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

All right. Today, the pleasure of speaking with Razeeb Khan.
He's one of the top science bloggers in the world. He writes about genetics, history, and evolution on his blog, Unsupervised Learnings.
And he has a podcast of the same name. And you can find it at razeeb.substack.com.
So Razeeb, 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, how you got into all this stuff?

Yeah, you know, I've always been interested in topics like history, demographics, etc.

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

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.

And, you know, so obviously I'm interested in demographics, historical inference, and, you know, genetics is a tool I can use as a geneticist, and so I do. So, you know, like, as we're recording right now, I 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 do a lot of things by myself.
Well, I replicate what's been done. Yeah.
So, I mean, that's a lot of what I do. Yeah.
Okay. Interesting.
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? So, there's like multiple visions, right? Like one view is like, you know, Charles Murray and coming apart. You have, you know, you have fat tails because there's assortative mating.
Another is there's like a slight dysgenic effect because there's lower fertility among higher intelligence people. So what does the equilibrium look like if there's no gene editing? More like the second in terms of not an equilibrium yet.
We're not going to have an equilibrium until, you know, the reproductive referentials equilibrate. They will at some point, you know, but it could be centuries.
So, like, at this point, people with genes for educational attainment have 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. So, you know, they don't have as many children and their generation times are longer.
Like the math is difficult there, right? So right now there's a strong negative selection. 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. 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, you know, like there should be selection for, I guess, educated, smart people because they will just have the cognitive tools to, you know, actually reproduce or, you know, survive and thrive.
Right. As long as like some smart people want to survive and thrive.
Yeah. I mean, survive and thrive is one thing, but have have a 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 youeducated people.
And then in their 30s, they start thinking about it. And sometimes people wait too long.
There's fertility issues or they just wait too long. They can't find someone else.
So yeah, in the long term, obviously there's a limit. There's a limiting principle, but you don't need to be that bright, survive and have a lot of children.
And on the contrary, there's clear evidence that not being bright is good for your reproductive output. So, you know, yeah, the movie about 2006.
The movie is called 2006? No, 2006, Idiocracy. Oh, I see.
um what explains the level of endogamy you see in um between indian jatis uh like indian subcasts because you have a very excellent uh blog post about this and so apparently as you say there's genetic evidence that for thousands of years these these jatis 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 like you have selly hemings uh you know uh thomas jefferson's um yeah so i like i don't how how is it possible for thousands of people what kind of social structure could lead to this yeah nobody really knows uh is a short answer 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 ninety nine point five percent per generation, like, you know, super high.
So, I 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 10 times bigger than what i'm talking about you know so yeah like you yeah, like you said, average black America is 20% European in ancestry, etc., etc. So 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 wonder about is infanticide, perhaps. I mean, maybe there's like social taboos.
Reproductive fitness is really low. I don't know.

It doesn't, you know, for humans, it doesn't make sense,

but the data is what it is.

Indians just are really good at endogamy for some reason, you know,

whereas in other populations, the general pattern is, you know, I mean,

you see someone, you're like, oh, they're fine. You know? Yeah, yeah.
One thing leads to another, you know, it's just like, you know, this isn't, it's not rocket science. It's universal human nature, right? But somehow Indians were able to escape that.
No one really knows. I mean, I've had multiple geneticists come up to me and be like, what's up with this? I don't know.
It's like, why are you asking me? And I'm like, well, I mean, 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 doesn't make any sense for a mammal where the males in particular are highly polygynous and 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 blah you know but again i mean you know sexual exploitation of lower caste women by upper caste men has been a thing so i do do wonder, like, what's up with that? I mean, there are some cases where you see things.
So, like, the Nair group in Kerala, you know, many of them, many of the women traditionally, not always, but they had these relationships with Kerala Brahmins, not Matheri Brahmins, that weren't marriages, but there't marriages but there was like consort there were consorts and uh you know carol i think the nyers also did polyandry and other things but you know you see the nyers you see like a very range of like genetic distance to namatiri brahmans 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 that so there exceptions to fathers, but, you know, I mean, are of that group.

So there are exceptions to this.

But, you know, like you're telling me, yeah, like in general, in general, I can like look at someone.

Most Indians like figure out like what their community, as they say, is from, which is like not like typical.

You know, most of the world is not like that.

It's basically like if all of India is populated by people like Ashkenazi Jews.

