Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science

Speaker 1 All right. Today, the pleasure of speaking with Razeb Khan.
He's one of the top science bloggers in the world. He writes about genetics, history, and evolution on his blog, Unsupervised Learnings.

Speaker 1 And he has a podcast of the same name.

Speaker 1 And you can find it at razeeb.substack.com. So, Razeb, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Speaker 2 That was my pleasure, man.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. So, can you give my audience a little bit of background about you, how you got into all this stuff? stuff? Yeah,

Speaker 2 you know, I've always been interested in topics like history,

Speaker 2 demographics, etc.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I've also been interested in science, have a scientific background, scientific training.

Speaker 2 And over the last 20 years, genetics has become just a really big deal in terms of, you know, just as a tool to do various things, whether it's in the biomedical space or historical inference.

Speaker 2 And, you know, so obviously I'm interested in demographics historical inference and

Speaker 2 you know

Speaker 2 genetics is a tool I can use as a geneticist and so I do

Speaker 2 so you know like

Speaker 2 like as we're recording right now I

Speaker 2 decided to do a bunch of pairwise genetic distances between populations and stuff just because I could for a post you know

Speaker 2 so uh you know I do a lot of things by myself where I replicate what's been done

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I mean, that's a lot of what I do. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 Interesting.

Speaker 1 All right. So I'd just like to jump into it.
So, my first question is: assuming there's no gene editing in the near future, what is the long-term equilibrium for intelligence look like?

Speaker 1 So, there's like multiple visions, right? Like, one view is like, you know, Charles Morrison coming apart. You have, you know, you have fat tails because there's a sortative meeting.

Speaker 1 Another is there's like a slight dysgenic effect because there's lower fertility among higher intelligence people.

Speaker 1 So, what does the equilibrium look like if there's no gene editing?

Speaker 2 More like the second, in terms of not an equilibrium yet.

Speaker 2 We're not going to have an equilibrium until

Speaker 2 the reproductive differentials equilibrate. They will at some point, you know, but it could be centuries.

Speaker 2 So, like, at this point,

Speaker 2 people with genes for educational attainment tend to delay childbearing to the point where a lot of them do not have children, you know, because they invest in educational attainment in the short term.

Speaker 2 So, you know, they don't have as many children and their generation times are longer. Like the math is difficult there, right?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 right now, there's a strong native selection.

Speaker 2 Not strong. 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.

Speaker 1 Is this something we're going to expect in the long term? Because like, naively, I would expect like people who are more intelligent,

Speaker 1 as long as there's, you know, some sort of selection pressure in the long term,

Speaker 1 there should be selection for,

Speaker 1 I guess, educated, smart people, because

Speaker 1 they will just have the cognitive tools to

Speaker 1 actually

Speaker 1 reproduce or survive and thrive, right?

Speaker 1 As long as some smart people want to survive and thrive.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 2 survive and thrive is one thing, but have a repur have

Speaker 2 offspring is a different thing.

Speaker 2 You know, the incentives in our society are such that a lot of people believe that thriving is being child-free.

Speaker 2 Or what usually happens, I think, is people want to establish themselves in their 20s and they don't want to put too much thought.

Speaker 2 I mean, at least, you know, professional managerial, college-educated people. And then in their 30s, they start thinking about it.
And sometimes people wait too long.

Speaker 2 There's fertility issues or just they just wait too long and they can't find someone else.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 yeah, 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.

Speaker 2 And on the contrary, um, there's clear evidence that uh not being bright is good for your reproductive output. So, you know, yeah, there's a movie about that in 2006.
So

Speaker 1 the movie is called 2006?

Speaker 2 No, 2006 Idiocracy.

Speaker 1 Oh, I see.

Speaker 1 What explains the level of endogamy you see in

Speaker 1 between Indian Jatis, like Indian subcasts? Because you have a very excellent blog post about this. And so apparently, as you say, there's genetic evidence that for thousands of years,

Speaker 1 these Jatis living in the same village,

Speaker 1 they're not intermarrying, they're not having kids together.

Speaker 1 You know, even within the context of like, you know, slaves in America, this is not a thing that happens, right? Like you have Sally Hemmings,

Speaker 1 you know, Thomas Jefferson's mistress.

Speaker 1 So like, I don't, how is it possible for thousands of people? What kind of social structure could lead to this?

Speaker 2 Yeah, nobody really knows. Uh, is a short answer.

Speaker 2 So, the math is like, you know, there's like there's evidence 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.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, you know, when I was younger,

Speaker 2 you know, the endogamy rate for like black Americans was like 95%,

Speaker 2 which is high, and today it's like 85%, you know. But

Speaker 2 you know, five percent is like ten times bigger than what I'm talking about, you know. So, yeah, like you said, uh, average black American is 20% European in ancestry, etc., etc.

Speaker 2 So, um, it's just like there's really high barriers in the Indian subcontinent in terms of like how it can be maintained.

Speaker 2 One thing that I wonder about is um, infanticide, um, perhaps, I mean, maybe there's like the social taboos

Speaker 2 reproductive fitness is really low I don't know I it doesn't you know for humans it doesn't make sense but the the data is what it is Indians just are really good at endogamy for some reason

Speaker 2 you know whereas in other populations the general pattern is

Speaker 2 you know I mean

Speaker 2 you see someone you're like oh they're fine you know

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. One thing leads to another, you know, it's just like, that's, you know, this isn't,

Speaker 2 it's not rocket science, it's universal human nature, right?

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 somehow Indians were able to escape that. No one knows really, no one really knows.
I mean, I've had multiple geneticists come up to me and be like, what's up with this?

Speaker 2 I don't know. And he's like, why are you asking me? And they're like, well, I mean.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 for a mammal where the males in particular are highly um polygynous, you know? And ideal. So

Speaker 1 I I mean, are are there any hypotheses out there about that to try to explain this?

