Genes, Race, and History with Razib Khan

foreign my guest today is razeeb Khan razeeb is a population geneticist writer and entrepreneur he's a prominent voice in the realm of genetic genealogy where he illuminates the interplay of genes history and culture his writing has been featured in The New York Times India today the National Review and his scholarly work is cited in many scientific journals in this episode we talk about commercial genetic testing companies like 23andMe we talk about the genetic histories of regions like Russia and China ashkenazis and matagasi that is people from the island of Madagascar we also talk about the indo-aryan connection we talk about whether race is a social construct we discuss the concept of epigenetics and so-called inherited trauma we talk about what Cleopatra really looked like and more is a literal Fountain of information on these topics and his sub stack is super interesting so you should all go check that out it's called unsupervised learning and I hope you all enjoyed this conversation as much as I did so without further ado razeeb Khan [Music] okay receive Khan hey what's up thanks so much for coming on our show my pleasure so I've been aware of you for a long time and I've been uh enjoying your sub stack recently which is really excellent you have these long deep articles about population genetics and what it can tell us about history and we're going to get into all of that but before we do can you give my audience a little bit of your bio like how did you get into population genetics as a field and and um and maybe we could talk a little bit about what you're up to these days because I know you're out of Academia now yeah yeah yeah so um you know I'm fairly typical in let's say first generation um children of immigrants so I was born in Bangladesh I moved here when I just turned five I grew up in Upstate New York and then I spent most of my I say formative years Adolescence in Oregon Eastern Oregon Western Oregon um you know I went to University of Oregon I majored in Biochemistry which is what you do uh when you're pre-med and then I realize I want to do medicine and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do I added a biology major with a focus on genetics I didn't really know much about genetics but I knew I was kind of interested in it and I'd always been interested in evolution and to really understand Evolution you need to understand uh genetics right so um this was the 1990s and genetics was was hot I mean this was the Human Genome Project was happening so that was always on my mind initially I worked in it I did some programming database developing and stuff like that because I didn't really want to spend time on a bench okay like you know working with a pipette and stuff like that that's what biologists do or that's what molecular biologists do and that was what my training was and then um I realize you know what I really like is more like mathematical modeling understanding Evolution using allele frequencies it's basically population genetics I had a little bit of training in that I went back and got a little bit of more training um some post post-bacular work and then I went to graduate school at UC Davis my interest uh my my PhD topic of Interest was actually like domestication and quantitative evolution of uh domestic dogs domestic cats and stuff like that so I was really interested in what human civilization had done uh to animals that we had domesticated or there were pets or that lived with us and um you know that brings me to a second interest which I've had which you know I think you've seen in my sub stack um you know I'm really interested in human history in the human past and this is not actually that surprising I know a lot of people in stem who have thought about majoring in history and they're like I'm just gonna major in stem and I don't know why that is I think it's because there's a lot of facts and it's just an interesting topic you know it's just a story of our species and so basically over the last 10 years the field of paleogenetics has emerged so paleogenetics is basically taking ancient DNA so not DNA from you know we're live but say DNA from someone that died 10 000 years ago and then sequencing it and getting all the information out and just so your listeners have a clear understanding we really understood or tracked like a couple of hundred genes in the human genome and it wasn't even called the human genome then like 30 years ago right so it's pretty amazing that you can take a whole genome of 19 000 genes from someone that died 10 000 years ago now so we've come orders and Orders of magnitude so um the reason I write so much about population genetics and ancient DNA and history on my sub stack is there's a lot of questions that used to be open questions that have been answered by these paleogenetic methods obviously they can't answer everything like okay like what was you know the theological difference uh you know of this particular sect in Anatolia okay that's not a genetic question but when people say concretely uh okay so the eight modern Greeks are not descended from the ancient Greeks at all is that right well that's actually wrong oh that's wrong but that was something that people started saying in the 19th century because what happened so why do what on What basis did they say that uh the basis is uh basically uh and I have a subject post on this so yeah people out there can look it up but uh what happened in the 19th century in the early 19th century is classically educated Western Europeans and particularly English like Lord Byron um