Very, very endogamous people.

Because people are like, oh, well, there's no other example.

I'm like, actually, there is Ashkenazi Jews, the Roma,

who themselves are of part Indian origin.

There's a few examples.

The issue is just like having a whole society like this is pretty weird. That is the innovation.
It's like, oh, let's have a whole society that's stratified. So, you know.
Yeah, it's very interesting. Speaking of Ashkenazi Jews, 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?

Yeah, early 19th.

achievement yeah um there there wasn't that much of an 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 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. like you know like parts of the world that are just going through industrialization now

and might have like small populations like parts of the world that are just going through

industrialization now and might have like small populations like australian jews right

um is there potential for like a new australian jew in the next century or two is i guess what

i'm asking so what you need so australian jews are highly endogamous were yeah and um you know

they they emerged in the context of central east europe as a middleman minority um you know

Thank you. And, you know, they emerged in the context of Central East Europe as a middleman minority, you know, 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.
So I guess we have to look for something like that um one you know this isn't

totally equivalent because uh dog is not a big issue here but like fujanese you know chinese from fujan have traditionally done better on examinations going back a thousand years going back to zong dynasty uh so there were like um affirmative action quotas on people from yeah so if you

look at like who

so Fujian people basically

a lot of the rich chinese not all obviously um but you know traditionally like in hong kong uh the elite families are um you know shanghaies 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 populations might come into their own. You know? Yeah.
Although, didn't you write somewhere else that the Chinese government for a long time, like not just, you know, the CCP like i guess china uh 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 In China only equivalent like like you'd see nationality Jews sort of the haka in south china and the haka 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 guandong where the cantonese and tachinese are and you know they they still kind of tend to intermarry. I mean, they're spatially isolated.
But again, the Haka are not like Ashkenazi Jews and having an ideological reason for their endogamy. Chinese lineages, some of them sound like Indian lineages, are paternal you know so your identity and who you are your clan is determined by who your father is so 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 you're part of the clan.
And so that's, I think how assimilation has happened. Genetically, people of Guangdong, like the Cantonese, like they have a minority of, you know, indigenous or South ethnic group, you know, ancestry.
Some of their practices are clearly not Han Chinese, especially like certain marriage practices, certain things that women do. And most of the gene flow is probably from females, from non Han that were assimilated in the area.
So yeah, the Han identity is very assimilative. North of the Yangtze, pretty much every Han sample that I have has a little bit of West Eurasian ancestry.
South of thezi none of them have it and so i think most of that west eurasia is probably assimilated mongols 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 tell for me is um you know like about one percent of northern Chinese Han men have R1A, maybe 0.5%. It's not super high, but R1A is, you know, mostly found out Indo-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 other groups after the fall of the Han dynasty, you know, 1500 or actually 1700 years ago, 1700, 1800 years ago.
I mean, I think that's when they started introducing that genetic element to Northern China, north of Yangtze. Uh-huh.
Interesting. By the way, 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 from Brahmin jathis.
Is there some particular reason that that seems to be happening? Wait, what seems to happen? Can you repeat that again? Well, why are a lot of big tech CEOs Indians, and specifically a lot of them from Brahmins? Yeah. Well, the guy from TwikTok's not.
He's Baniya. I mean, I think the Indian explanation, which you probably know, is like Brahmins are literate.
They're symbolic manipulators. And so obviously, you know, if you work at Microsoft or Google, they tend to be particularly South Indian Brahmins, actually, as opposed to North Indian Brahmins.
There aren't that many of those. And this goes back to the colonial period, actually.
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, you know, this is like a longstanding issue or issue, a phenomenon of South Indian English-speaking Brahmin elites in particular, availing themselves of technology, higher education. 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. You know, so I think, you know, the CEO of Microsoft and CEO of Google are both South Indian Brahmans.
They're both Telugu Brahmins. There's some debates, I think, whether the guy at Microsoft is a Brahmin online.
Because I don't know. I can't tell these sorts of things.
I mean, I can, but I don't have a good instinct. You know what I'm saying? But anyway, yeah.
So I think Brahmins are like Ashazi jews you know they analogize themselves particularly south indian brahmins i think we do have to distinguish that because i you know like one of you heard about like a guju brahmin or a up brahmin 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 indianinent or, you know, to be honest, within the Indian subcontinent, from what I can see. What explains that? I mean, so I read a part of Satya.
He's the Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, and he talked about how his, like, parents were, like, these Marxist philosophers, you know, Brahmin philosophers. But anyway, so what explains, what explains why these North Indians were,

I guess,

complacent and these South Indians were availing themselves of,

you know,

the resources.