Speaker 2 Not really. I mean, you know, it's like, oh, like, caste system, blah, blah, blah, you know, but

Speaker 2 again, I mean, you know, sexual exploitation of lower caste women by upper caste 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.

Speaker 2 So, like, uh, the Nair the Nair group in Kerala,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 many of them, many of the women traditionally, not always, but

Speaker 2 they had these relationships with

Speaker 2 Kerala Brahmins, Namuthiri Brahmins, that weren't marriages, but there was like consort there were consorts and, you know, Carol, I think the Nairs also did polyandry and other things, but, you know, you see in the Nairs, you see, like, a va range of, like, genetic distance to Nambutiri Brahmins, and that's just because they're biological fathers, their fathers I mean I don't know if they call them fathers but you know I mean

Speaker 2 are

Speaker 2 of that group so that 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

Speaker 2 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 the 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

Speaker 2 You know, very, very endogamous people. Because people are like, you know, people are like, oh, well, there's no other example.
And I'm like, actually, there is.

Speaker 2 Like Ashkenazi Jews, the Roma, who themselves are of part Indian origin. You know,

Speaker 2 there's a few examples. The issue is just like having a whole society like this is pretty weird.

Speaker 2 That is the innovation. It's like, oh, let's have a whole society that's stratified.
So, you know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's very interesting.

Speaker 1 Speaking of Ashkenazi Jews,

Speaker 1 I thought your post on that was very interesting. And, you know, you talk about how, you know, before Jews were kind of liberated in Europe in the 18th century, or sorry, was it 19th century?

Speaker 2 There just wasn't that much 19th century.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 1 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 were bottlenecked by a similar process

Speaker 1 and who are also very endogamous that once they get to a point of prosperity and liberation that Jews went through in the 19th century, you know, in the future, we'll just be talking about how they're outputting a greater portion of the world's cultural heritage.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 you know, like parts of the world that are just going through industrialization now and might have like small populations like Austrian Jews, right?

Speaker 1 Is there potential for like a new Austrian Jew in the next century or two? I guess what I'm asking.

Speaker 2 So, what you need, so Australian Jews are highly endogamous, were. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, they emerged in the context of Central East Europe as a middleman minority.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 what the whole thing is, like, you know, Haredi Jews dressed like Polish nobles, you know, because they worked for these Polish nobles as factors and tax collectors and administrators and whatnot.

Speaker 2 So I guess you have to look for something like that.

Speaker 2 One, you know, this isn't totally equivalent because endogamy is not a big issue here, but like Fujianese, you know, Chinese from Fujian have traditionally done better on examinations going back a thousand years, going back to the Song dynasty.

Speaker 2 So there were like affirmative action quotas on people from Fujian.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 if you look at like who, so Fujian, people basically, a lot of the rich Chinese, not all, obviously,

Speaker 2 but, you know, traditionally, like in Hong Kong, the elite families are,

Speaker 2 you know, Shanghai's, some Fujianese. And so, like, these coastal, southeast coastal people in China have traditionally been extremely enterprising.

Speaker 2 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 populations might come into their own, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Although, didn't you write somewhere else that 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 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 the UC Noshanaji Jews are 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.

Speaker 2 And, you know, they still kind of tend to intermarry. I mean, they're spatially isolated.
But, you know, again, like, um, the Hakka,

Speaker 2 the Hakka are not like Ashkenazi Jews in having an ideological reason for their endogamy. Um, you know, Chinese

Speaker 2 lineages,

Speaker 2 sometimes not like Indian lineages, but um, are paternal, you know, um, so your identity and who you are, your clan is determined by who your father is.

Speaker 2 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 clan.

Speaker 2 And so, that's, I think, how assimilation has happened.

Speaker 2 Genetically, people, Guangdong, like the Cantonese, like they have a minority of, you know, indigenous or south ethnic group, you know, ancestry.

Speaker 2 Some of their practices are clearly not Han Chinese, especially like certain marriage practices, certain things that women do.

Speaker 2 And most of the gene flow is probably from females,

Speaker 2 from non-Han that were assimilated in the area. So, yeah, the Han identity is very assimilative.

Speaker 2 North of the Yangtze, pretty much every Han sample that I have has a little bit of West Eurasian ancestry. South the Yangtze, none of them have it.

Speaker 2 And so I think most of that West Eurasia is probably assimilated Mongols and other things like that. Because the Mongols are about 10%.

Speaker 2 Assimilated Mongol. Yeah.
I think that's what it is. Because the Mongols are about 10% West Eurasian.
And the TAL for me is,

Speaker 2 you know, like about 1% of northern Chinese Han men have R1A.

Speaker 2 Maybe 0.5%. It's not super high, but

Speaker 2 R1A is, you know, mostly found in Indo-Iranians and Slavs. And Mongols have it.
They have the Indo-Iranian version because they assimilated Scythians and Sarmatians and other Iranian steppe people.

Speaker 2 So I think that's probably where that comes into the Chinese.

Speaker 2 And, you know, you can go back to the Toba Turks and other groups after the fall of the Han dynasty, you know, 1500 or actually 1700 years ago, 17, 1800 years ago.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think that's when they started introducing that genetic element to northern China.

Speaker 2 North of the Yangtze.

Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Interesting.

Speaker 1 By the way, so there's 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

Speaker 1 from Brahmin Jatis.

Speaker 1 Is there a particular reason that that seems to be happening?

Speaker 2 Wait, what seems to happen? Can you repeat that again?

Speaker 1 Why are a lot of big tech CEOs Indians and specifically a lot of them from Brahmin, you know, Brahmins?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, the guy from Tuk talks not.
He's Bonniean.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think

Speaker 2 the Indian explanation, which you probably know, is like Brahmins are literate, they're symbolic manipulators,

Speaker 2 and so obviously, you know, if you're working at Microsoft or Google,

Speaker 2 and they tend to be particularly South Indian Brahmins, actually, as opposed to North Indian Brahmins, there aren't that many of those.

