This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, R. Taylor Raborn , a genomicist and associate bioinformatics principal investigator at the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) joins Razib to discuss his current and former research interests, touching on the unpredictable path a career in science can take. Taylor was drawn to biology at a young age due to his naturalist bent. Eventually, as a graduate student, he became particularly interested in the topics of gene-prom...
Jan 13, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 62
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share The day after Christmas 2021, the great entomologist and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson died at the age of 92. Carl Zimmer in The New York Times wrote an obituary that highlighted his seminal early contributions to science, as well as his role as a public intellectual after the publication of 1975’s Sociobiology . Wilson also wrote an autobiography, Naturalist , telling the story of his life in science from his own perspective. In the days after ...
Jan 11, 2022•1 hr 30 min•Season 1Ep. 61
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Eric Kaufmann , political scientist and demographer , and the author of The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America , Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? and Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities . During the course of their conversation, Razib and Eric focus on the thesis at the center of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? , the prediction that due to the higher reprodu...
Jan 08, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 60
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib catches up with Leighton Woodhouse , a documentarian and journalist (with a Substack !), to discuss the rise of political polarization and the disintegration of traditional parties and coalitions on both the left and the right. Leighton, whose activism began in 1999 at the WTO protests in Seattle, reflects on the financial , geopolitical and social shocks of the last twenty years, how they’ve transformed the mo...
Dec 31, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 59
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Dr. Xiaotong Yao , a computational biologist specializing in cancer research at Cornell’s Weill Institute, joins Razib. They first dig deep into genomics, considering the efficacy and costs of expanding whole-genome sequencing to assemble massive population-sized datasets. Not a thousand people, but a billion. Next, they probe the implications of wide-scale sequencing as it becomes integral to clinical di...
Dec 23, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 58
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning author and Washington Post columnist (and former blogger ) Megan McArdle join Razib for a wide-ranging conversation reflecting on our reemergence after the year and a half ordeal of COVID lockdowns, rising violent crime rates, defunding policing, and the preposterous genetic distribution on Trantor, capital of Isaac Asimov’s Galactic Empire. An urbanite who has spent her life in the US’s own imperial capital cities -...
Dec 16, 2021•1 hr 31 min•Season 1Ep. 57
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Charles C. Mann , author of 1491 , 1493 , and The Wizard and the Prophet joins Razib, to delve into the history of the Americas, and a broader theme that runs through Mann’s work – how human societies and their environment are inseparably intertwined. Mann’s work goes a long way towards dispelling the myth that the Americas were an untamed wilderness before the arrival of Europeans, scarcely populated and unshaped by...
Dec 09, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 56
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning , Razib is joined by Tim Lee , a former columnist at the Washington Post , Ars Technica , and Vox.com , to discuss his new project, Full Stack Economics , a newsletter on economics, technology, and public policy. The conversation jumps directly into a major issue facing many Americans today: the cost of housing. In many US cities, access to affordable housing is the most economically important issue facing individual...
Dec 02, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 55
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning , researcher, blogger, and essayist Tanner Greer joins Razib to consider the challenges facing conservatism in America today, the future of China and its relationship to the US. Much of Tanner’s extensive research and analysis are featured on his excellent weblog, The Scholar’s Stage , and the conversation also touches on the current state of blogging (and its past). Razib and Tanner first tackle the evolution of a n...
Nov 25, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 54
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib turns his gaze to space with Eric Berger , Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica and author of Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX . They ask who is Elon Musk anyway, and how did SpaceX come to win the early race to dominate private spaceflight? What does the privatization of the space fleet mean for the prospects and goals of NASA? How has NASA’s mission evolved, and ...
Nov 18, 2021•46 min•Season 1Ep. 53
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Harvard professor Carole Hooven joins Razib to discuss her new book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us . Though they do talk about the science of testosterone, Razib and Carole end up exploring the public reaction to her writing a book on sex and biology in 2021, as well the culture of censorship and shunning that has become the norm in much of academia. Hooven’s rece...
Nov 11, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 52
Subscribe no Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning Podcast , Razib gets into the genetics weeds again with Alex Young of the Social Sciences Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC). They discuss the heritability of complex traits and how the SSGAC develops predictive models using genetics to tackle questions that have traditionally been the purview of social sciences (and why that’s controversial, but shouldn’t be). Alex explains how large datasets where many indiv...
Nov 04, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 51
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib is joined by genetic genealogist Josh Lipson for a deep dive into the history and genetics of the Ashkenazi Jewish population in Europe. They review the historical demographics of the Jews of both Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as the possible founding source populations from the Levant (Palestine) and Mesopotamia (Babylon). They discuss the cultural and genetic differences between ...
Oct 28, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 50
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Recently Yale Law School (YLS) student Trent Colbert wrote Why I Didn’t Apologize For That Yale Law School Email: We must end the culture of performative repentance for Persuasion . I was broadly familiar with the culture-war saga that Colbert was caught up in, having read a piece a few weeks ago in The Washington Post describing how a seemingly innocent and jocular email triggered accusations of racism at YLS (as well as Aaron Sibarium’s piece in The...
Oct 26, 2021•38 min•Season 1Ep. 49
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning Podcast I’m joined by author and journalist Kat Rosenfield . She has a new novel out, No One Will Miss Her , is a co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast, and a contributor at various places, like UnHerd and Newsweek . We first talk about Andrew Cuomo (the former governor of New York), Al Franken, #metoo, and how the dynamics of fame, power and identity play into the media narrative around sexual harassment, as wel...
Oct 22, 2021•45 min•Season 1Ep. 48
In this week’s Unsupervised Learning Podcast , Razib is joined by author and psycholinguist Steven Pinke r to discuss his new book Rationality: what is it, why it seems scarce, and why it matters . Pinker makes the case the humans are fundamentally rational beings, and that it’s this capacity that has allowed Homo sapiens to spread across the planet and occupy virtually every niche available to us. Our intuitive ability to understand how physical objects, other creatures and other humans think a...
Oct 14, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 47
This week Razib talks to Fredrick DeBoer , author of The Cult of Smart , about the heritability of intelligence and its broader implications for society and education. The two discuss the difficulties of having fact-based conversations around the topic of heritability without being shouted down or accused of being proponents of eugenics. They also talk about how The Cult of Smart compares to Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery . Freddie breaks down the evidence that heritability, rather than...
Oct 07, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 46
This week Razib is joined by evolutionary psychiatrist Dr. Emily Deans to discuss the coronavirus pandemic. The conversation begins with the importance of winning and retaining hearts and minds when managing a pandemic, where nations have succeeded and failed in their public health messaging – and how numerous institutional failings – like sloppy contact tracing and poor communication - have eroded a portion of the public’s trust in the pandemic response. They also discuss the psychology of indi...
Sep 30, 2021•58 min•Season 1Ep. 45
On this week’s Unsupervised Learning Podcast , Razib sits down with Mahan Ghafari , a doctoral candidate at Oxford’s department of zoology to discuss his ongoing research in the area of viral evolution. They discuss the difference between RNA viruses and DNA viruses and how viral evolution differs from that of more complex life forms – accentuated by a virus’s short reproduction cycle and high mutation rate - particularly in RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2 which can mutate orders of magnitude faster...
Sep 24, 2021•52 min•Season 1Ep. 44