Yeah.

I think UP and Bihar in particular 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 Rajput Thakars all over the world either from

UP,

right?

Punjab is different. There's a lot of Punjabis all over the world of various groups.
You know, a lot of Jats, the agriculturalists, farmers in the Central Valley, Khatri is all over the place, you know. In contrast, in UP, Bihar, these North Indian states, there's just like, there's less dynamism, less cultural dynamism.
The behavioral economic literature shows a really strong preference for zero-sum gains, wanting to be at the pinnacle of the local. This is not always true, but they prefer to be at the pinnacle of the local power structure rather than taking a risk going somewhere else where they might not be at the peak.
You know, they might be way more well off in the aggregate, but, you know, 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, 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 chandra sekar 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 games just like all sorts of things that happen you know and then he experienced prejudice at the hander of i think like arthur eddington in particular was was pretty prejudiced against indians and their ability to contribute to physics so um is that the guy who approved uh einstein's uh or the approved relativity right okay. I think empirically.
Yeah. Yeah.
So, but I mean, I mean, at least that's Chandler Sekar's take, like, you know, we don't know if it's like 100% true that anything was really, you know, who knows? Cause 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. Chandler Sekar lived until like, like, wasn't it 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 ago. 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's hard to find information back then.
But, you know, you could. He was still around giving quotes.
So, yeah. 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 anthropological and genetic history.

I wonder 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. Some people do.
You know, Spencer Wells, who I worked with, former boss, 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 steppe, he's been there a lot. So, you know, he can add a lot to that.
In a few places, 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, there wasn't like, ooh, like, whoa, like, I really understand the British people now 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 you know about uh the history these different places, do you feel that when you visit a place or when you learn more about a place, you're like, oh, 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 happened in that place thousands of years ago? Or does it feel that it's just kind of random? No, it's not random.
Sometimes you do. I 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 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 antecedents 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 geography so uh um so 2019 i'm a scientific conference america studying

human genetics. I'm meeting these people.
You're just networking. You're meeting.
So I met this Chinese geneticist. I think she's in grad school in the United States.
I was like, oh, 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 train of thought. So I immediately blurt out Wuhan.
She was like, whoa, how did you guess that? You know? So one, she was shocked that I knew of Wuhan, right? Because most Americans don't. Two, Shanghai is in 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 rail line between Beijing and Guangdong, between Guangzhou, and 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 Chinese? Like, yeah, yeah, I'm from the Eastern. 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, it's just an educated, Do you know what I'm saying? If someone's like... Someone's like...

Has like...

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?

And I'm just like, uh...

You know what I'm saying?

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 you know 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, can you guess my Jati?

I mean, I know you're Guju, right?

Uh-huh.

But I couldn't, I didn't guess it.

I don't know by the name.

I mean, you look, are you like half Patel, half Bani?

I'm just guessing.

Yeah, yeah.

Did I guess right?

Yeah, yeah.

That's exactly right.

How did I do that? I don't even know, man.

My mom, my dad, yeah, my dad is Patel and my mom is uh mania yeah okay all right that's exactly correct okay guys um this was 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 this is my educated guess. Right.
Right. So that alone should justify your subscription.

Yeah. didn't have any i just like looked at him and i was just like this is my guess this is 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 the 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 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 a trade off that um involves uh if this trade-off, you might have a higher odds of becoming a genius, but also a higher odds of becoming an idiot? Yeah.
So, I mean, you got to, like, BS a little bit about the molecular mechanism, or, like, I haven't looked at it in detail in a while, but one of the hypotheses is, for example, we have 1X chromosome. So, with X chromosomes, normally with women, there's inactivation of one X chromosome randomly in the cell, right? Or in the tissue or whatever, in the tissue, bar bodies, right? So every cell has an X chromosome and they tend to clump, whereas there are these bar bodies, like X chromosomes that are inactivated.
They're not expressing. They're like euchromatic..
Okay. People are going to be like, oh my God, like he's getting euchromatic and heterochromatic mixed.
I always get them mixed up. Okay.
I'm not a molecular geneticist, but anyway, so like one of the X chromosomes has to inactivate and that's random. Okay.
So let's say a woman has like 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 limiting the degrees of freedom, right?