Speaker 2 And this goes back to the colonial period, actually.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So, you know, this is like a long-standing issue or issue, a phenomenon of South Indian English-speaking Brahmin elites in particular

Speaker 2 availing themselves of technology, higher education.

Speaker 2 You know, Tamil Brahmins, for example, are very well represented in engineering and software. And that's obviously the pipeline that Indian Americans are going into as CEOs, highly overrepresented.

Speaker 2 You know, so I think

Speaker 2 the CEO of Microsoft and CEO of

Speaker 2 Google are both South Indian Brahmins. They're both Telugu Brahmins.

Speaker 2 There's some like debates, I think, whether

Speaker 2 the guy at Microsoft

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 But anyway, yeah, so I think Brahmins are, you know, like Ashkenazi Jews, you know, they analogize themselves, particularly South Indian Brahmins.

Speaker 2 I think we do have to distinguish that because because I, you know, you know, like, one of you heard of like a Guju Brahmin or a UP Brahmin, you know, it's like those people just stay where they are.

Speaker 2 You know, they're not, um,

Speaker 2 you know, they're local landed elites, but they're

Speaker 2 like well known outside of the Indian subcontinent, or, you know, to be honest, within the Indian subcontinent, from what I can see.

Speaker 1 What explains that? I mean, sorry, I read

Speaker 1 a part of the Satya, he's the Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, and he talked about how his

Speaker 1 parents were like these Marxist philosophers, you know, Brahmin philosophers.

Speaker 1 But anyway, so what explains

Speaker 1 what explains why these North Indians were, I guess, complacent and these South Indians were availing themselves of

Speaker 1 the resources.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I think in UP

Speaker 2 and Bihar in particular, the elites,

Speaker 2 they tend to like to be big fish with small ponds. So it's not like there's like Rajput Thakurs all over the world either from UP, right? Punjab is different.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of Punjabis all over the world of various groups.

Speaker 2 You you know a lot of jats uh as agriculturalists farmers in central valley cottries all over the place you know um in contrast in up vihar these north indian states um there's just like there's less dynamism less cultural dynamism the behavioral economic literature shows like a really 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

Speaker 2 they prefer to be at the pinnacle of the local uh power structure rather than taking a risk going somewhere else where they might not be at the peak.

Speaker 2 You know, they might be way more well off in the aggregate, but

Speaker 2 they wouldn't be at the peak. And so, for example, someone like Chandra Sekhar of Chandra Sekhar Limit, he's a Tamil Brahmin by background.
Obviously, he settled in the United States eventually. But,

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 they experienced some kind of discrimination, you know, prejudice being South Indians in the North.

Speaker 2 And then Chandra Sekar went to the United States and just during the time of segregation, you know, and they tried to put him in the blacks-only area in St. Louis, like for some

Speaker 2 sports game. There's like all sorts of things that happened, you know.
And then he experienced prejudice at the hand of, I think, like Arthur Eddington in particular, was pretty

Speaker 2 prejudiced against Indians and their ability to contribute to physics.

Speaker 1 So, um, is that the guy who uh proved uh Einstein's uh

Speaker 1 the proved relativity, right?

Speaker 2 Okay, yeah, yeah, I think empirically, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, but I mean, I mean, at least that's Chandra Sekar's take.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, you don't know if it's like 100% true that Eddington was really, you know, who knows? Because sometimes it turns out that there's personal beefs going on.

Speaker 2 I don't think Eddington ever told his side, he died a long time ago. Chandra Seykar lived until like,

Speaker 2 wasn't it like until 10 years ago? I think he died 10 years ago.

Speaker 2 Yeah, i think

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 He was still around giving quotes. So, yeah.

Speaker 1 Does the work you do involve a lot of traveling? I mean, you're writing about all these different areas of the world and, you know, their

Speaker 1 anthropological and genetic history. But I wonder if

Speaker 1 that requires you or if it helps you to just travel to all these places or are you able to do that just from just from here?

Speaker 2 I do mostly in 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,

Speaker 2 you know, I'm not. Yeah,

Speaker 2 I don't do that.

Speaker 2 Some people do. You know, Spencer Wells, who I worked with, former boss,

Speaker 2 he's, you you know traveled all over the world and you know 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 steppe he's been there a lot so you know he can add a lot to that

Speaker 2 been a few places

Speaker 2 if if if I mean I don't know if you read the Finland series I've been to Finland you know

Speaker 2 So there's 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.

Speaker 2 You know, so, I mean, it was, there wasn't like, ooh, like, whoa, like, I really understand the British people now. Just like, okay, they're drinking a lot.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Huh.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so that's, that's one thing I was wondering is knowing all that you know about the history of these different places, do you feel that when you visit a place or when you learn more about a a place that you're like, oh, I what they're doing today, that makes sense to me, like why it is the way it is, given what I know about, you know, the roots of what what happened in that place thousands of years ago?

Speaker 1 Or does it feel that it's just kind of random?

Speaker 2 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 because of this.
And they're like, what?

Speaker 2 Oh.

Speaker 2 You know, like they don't because you don't know the antecedents of, you know, we don't know the antecedents of everything we do. And so a lot of times I do.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I mean, the thing was, like, you know, for example, like, um, Americans are really ignorant in geography. So, uh,

Speaker 2 um, so 2019, I'm a scientific conference of American studying human genetics. You know, I'm meeting these people, you know, you're just networking, you're meeting.

Speaker 2 Um, so I met this uh Chinese geneticist.

Speaker 2 She's, I think she's in grad school of the United States. And I was like, oh, like, where are you from? She was just like, oh, I'm from a city between Beijing.

Speaker 2 and Guangdong, like exactly in the middle. Okay.

Speaker 2 So here's my train of thought. So I immediately blurred out Wuhan.

Speaker 2 And she was like, whoa, how'd you guess that? You know? Okay, so one, she was shocked that I knew what Wuhan, that I knew of Wuhan, right? Because most Americans don't.

