ancestral archaeological cultures like the Corded Ware, Bell Beaker and Catacomb Cultures. He also talks about the connections between charioteers and the early Mycenaeans, and looks at Robert Drews’ ideas in Coming of the Greeks. Finally, he addresses outliers in the ancient DNA data that indicate connections between locales as disparate as Scandinavia and Cyprus 4,000 years ago.
Brasil