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.
So, I mean, the easiest explanation for why 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. In terms of we are the heterogametic sex, so we're the sex that has – so in birds, I think it's the opposite.
I know it is the opposite. Females are the heterogametic sex.
The sex determination happens through them, and males have the equivalent of two x's i think it's zw and i think the males are zz 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? Like, SRY, the sex chromosome, the sex determining region kicks in, and we become male. We become 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.
So there are more males born than females, probably because the Y chromosome of the male, 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 sampling on miscarried fetuses that males are overrepresented.
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.

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

And so that explains 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 at 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 iq like once. There's no reason you need to be able to do algebraic topology easily.
Okay? Yeah. There's no reason.
And 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 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 a separate question, I guess you can answer at the same time. Do we have an explanation for why brain size decreased by like, what was it 10% or something like that? We're just smaller.
So our bodies got smaller. When it got warmer, we got smaller, but also agriculture seems to have given us really, really weak bones.
We got more fragile and more gracile. 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 as opposed to reliability and consistency.
That probably meant that smaller brain sizes are more optimal to survive through the attainment. We know smaller body sizes are for sure.
We know 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 just clearly like bengalese are just a short people, you know? If you just like meet like people from Bangladesh or West Bengal in the West and like they're chubby AF cause they get a lot to eat.
So it's not like genetics, you know? Like I used to, or not, or not genetic, but like environment. I used to, I was like, when I was little, people would say like, oh, well, you know, people, you know, your parents, because my dad's short, your parents didn't eat a lot of meat.
I'm just like, OK. But now that I know about genetics, nutrition and class background, I'm like, no, like 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 the bengali population is bangladesh they have cholera resistance obviously because you know the issues with flooding and water um that's different than others as indians have gotten into populations there's some reasons why they're small too i don't know why why why bengali are small. But that's obviously true.
So sorry, what's the link between cholera and height? There's no link. I'm just saying there's been studies in selection.
There's selection for resistance to cholera in Bengal. It's one of the canonical examples, like the vibria, whatever, like the microbe.
There's clearly 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 I guess they happen together. They're associated in many different mammals with domestication, you know, like smaller jaws, males and females looking similar and then, you know, less intelligence.
There's a cluster of 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 idea 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 it that way because this hypothesis has been around for a generation and it hasn't really 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 I guess what I would say is, like, it could be that, and let's see.

Let's see. Let's see.
What I would say is it could be humans are special in some distinct ways, okay? Because, like, it's been studied in foxes and other organisms extensively. But it hasn't been, and dogs, you know, and there's a spacklingackling 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 tuned we obviously don't have floppy ears and we don't show piebald

patterning so um i think this I think it's a great idea.

I just don't know for sure 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.

Gotcha.

Okay, so this morning you tweeted,

if everyone who attends a church thinks that the point of church is to bask in the war of the fellow parishioners rather than worshiping god the church won't last long and then you followed that up uh with a tweet that said uh uh in parentheses i'm not talking about religion so i i generally don't know uh what you're what you're referring in that tweet i i don't know if you meant meant to it unsaid, but I was just kind of curious. Yeah, I was being

stressed, and I was just having a discussion.

I'll tell you what it was.

Just having a discussion with a scientist friend of mine.

We were talking about collegiality

and truth, and

you know, it's like sometimes

it seems like in science

today, and it's not just

online, but just in general,

you know, like the community 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 and a lot of it's fake uh 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 were 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 inequitous 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 is a pediatrician. In science, you have like a few superstars who – I mean like it's hyper Pareto principle, right? It's not like the 2080.
It's like the the 5 to 95 you know so um anyway it's just like 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 blah i'm just like in one it's a very very winnowing 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 um there's like a logic curve where a small minority of scientists make the largest uh much larger portion of the total contribution to science but it's unequal. I think it was you who said this or wrote about this.

I don't know where I saw this.

But professors, the career of professorship has the highest heredity

in the sense that the highest correlation between the parent being a professor

and the child being a professor.

Yeah.

Was that you?

Yeah.

I didn't.

I mean, I probably retweeted it.

I mean, that's obvious.