Speaker 2 Two, Shanghai is in the middle, but if she was from Shanghai, she would say Shanghai.

Speaker 2 So it had to be another city. I happen to know that there's a high-speed rail line between

Speaker 2 Beijing and Guangdong,

Speaker 2 between Guangzhou, and

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I was like, oh, you're pretty tall. Like, you know, are you from North China? He's like, yeah, yeah, I'm from the eastern.
I'm like, Shandong. And then he was just like, whoa, how'd you know that?

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 that's wicked crazy. How'd you know that? And I'm just like, uh,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 but it's because I know, like, everybody outside of America rightfully assumes that Americans do not know anything about where they're from, like, nothing.

Speaker 2 You know, and so it's just like an incredible party trick with an American accent to be like, you are from Praha.

Speaker 1 You know, they're like, what?

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 1 by the way, can you guess my Shati?

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, I know you're Guju, right? Uh-huh. But I couldn't, I didn't guess it.
I don't know it by the name. I mean, you look, are you like half Patel, half Banny? I'm just guessing.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Did I guess right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 That's exactly right.

Speaker 2 How about Jesus? I don't even know, man.

Speaker 1 Yeah, my dad is Patel and my mom is Bania. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay. All right.

Speaker 2 Exactly correct. Okay, guys.

Speaker 2 This was not a conspiracy between us. Like, he literally, like, just, I didn't know that question was going to be asked.
And I actually didn't have any. I just looked at him and I was just like,

Speaker 2 this is my guess. This is my educated guess.

Speaker 1 Right, right. So that alone should justify your subscription.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I've had this question about,

Speaker 1 you know, the greater male variance theory for a long time, which is that,

Speaker 1 so basically the idea is

Speaker 1 men produce more geniuses, but also more idiots.

Speaker 1 So, I've always wondered, like,

Speaker 1 why is that the case? Because

Speaker 1 there must be some mechanism that just increases the variation,

Speaker 1 like, you know, gives you a higher odds of being a genius, but at the cost of higher odds of also being an idiot,

Speaker 1 that is more activated than men, right? Like, why, what is the trade-off that

Speaker 1 involves

Speaker 1 if you activate this trade-off, you might have a higher odds of becoming a genius, but also a higher odds odds of becoming an idiot.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, you got to like BS a little bit about the molecular mechanism. I haven't looked at it in detail in a while, but one of the hypotheses is, for example, we have one X chromosome.

Speaker 2 So with X chromosomes, normally with women,

Speaker 2 there's

Speaker 2 inactivation of one X chromosome randomly in the cell, right?

Speaker 2 Or in the tissue or whatever, in the tissue region, bar bodies, right?

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 euchromatic.

Speaker 2 People are going to be like, oh my God, he's getting euchromatic and heterochromatic mixed. I always get a mixed up.
Okay, I'm not a molecular geneticist.

Speaker 2 But anyway, so one of the X chromosomes has to inactivate and that's random. Okay.

Speaker 2 So let's say a woman has like a major mutation. in the X chromosome, you know that like she has another copy, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's only one X chromosome,

Speaker 2 right? So obviously, that's limiting the degrees of freedom, right?

Speaker 2 And so, if that's a 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.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, the easiest explanation for why at the low end men have problems is probably,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Um, in terms of we are the heterogametic sex, so we're the sex that has like, so in birds, I think it's the opposite, or I know it is the opposite.

Speaker 2 Um, females are the heterogametic sex, the sex determination happens through them,

Speaker 2 and males have like the equivalent of two X's. I think it's ZW, and I think the males are

Speaker 2 ZZ. Anyway,

Speaker 2 so that's one issue. And when you think developmentally, you know, we all start out as females.
The female is the template.

Speaker 2 And so men have to go through extra processes. So at the end of life, it's the opposite.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But at the beginning of life, I think it's at the end of the first trimester, we go through this testosterone burst right sry the sex um you know

Speaker 2 you know the sex chromosome the you know the sex determining region kicks in and we become male we become masculized so when you have a situation when you have extra developmental steps hey guess what that can mess things up okay

Speaker 2 so we also have higher testosterone testosterone is antagonistic to immune response.

Speaker 2 So there are more males born than females, probably because the Y chromosome of the male,

Speaker 2 the sperm of a male Y chromosome is lighter than when it has an X chromosome. Okay, so probably male sperm,

Speaker 2 quote, male sperm, have an advantage in speed. There's about 104, 105 males born.

Speaker 2 for 100 females, but in utero, there's a strong suspicion from people that have done like sampling on miscarriage, miscarried fetuses that males are overrepresented.

Speaker 2 So we actually start out with a bigger advantage. And we're already culled because of our genetic abnormality, something on the order of like 10 to 50% of fetuses miscarry.

Speaker 2 It's still kind of not clear with the total numbers because it's really hard to track miscarriages early on, right?

Speaker 2 And so 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

Speaker 2 there's really no reproductive value at the high end. It's just kind of like a freak thing.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 if we're less developmentally stable,

Speaker 2 we can go off target a little bit more is the way I think of it. There's no reason you need to have your IQB like once.
There's no reason you need to be able to do algebraic topology easily.

Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 2 There's no reason. And there is some evidence.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, some. There's some evidence.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but is there some reason in the ancestral environment why, I don't know, having a brain capable of algebraic topology would be advantageous?

Speaker 1 Like, is there something that a human would need to do? Okay, and then

Speaker 1 a separate question, I guess, you can answer at the same time.

Speaker 1 Do we have an explanation for why brain size decreased by like what was it?

Speaker 1 Was it 10% or something like that?

Speaker 2 It was just smaller. So our bodies got smaller.

Speaker 2 When it got warmer, we got smaller, but also agriculture seems to have given us really, really weak bones. We got more fragile, more grass-ile.

