John Hawks: varieties of humankind all mixed-up
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
Release Date: 08/23/2025
Chris Masterjohn: COVID-19 to mitochondrial health, communicating and applying "the science"
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
Today, Razib talks to , a nutritional scientist and leading expert in mitochondrial biology who believes hidden energy bottlenecks underlie much of modern disease. After years of work as a professor and researcher, he founded , the first mitochondrial analysis designed for everyday health, and serves as its Scientific Director. His mission is to make mitochondrial testing accessible so people can identify and correct the specific energy limitations holding them back. After earning his PhD in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Connecticut in 2012, he completed a postdoctoral...
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Mike White: academia and genomics in the 21st century
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to , a Genetics professor at the Washington University in St. Louis. White has a position at the School of Medicine in St. Louis, where he leads a research team focused on understanding the biophysical architecture of regulatory DNA. He earned a B.A. in music before pivoting to the sciences, receiving his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Rochester in 2006 and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Wash U under Dr. Barak Cohen. White’s work combines functional genomics, synthetic biology, computational biology, and deep...
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Aaron Renn: Heartland urbanism and leaving Left Behind behind
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to . Renn is a , consultant, and known for his work on the challenges facing American cities and religious institutions in the 21st century. He is a contributor to and the author of , a book exploring the cultural shifts regarding Christianity in America. Renn previously served as a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for five years and as a contributing editor for City Journal, having established his voice on urban policy through his widely cited blog, . Prior to his career in...
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Daniel Tabin: ancient DNA, the good, bad and ugly
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to , a 5th-year Ph.D. student in in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. His research focuses on using ancient and modern DNA to answer questions about human history. Tabin completed a degree in Computer Science and Math and Master’s in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He Ph.D. project involves the population genetic history of Central and East Asia. First, Razib and Tabin discuss he co-authored that looks at problematic results in the paleogenetic literature due to contamination...
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Peter Nimitz: the story of the Slavs
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to about . His Substack, titled , explores world history through the lenses of archaeology, paleogenetics, and historical processes. His writing focuses on "deep history," such as the Bronze Age Collapse and the migration of Indo-European peoples, while connecting these ancient shifts to broader patterns of civilizational rise and fall. Nimitz often integrates technical data from genetics and climate science to challenge traditional narratives about nomadic tribes and early state formations across Eurasia....
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Jesse Arm: Gen Z Republicans and their views
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
On this episode Razib talks to , VP of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute. His writing and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, New York Post, Fox News, City Journal and Jerusalem Post. Arm graduated with honors from the University of Michigan, where he majored in international political economy, and studied language and international affairs at Tel Aviv University. He has also worked for Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Dan Benishek, and the analytics arm of American Continental Group, a major...
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Davide Piffer: how Europeans became white
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to , whose Substack examines genetic differences between populations. Piffer on human genetic variation for a decade, and recently started a Substack, , exploring similar issues in detail over a series of posts. Razib asks Piffer about the difficulties in analyzing polygenic scores from quantitative traits in ancient DNA samples. How does he do in technical terms, from genome quality to imputation to ancient populations from modern ones? Then, they discuss some of Piffer’s findings, in particular, his work...
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Aneil Mallavarapu: why machine intelligence will never be conscious
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
Today Razib talks to , a scientist and technology leader based in Austin, Texas, whose career bridges the fields of biochemistry, systems biology, and software engineering. He earned his doctorate in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from the University of California, and has held academic positions at Harvard Medical School, where he contributed to the Department of Systems Biology and developed the "Little b" programming language. Mallavarapu has transitioned from academic research into the tech and venture capital sectors, co-founding ventures such as Precise.ly and DeepDialog, and...
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Richard Hanania: his break with the Right and the rise of kakistocracy
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
On this episode Razib, talks to , a . Hanania holds a Ph.D. from UCLA, a J.D. from the University of Chicago, and an undergraduate degree from CU Boulder in linguistics. He is a regular contributor to the and , and has . Hanania is also the author of . Razib and Hanania talk about his new book , and his developing views on populism and immigration. They highlight the rise of populism on the Right, the rejection of cognitive elitism, and the impact of social media on political discourse. Hanania criticizes the far-right’s nativism,...
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Francis Young: Baltic paganism in modern times
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
On this episode, Razib talks to ,, a historian who teaches at Oxford. Young specialises in the history of religion and belief from ancient times to the present day, and provides expert indexes for academic books and translates medieval and early modern Latin. He holds a PhD from Cambridge University and is the author, editor or co-author of . On his last visit to the , he discussed his book , an account of the practices and persistence of Baltic paganism down to the 16th-century, the age of the Renaissance and Reformation. Today he discusses his new book, . Razib and...
info_outlineToday on Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist who has been a researcher and commentator in human evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology for over two decades. With a widely read weblog (now on Substack), a book on Homo naledi, and highly cited scientific papers, Hawks is an essential voice in understanding the origins of our species. He graduated from Kansas State University in 1994 with degrees in French, English, and Anthropology, and received both his M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, where he studied under Milford Wolpoff. He is currently working on a textbook on the origins of modern humans in their evolutionary context. Hawks has already been a guest on Unsupervised Learning three times.
In this episode, Razib and Hawks focus on a very specific question: What were the different contributions to the heritage of modern humans in a world more than 200,000 years ago that was inhabited by at least half a dozen hominin species? First, Hawks takes us back to the year 2000 and his early work extending a more multiregional framework of human evolution, exploring what could be gleaned from the archaeological and paleontological record. Then Razib and Hawks discuss the ancient DNA revolution and the discovery that modern humans had ancestry from Neanderthals, as well as from an entirely new species, the Denisovans. They also examine the fact that, unlike Neanderthals, Denisovans appear to have been separated into very different regional populations that made distinct contributions to various modern populations. Razib also asks Hawks about the discovery of new pygmy human species in Luzon, as well as the current state of research on Homo naledi in South Africa and the Hobbits of Flores. Hawks contends that DNA will likely be extracted from all these lineages at some point and, if not, protein sequence data may be obtained. This would finally give researchers the statistical power to evaluate the possibility of extremely archaic admixture events. Hawks and Razib also address the potential role of natural selection driven by introgressed genes from sister lineages of humans and how this shaped modern variation.