I didn't talk about it extensively.

I was like, okay, everyone knows this. Everybody in science knows this.
My dad was 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. So people in science, people who go into graduate school in science, academic science, they – you know, reason first generation is a thing is because it's so skewed toward professional managerial class people in general.
It's very, very class biased. So, yeah.
Anyway, it's very class biased. But even people who come from professional managerial backgrounds, if they didn't come from academia, they don't always know everything.
So I have a friend who came from a very upper middle class background background. And, you know, he admitted like, yeah, like, he had to learn some things in terms of what you do to make it in science.
Because, you know, his I think his dad's a lawyer. 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, 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.
Because they just assume you don't know as much about like how to make it the profession, right? And so there's tacit stuff that gets passed on. Like I have a friend, he's, he is a research one professor.
He does have tenure. 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, blah. And he just thought to himself.
And, you know, he's he's in like in his field. He's in a top 10 institution.
He's not at Harvard, but he he's in a top so he's doing really well so i don't want to under 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 you know 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 it's like doctors he never had a chance so um you know that is what on the margin um it makes a big difference 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 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 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 overcompcompensates, 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, you know, online, there's one guy online who's super, super progressive. But a friend of mine told me he's like a notorious dick to people in his lab.

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, 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 point of science then? You know, what is the point of why are you here? Why aren't you an accountant or a CPA or something like that? I don't know.
It doesn't make sense, you know? 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 the laboratory

the research institution and god is the truth and if you're not there for the truth

eventually 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 passion for the truth

Thank you. 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, what's the point? Yeah, yeah. There's this professor, we both know, but obviously I'm not going to say who it is.
And so his kids also want to become professors. So the kid, they just graduated 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, guided them so that they would be in a good position to become a professor themselves, right? So when you consider that kind of advantage, and somebody who just goes college, like, oh, this subject seems interesting to me. Maybe I should consider a graduate academic career here.
Obviously, there's like no comparison in just the level of advantage you have if you've been planning it out like that. Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know what's going on here. I've talked to multiple friends who are like in postdoc level and they just talk about like they can see over the last 10 years of massive inflation in publication where their 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 third, fourth year of graduate school. And they went to the same university.
So what's happening here? You know, and I mean, you know, this like, OK 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 to measure something eventually the metric gets distorted right it's just like the truth is 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 spheres that i travel and maybe that you travel as well on 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 metallurgy um 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.

We reify it 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.
So I think we might be at a step now. 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 than, 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 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, 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 scrambling. You know, we have supercomputers in our pockets.
They're called phones. You know, we're doing science fictional video stuff.
And my kids who are like my oldest kid is say 10 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 would 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 of 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 they have an old rotary like toy phone um they traditionally use it as a hammer. You know, it's like they don't really know what the form factor.
It's totally like weird for them. So, you know, we are living through a radical change in terms of, you know, like our social technology or information technology.
Like most of your viewers probably know Kurzweil, information technology is exponential. So there are some radical changes going on right now, and we need to 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 have said, like, I did say 20 years ago probably because, again, like, you know, I know people hope Holden will be okay with him saying that.

I've known Holden for 15 years, you know. Holden Karnofsky, I think he's, you know, might be one of the people you're talking about, about this century.
And I 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 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 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 you know especially or not just in general like i look at myself when i see myself i don't see a primate i he received, 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 and that you're an animal of like that particular lineage you know i mean when you look at right It's like, 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 but 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 we 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 we got more robust with sama burya with social technology right um so for example you see the chinese dynastic cycle uh keeps shrinking every single time in terms of the chaotic interregnum 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 xiao dynasty doesn't really count but let's do the xiao that's like 500 years decline bigger to warring states and then the han you know the the chen han dynasty then there's like like a 300 year period of collapse and then there's like like a 150 year period of collapse, and then there's like a 150-year period of collapse.

You know, it just keeps shrinking every single time.