Speaker 2 We shrunk some with agriculture. And so that natural process of that is smaller brains.
I bet you average nutrition probably decreased some in terms of like quality.

Speaker 2 as opposed to reliability and consistency. That probably meant that, you know, smaller brain sizes are more optimal to survive through the effames.
We know smaller body sizes are

Speaker 1 for sure.

Speaker 2 We know smaller body sizes are. There's been a lot of negative selection in southern Europe and in Asia for small body size.

Speaker 2 And last I checked, it seems pretty clear that people in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent are shorter genetically.

Speaker 2 Like some of it is like East Asian ancestry, but I mean, just clearly Bengalis are just a short people, you know?

Speaker 2 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 used to when i was or 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

Speaker 2 people people you know your your parents because my dad's shorty your parents didn't eat a lot of meat i'm just like okay but like now that i know about genetics nutrition and class background i'm like no like my my family

Speaker 2 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's Muslim, so they eat beef and they got protein.

Speaker 2 No, they're just short because of genetics, you know. And why?

Speaker 2 Well, we know the Bangladesh, the Bengali populations, Bangladesh, they have cholera resistance, obviously, because, you know, the issues with flooding and water.

Speaker 2 That's different than other

Speaker 2 Indian subcontinental populations. There's some reasons why they're small, too.
I don't know why, why Bengalis are small, but that's obviously true.

Speaker 1 So, sorry, what's the link between cholera and height?

Speaker 2 Or cholera? There's no link. I'm just saying, like, there's been studies in selection.
There's selection for resistance to cholera in Bengal.

Speaker 2 It's one of the canonical examples, like the Vibria, whatever, like that, the microbe. There's clearly strong selection because of the cholera over the last couple of centuries.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 I guess

Speaker 1 they happen together. They're associated in many different mammals with

Speaker 1 domestication, you know, like smaller smaller jaws,

Speaker 1 males and females looking similar, and then, you know, less intelligence. There's a cluster of other things.

Speaker 1 But so basically, the idea is that the same thing happened to humans during the agricultural revolution.

Speaker 2 What do you make of that idea? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a plausible. I think

Speaker 2 it hasn't really

Speaker 2 panned out in terms of the genomics. Let's just put it that way.
Because this hypothesis has been around for a generation, and it hasn't really panned out in terms of the genomics. So, um,

Speaker 2 I guess what I would say is, like,

Speaker 2 um,

Speaker 2 it could be that, uh,

Speaker 2 um,

Speaker 2 and uh,

Speaker 2 let's see,

Speaker 1 let's see,

Speaker 2 um,

Speaker 2 what I would say is it could be humans are special in some distinct ways, okay?

Speaker 2 Um, because the, because, like,

Speaker 2 it's been studied in foxes and other organisms extensively, but

Speaker 2 it hasn't been, and dogs,

Speaker 2 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, floppy ears,

Speaker 2 just really, really common patterns across mammals because the same developmental pathways are tuned. We obviously don't have floppy ears and we don't show high ball patterning.
So

Speaker 2 I think it's a great idea. I just don't know for sure

Speaker 2 how it operationalizes in humans. Let's put it that way.
I mean, it's been a generation. We have genomic resources, and it hasn't really, I haven't seen too much advancement in that direction.

Speaker 1 Gotcha.

Speaker 1 Okay, so this morning you tweeted, 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.

Speaker 1 And then you followed it up with a tweet that said,

Speaker 1 in parentheses, I'm not talking about religion. So I genuinely don't know

Speaker 1 what what you're referring to in that tweet. I don't know if you meant to keep it unsaid, but I was just kind of curious.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was being stressed in. I was just having a discussion.

Speaker 2 I'll tell you what it was. Just having a discussion with a scientist friend of mine, we were talking about collegiality

Speaker 2 and truth. And, you know, it's like sometimes, sometimes it seems like in science today,

Speaker 2 and it's just not just online, but just in general, you know, like the community

Speaker 2 and just like, you know, comfort I guess I don't know is like prioritized and a lot of it's fake you know science is like it is like

Speaker 2 is like

Speaker 2 it's like it's like management consulting it's up or out

Speaker 2 you know

Speaker 2 so all this stuff about like support and

Speaker 2 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, a relevant one, right?

Speaker 2 So, all this stuff about how we're here to support you. No, like we're here to like separate the weed from the chaff.
So, that's kind of like fake right there.

Speaker 2 But, you know, there's a lot of talk about, you know,

Speaker 2 just kind of the community and not making people uncomfortable and inclusion and equity. And I'm just like, science is like super inequitous.

Speaker 2 Right? It's not like it's not like PD. It's not like pediatrics or something, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, there are superstar pediatricians but look the average pediatrician makes a difference and pediatrician is 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 looking 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.

Speaker 2 That makes people blah, blah, blah. I'm just like,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the other thing is,

Speaker 2 you know, like, I thought science was here for the truth. Like, if that's not the primary focus, if you're here for like quality of life,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 I don't know. Like, why are we funding it then? You know, I don't know.
Yeah. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it makes sense. It's not only unequal in the sense that there's like a locked curve where a small minority of scientists make the largest,

Speaker 1 much larger portion of the total contribution to science, but it's also unequal. I think it was you who said this or wrote about this.

Speaker 1 I don't know where I saw this, but professors, the career professorship has the highest heredity in the sense that the highest correlation between the parent being a professor and the child being a professor.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Is that you? Yeah.

Speaker 2 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 I was like, okay, everyone knows this. Everybody in science knows this.

Speaker 2 My dad is a professor, by the way. But anyway, I'm not.
But I'm just saying that, like, everybody who... So one thing is, so I have a friend.

Speaker 2 Like, I'm, you know, so people in science, people who go into graduate school in academic science, they, you know, reason first generation is a thing is because it's so skewed toward professional managerial class people in general.

Speaker 2 It's very, very class biased, you know?

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 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 knows, I mean, it's the same thing in medicine. Like, I have a friend.

Speaker 2 He's in medicine. I think his parents are engineers.
And, you know, he said that they told him for medical school interviews, it's going to count against you that your parents aren't doctors.

Speaker 2 Because they just assume you don't know as much about like how to make it in the profession. Right.
And so there's a tacit stuff that gets passed on.

Speaker 2 Like, I have a friend, he's, he is a research one professor. He does have tenure.
I mean, he has succeeded, but he comes from a very working class background.

Speaker 2 And by the time he got to the postdoctoral fellow stage, which is after PhD, before professorship, he was like talking to people, and they were talking about their choices that they made as undergrads and blah blah blah.

Speaker 2 And he just thought to himself, and you know, he's

Speaker 2 he's in like in his field, he's in a top 10 institution. He's not at like Harvard, but he's in a top, so he's doing really well.

Speaker 2 So, I don't want to undersell how much he's accomplished, but you know, what he literally told me, he's like, you know, I just thought to myself, I was like, I never had a chance,

Speaker 2 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 Dr.

Speaker 2 He never had a chance. So, um, you know, that is what it 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,

Speaker 2 who,

Speaker 2 you know, like some of the most, um,

Speaker 2 where is it? There's a, like, there's a professor, I'm not gonna name who it is explicitly, but people who follow academic Twitter probably know who I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 Um, they work in biomedical science, and you know, they do periodic virtual signaling, uh, just like standard progressive stuff.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I mean, they're smart, okay?

Speaker 2 But, okay, like they knew exactly how to succeed in science because they had all the family connections in the world.

Speaker 2 And, um,

Speaker 2 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 there's one guy online who's like super super progressive but a friend of mine told me he's like notorious dick

Speaker 2 um to his to people in his lap where it's like he's the really bad boss he's really mean really demanding so obviously he's just covering his butt like on social media.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It doesn't make sense you know um you're supposed to be here 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 in a research institution and god is the truth and if you're not there for the truth

Speaker 2 uh eventually the the institution is 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 don't have passion for the truth uh what's the point

Speaker 1 yeah yeah um there's this professor we both know but obviously i'm not going to say who it is um and so his um his his his kids um also want to become uh professors so it the um

Speaker 1 uh the the the the kid uh they um 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 somebody who just goes into college like oh this subject seems interesting to me maybe i should consider a graduate uh academic career here obviously there's like no comparison in the in just the level of advantage you have if you if you have been planning it out uh like yeah i don't know i i don't know what's going on here um

Speaker 2 I've talked to multiple friends who are like in postdoc level, and they just talked about like they can see over the last 10 years a massive inflation in publication where their postdocs now and like some of their graduate students have like two or three publications coming in.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 You know, and we,

Speaker 2 I mean, you know this, like, okay, like in the past, they didn't publish as much, but they did a lot of science. So this is, this is like one of those issues when you devise a metric.

Speaker 2 To measure something eventually the metric gets distorted, right? It's just like a truism. The metrics getting distorted.
There are people who are like producing.

Speaker 2 I mean, look, I mean, some of these researchers who are like, who have like 30 papers a year? What, what, what?

Speaker 2 You know, I mean, you're not contributing, you're just, you're not really contributing to it, you know? So, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 There's like, uh, there's like full-time bloggers who don't output as many blog posts as you are outputting papers, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, uh, yeah,

Speaker 2 yeah.

Speaker 1 Um, okay, so within the spheres that I travel in, maybe that you travel in as well, like EA edges and stuff, there's this idea that we are living in like a very important time in history.

Speaker 1 And then there's like

Speaker 1 a step function, right? So that you have like different steps, like agriculture, domestication, metallurgy,

Speaker 1 industrialization. And like we're at another step right now.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 from all the people I know, you know the most about history, especially ancient history. So do you view history as a sort of

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Like what is your view of your long view of history?

Speaker 2 I think it's mostly gradual.

Speaker 2 We reify it into a step, but I think we might actually be at a step now.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 if the slope is steep enough, it's a step.

Speaker 2 Right?

Speaker 2 So I think we might be at a step now.

Speaker 2 And there have been steps in the past, but mostly we reify. So the Industrial Revolution, my understanding from economic history, is really more gradual and exponential

Speaker 2 than the quote revolution. Agriculture was probably like that as well.
Peter Turchin's work with some of his collaborators indicates that the Axial Age was actually more gradual.

Speaker 2 Some of the coalescing of ideas, it wasn't like a step within one century, you know, around 600 BC or whatever. So,

Speaker 2 you know, this is just a situation where most of the time i think we we tend to like simplify this a step but you know um you know right now

Speaker 2 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 just scrambling you know we have supercomputers in our pockets they're called phones you know we're doing you know science fictional video stuff

Speaker 2 and uh my kids uh who are like my oldest kid is say 10 my youngest is like five right something like that and so they're they're a little dubious about this idea sometimes you use the phone uh for these non-video calls

Speaker 2 and they're very confused why people would do that and they're very skeptical of this idea that that's what this phone was actually originally designed for

Speaker 2 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 of how that could be a phone like what is this ancient technology from 2007

Speaker 2 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 of whatever, right?

Speaker 2 Um, and so, like, you know, my kids saw the phone and they were like, what is this thing?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You know?

Speaker 2 And they have an old rotary like toy phone.

Speaker 2 They traditionally use it as a hammer. You know, it's just like they don't really know what the form factor is, it's totally like weird for them.

Speaker 2 So, you know, um, we are living through a radical change in terms of, you know, like our social technology or information technology.

Speaker 2 Like most of your viewers probably know Chris Weil, information technology is exponential. Yeah.
So there are some radical changes going on right now, and we need to

Speaker 2 think about what that means because I think we're like, you know, I mean, VR

Speaker 2 is going to be a big deal. So I have said, like, I did say 20 years ago, probably.

Speaker 2 Because, again, like, you know, I know people hope Holden will be okay with me saying that. I've known Holden for 15 years, you know?