And so showing you that like cultural or 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

Thank you. And so 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.
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, COBOL software that barely anyone can read.
It's a cuneiform, you know. So it's like the Babylonians,ians like we laugh at them for like 2 000 years or 1500 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 cobalt programmers but we have cobalt 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. How did I mean, it's not like that difficult.
It's feasible. But the issue here is like timing and time because you might not have enough programmers to service all the code that you have.
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. Yeah, yeah.
Sustain, sustain. Right.
Yeah, I had Sam on just a little while back to discuss exactly these topics. So for the listeners who are interested, definitely check out that episode.
Yeah, and even with something like COBOL or software engineering, like somebody who started coming to science, even something that's that legible, you can have sort of implicit knowledge from previous programmers or like how does the entire system work? And 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 manufacture. I know a guy who worked at a fertilizer plant.
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, OK, that's a famine right there. Right.
We've lost the source of nitrogen here. So, yeah.
Oh, so 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 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 you think it's more feasible that we just move on to entirely virtual?

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.

What's even more feasible?

I think 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 false 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. But the issue there is like.
So I guess I think of gene editing, to be honest, more as like Smithian growth. Whereas like, you know, 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. I mean, we can all like understand the basic logic there.
Like there is John von Noemann existed. The experiment has been done.
So we can aspire to create like a bunch of von Noemann. Okay, that's great.
Now the issue is like with the human computer interfaces, that's never been done, right? So that is like an innovation. That's like, you know, technology-driven growth that's increasing like the baseline productivity by like crazy amount.
Like that could be the possible quantum leap. So, excuse me, that could be a big deal in a good way or a bad way.

And I think a lot of your listeners know about all the existential risk crisis and artificial – we talk about hostile AI and general artificial intelligence and all this stuff. But I mean perhaps it will start with us.
Perhaps Skynet will be some uploaded crazy kid. you know where it it's going to be a situation where 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 at sea, right? So there's going to be people who do things like going to Mars.
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.
Like just basically people just disappear into the ether. But then the first person that gets in there is going to be like Christopher Columbus or, you know 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 could 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 there are like pretty extensive pretty high variance and in the short term what is the landscape of um uh just 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 in the short term gene editing really will do it will probably

cure cystic fibrosis their sickle cell 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 there's always a problem with off-target effects which cause mutations cause cancers but you know if you're cystic fibrosis you're going to be dead by 45 you're going to take the risk right so i think that's honestly going be the first thing. 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. 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, because

they're just degenerative diseases that kill people in the prime of their lives.

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

You know, we have 40-year-old IVF babies now, you know, I think almost 40.

But so I think 20 years, yes, you will start to see parents editing the genes of their offspring. I think intelligence is, like, difficult because it's a polygenic trait 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 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. Rather than focusing on getting gain of function genes, which is like, okay, like how do you identify those? Fix all of your copy errors.

Because that's a finite number.

Compare it to the pedigree of the parents.

Look at the de novo mutations.

Look at the parents' de novo mutations against the idealized reference, 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 SNPs affect the variation in intelligence between people?

Let's see.

How many snips?

It's going to be an order of thousands.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

So just some meta questions to close out on.

So you've 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. 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.
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, cultural evolution. That's what Joe Henrik and some of his people wanted to do.
Yeah, so I think in cultural evolution, there's going to be a lot of gains because Peter Turchin, Joe Henrik, these people are applying evolutionary principles to historical processes. to have the empirical data set um um uh to have the empirical data set's really important and this is a really new nascent feel 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 get anthropology knowledge oh my god and i don't think the short-term knowledge is super important i think having a deep deep not deep thick knowledge about historical arcs um um would probably be pretty useful yeah interesting interesting and 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 imperialism that's causing problems

yeah causing problems out yeah uh just historians do not like the turf turf infringement

Thank you. imperialism that's causing problems yeah causing problems out 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 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 um you know that that's like uh you know you would think beforehand that your prior would be oh, like how many people are going to be able to understand this or be interested in this.
But in fact, you're, you know, you're one of the top people on Substack. Like, what is the experience of that been like? And like, has it surprised you the popularity of your work and everything? Honestly, no.
Well, I mean, it surprised. Okay, I'm going to be honest.
It probably surprised me like how many people are willing to 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 And, you know, it's given me some direction, I guess.

But 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 of startup world way, I would pivot and iterate is what I'm

thinking.

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?

Thank you. and final question do you have any advice for people who like want 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 like you know um text-to-speech type stuff like there's one there there are things people are super interested in so for example people are super interested in australian 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 as super interesting.
So 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 that talks about personality and using machine learning methods to classify personality. Okay.
Machine learning is technical, but personality is interesting.

Interesting.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

That's good advice.

All right, Razeev.

Yeah, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for your time.