Speaker 2 Holden Karnofsky, I think he's, you know, might be one of the people you're talking about about this century.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I think that we are in a meta-stable state right now where, I mean, I'm looking at you right right now, and you look like a primate, you know, and you are a primate,

Speaker 2 you know, but like you have access to all this technology. Like, what's going on? You know, especially, or not, just in general.
Like, I look at myself. When I see myself, I don't see a primate.

Speaker 2 I see Razeev. You know what I'm saying? But if you look at another person,

Speaker 2 it's just like really, really like, you know, you think about it. It can be really, really visible.

Speaker 2 It's really, really visible

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 you're an animal of like that particular lineage. You know, if you, when you look at,

Speaker 2 you see the way they move, you know, you think about, so like, how long is this going to persist? Like, we obviously evolved during the Pleistocene, even earlier with a lot of our instincts.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You know, there's probably going to be people in the southern hemisphere for sure that are going to survive. But we destroy our civilization.

Speaker 2 And civilizations have destroyed in the past, have been destroyed in the past

Speaker 2 by

Speaker 2 overreach,

Speaker 2 but those civilizations had like local collapses, local regressions. And then they got like more, we got more robust with Samaburya would call social technology, right?

Speaker 2 So, for example, you see the Chinese dynastic cycle, it keeps shrinking every single time in terms of the chaotic interregnum.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 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 relatively easily, right? So like the first big

Speaker 2 first big unwinding is Xiao dynasty doesn't really count, but let's do the Zhao. That's like 500 years decline, compared to warring states, and then the Han, you know, the Qin Han dynasty.

Speaker 2 Then there's like

Speaker 2 a 300-year period of collapse.

Speaker 2 And then there's like a 150-year period of collapse. You know, it just keeps shrinking every single time.

Speaker 2 And so showing you that like cultural or social technology is getting better, information technology is getting better. But now we're global.

Speaker 2 And so like, even if there's like a 50-year collapse, I mean,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 there's a lot of stuff that we're going to lose. You know, and Samo and others have talked about the fact that like we can't make rockets the way we could.

Speaker 2 50 years ago because a lot of those engineers are not, you know, and our military runs on like COBOL, COBOL software that barely anyone can read. It's like cuneiform,

Speaker 2 you know, so it's like the Babylonians, like we laugh at them for like 2,000 years or 1,500 years, 2,000 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 COBOL programmers, but we have COBOL software base.

Speaker 2 And so people are going to have to like, you know, train and like learn from these manuals, these ancient texts from the 1970s, how to do it. I mean, it's not like that difficult.
It's feasible.

Speaker 2 But the issue here is like timing and time

Speaker 2 because you might not have enough programmers to service all the code that you have.

Speaker 2 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 how to make it work.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Sustain.
Sustain.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I had a samo on just a little while back to discuss exactly these topics.
So, for the listeners who are interested, definitely check out that episode.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and even with something like, you know, COBOL or software engineering, like as somebody who started computer science, like even something that's that legible, you know, you can have sort of implicit knowledge from previous programmers or like, how does the entire system work?

Speaker 1 And, you know, this is like literally a written word, right? That's what a program is. So that's super legible.
Compare that to other forms of manufacturing.

Speaker 1 I know a guy who worked at a fertilizer plant.

Speaker 1 And, you know, maybe I shouldn't 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?

Speaker 1 We've lost the source of nitrogen here.

Speaker 1 So, yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, so

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, do you see, knowing what you know about genetics and the potential malleability of our genetics, do you see the future iteration iteration as

Speaker 1 us adding on to or modifying or selecting on the same biological substrate? Or do you see the future iteration? Do you think it's more feasible that we just move on to entirely virtual,

Speaker 1 we're like M's living on computers? Like, which seems more feasible to you?

Speaker 2 I mean, it would be ironic if we're a simulation that uploads ourselves into a computer.

Speaker 2 But anyway, I don't want to get into that. You know, I don't want to get into that.

Speaker 2 What the more feasible? I think in the, in the, okay, like, the biological program of redoing ourselves, I think is like actually,

Speaker 2 it's not straightforward in terms of like, you know, minimal risk. There's going to be a lot of false starts, which is going to be kind of crazy.
But I do think people will improve themselves. Okay.

Speaker 2 I think they will edit themselves better over the next century.

Speaker 2 But I think that there's going to be.

Speaker 2 Some integration with brain computer interfaces. Yes, I do.
I mean, I haven't like followed it closely, but I do move in some of the similar circles.

Speaker 2 And I think 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...

Speaker 2 But the issue there is like,

Speaker 2 so I guess I think of gene editing, to be honest, more as like Smithian growth, whereas

Speaker 2 increased efficiencies. Because we have the genetic variation now.
Like we can make him smarter. We have the technology.
Okay, we're not there yet. I can see that though.

Speaker 2 I mean, we can all like understand the basic logic there. Like, there is

Speaker 2 John Von Noman existed. The experiment has been done.
Yeah. So we can aspire to create a bunch of von Nomans.
Okay, that's great. Now, the issue is like

Speaker 2 with the human computer interfaces, that's never been done, right? So that is

Speaker 2 like an innovation. That's like, you know, technology-driven growth that's increasing like the baseline productivity by like a crazy amount.
Like, that's, that could be the possible quantum lead. So,

Speaker 2 um,

Speaker 2 excuse me, um, that could be a big deal, uh, in a good way or a bad way.

Speaker 2 And I think a lot of your listeners know about all the existential risk crisis and artificial, you know, like we talk about, like, you know, hostile AI and general artificial intelligence and all this stuff.

Speaker 2 But, I mean,

Speaker 2 I mean, perhaps it'll start with us.

Speaker 2 You know, perhaps Skynet will be some uploaded crazy kid, you know, where it's like,

Speaker 2 maybe it's going to 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

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 obviously, the ships just disappeared. You know, they die, you know, they died at sea, right? So there's going to be people who do things like going to Mars.

Speaker 2 There's going to be high mortality rates, you know, these sorts of things. Similarly, with like these human computer interfaces, there's going to be high death rates.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 it's going to be a situation where they may be like actually like a very, very advantageous position.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They iterate, they pivot. And so they can be like, you know, the god of that universe.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 I'm just speculating here, but I'm trying to say that like, I think the possibilities there are like pretty extensive, pretty high variance.

Speaker 1 And in the short term, what is the landscape of

Speaker 1 just,

Speaker 1 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 could raise your kids' IQ by one or two standard deviations?

Speaker 1 Or are these going to be like

Speaker 1 marginal improvements?

Speaker 1 By the time I'm ready to have kids, what will it look like?

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, I think with gene editing, the intelligence intelligence thing is going to be like 20 years. Let's say 20 years, okay?

Speaker 2 Like, I think in the short term, gene editing really will do is will probably cure cystic fibrosis, clear sickle cell.

Speaker 2 Like, these are like Mendelian, quasi-Mendelian diseases with large effect loci, and people just have issues. And so, you know, there's always a delivery problem.

Speaker 2 There's always a problem with off-target effects, which could cause mutations, could cause cancers. But, you know, if you're cystic fibrosis, you're going to be dead by 45.

Speaker 2 you're going to take the risk, right? So I think that's honestly going to be the first thing.

Speaker 2 The first thing is going to be transfection or like, you know, gene editing of adults for Mendelian diseases. So that's the next 10 years.
Okay. It's already happening now.

Speaker 2 They're already curing people of malaria or sickle cell.

Speaker 2 And I think they're working literally right now as we record on cystic fibrosis and ALS, you know, because they're just degenerative diseases that kill people in the prime of their

Speaker 2 lives.

Speaker 2 But, you know, 20 years, that's a long time.

Speaker 2 You know, we have 40-year-old IVF babies now, you know?

Speaker 2 I think almost 40. But

Speaker 2 so I think 20 years, yes, you will start to see parents editing the genes of their offspring.

Speaker 2 I think intelligence is like difficult

Speaker 2 because it's a polygenic trait

Speaker 2 with 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

Speaker 2 Armand Leroy was talking about it, but other people is like, it's not like what you should do is focus for like, focus on mutations and other things try to fix those and see if that just inadvertently like increases the you know intelligence 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 compare to the pedigree of the parents look at the de novo mutations look at the parents de novo mutations against the idealized reference etc etc 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?

Speaker 2 Let's see.

Speaker 2 How many SNPs?

Speaker 2 It's going to be the order of thousands.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right. So just some meta questions to close out on.
So

Speaker 1 you've, you know, you distinguished yourself in your career by being somebody who's like an expert in history and an expert in genomics and life sciences more generally.

Speaker 1 Are there other fields where you think knowledge of history would be very useful in setting up like a separate niche? Because you have a niche in history and genomics.

Speaker 1 But it would be hard to imagine, for example, somebody knowing a lot about history and computer science having a special niche, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, cultural evolution. That's what Joe Henrik and some of his people

Speaker 2 wanted to do.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I think like in cultural evolution, there's going to be a lot of gains because, you know, Peter Turchin, Joe Henrik, Henrik, these people are applying evolutionary principles to historical processes.

Speaker 2 And to have the empirical data set,

Speaker 2 to have the empirical data set is 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.

Speaker 2 Peter said, like, oh, like getting anthropology knowledge. And I'm like,

Speaker 2 I don't think the short-term knowledge is super important. I think having a deep, deep, not deep, thick knowledge about historical arcs

Speaker 2 would probably probably be pretty useful. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Interesting. Interesting.

Speaker 2 Joe and his group are, they're working in that. They're moving into history.
They're doing some serious imperialism that's causing problems.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Causing problems how? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Just historians do not like the

Speaker 2 turf infringement. That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 I see. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 And so you, you're, you're one of the top bloggers on Substack and you have this like deeply technical blog on, you know, the science of genomics and other things.

Speaker 1 You would think beforehand that your prior would be like, oh, how many people are going to be able to understand this or be interested in this? But in fact, you're one of the top people on Substack.

Speaker 1 What has the experience of that been like? And has it surprised you, the popularity of your work and everything?

Speaker 2 Honestly, no.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, it surprised. Okay, I'm going to be honest.
It probably surprised me how many people are willing to pay, but people have been reading me for a long time.

Speaker 2 So I just kind of professionalized it some.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 2 it's it's been great.

Speaker 2 And it's really like helped me figure out what people are interested in in terms of what they're willing to pay for. And,

Speaker 2 you know, it's given me some direction, I guess. But

Speaker 2 I plan to do, I basically do what I continue to have done in various ways in the past into the future. And, you know, like thinking in the startup world

Speaker 2 way, I would pivot and iterate is what is what I'm thinking.

Speaker 1 And final question, do you have any advice for people who like want to write about technical topics in a way that's like very interesting to a broad audience?

Speaker 2 Okay, so you have to make it relevant to them somehow. So for example,

Speaker 2 like let's say you want to write about signal detection.

Speaker 2 I think, you know, text-to-speech type stuff

Speaker 2 is one of the there are things people are super interested in. So for example, people are super interested in oxygenatic Jewish genetics.

Speaker 2 People are super interested in the genetic architecture of skin color. I mean, okay, why?

Speaker 2 I could talk about the genetic architecture of, like, I don't know, something else,

Speaker 2 you know, and it wouldn't be as super interesting. So, you have to find the domain that they're interested in and then apply your method, right?

Speaker 2 So, if you're interested in, so actually, there's a sub-stack on personality

Speaker 2 that talks about personality and using machine learning methods to classify personality. Okay.
Machine learning is technical, but personality is interesting.

Speaker 1 Interesting. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's good advice. All right, Brazeev.
Yeah, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for your time.