you know British people uh show up in Greece to help them with their Revolution against the ottoman Turks and they did succeed but um one of the things that happened is they they were like shocked at what the modern Greeks are like because they are not what's described in Herodotus or thucydides or Homer you know because that's what they knew the Greeks and so they're sitting around you know drawing triangles and formulas and yeah yeah okay modern Greeks from their perceptions Socrates and Pythagoras yeah we're in Oriental people whereas the ancient Greeks are obviously a western people and I'm not saying like that's literally true but I think this is what their perception was the ancient Greeks are the cultural ancestors of the West so how can these people uh you know these kind of like feuding um you know argumentative Oriental uh Middle Eastern looking people uh be the descendants of the ancient Greek so the hypothesis is well these are not the descendants of the ancient Greeks what happened during the Roman Empire was a bunch of slaves came in from Syria and replaced ancient Greek so that's the hypothesis right uh modern genetics to show that's not really true um actually um I have a separate pose on this but basically slaves have very very very like sub-normal fertility in the vast majority of the world for the vast majority of History so slaves actually don't leave much of an imprint right because they don't have children and in fact they were often castrated yeah in the Arab world yeah and yeah actually before the Arab world the byzantines had constrados too and obviously the Romans right so that was a common thing but even if the children were born in The Classical period um you know it fantasize was socially acceptable and so they would they would just take the info because like infants or like if you're talking about economic calculation infants are not sync and so they would kill the infants if the slaves ended up having so slaves tried not to have children because they knew that the infants often would be killed or exposed anyway um so the slaves didn't have Offspring and so modern Greeks are mostly descended from ancient Greeks they do have some ancestry that's new and that's actually Slavic ancestry and I see this I actually looked at the data I see it everywhere in Greece especially in northern Greece obviously but still like say like five to 25 Slavic ancestry from after like around like five five eighty to 600 A.D um the Byzantine Empire base so when you see um so when you get a bunch of genomes from Modern Day Greek people you see share genes with current Slavic people how do you date those how can how do you know that it's 500 A.D sure well yeah we know it's 580 because the byzantines took good records and so there's a group I think they call them scalvini and they're basically slobs and they show up uh with the avar Empire the avars were Turks but the majority of people that lived under them were not Turks they were mostly slobs who came from what we would call like Moravia Southern Poland Etc and they started moving Southward so before 600 A.D so you know you guys know that Yugoslavia you know all that former region Bulgaria These Are Slavic languages but those regions were not Slavic speaking the western part of the Balkans was more um like Albanian illyrian speaking and the eastern part like in Bulgaria was actually Latin speaking and so that all changed after that period so we know this from history in terms of Discovery didn't show up until after about 600 A.D and then they just percolated all through you know Greece the interior obviously in the North uh you know the Republican Macedonia northward there was cultural shift in terms of now they speak Islamic language genetically they look to be about like 30 to you know 50 Slavic uh so there was much more substantial uh replacement there um but in Greece you see uh it's more like you know five to twenty five percent but I mean aside from the historical records I can just tell you okay you pull someone who's a genome from say 1200 BC okay like this is like a real example you compare their genotype you compare their letters of acgmt you compare them to a modern Greek uh and you see how different they are and then you can also create a model OKAY like so let's compare it to um a Slavic person a Polish person okay this is like an Uber slav whatever right and okay how much of the ancestry of this Greek person um would have to be polish to explain the difference from the ancient Greeks and it turns out to be like you know it'll be like 17 or something right so this person can be modeled to high degree of statistics significance as an ancient Greek with some Polish ancestry I see right yeah no that is it's amazing because you know I've I didn't appreciate this until reading your sub stack posts how much the sequencing of the human genome can inform history yeah right because they're they're just there are certain there's like uh like for example you have a very long post about Madagascar yeah where uh you know the sequencing the genomes of of um I I don't know madagasi yeah which is what you call people from Madagascar yeah can give you accurate information about you know the migrations to that Island right yeah which are not obvious and may not have been documented in this case so like what do we know about madagasi from population genetics yeah so if you just look at them uh you can tell they're Asian and African right because they they have like dark skin probably darker than my my skin in some cases but their their eyes and facial features look very similar to Southeast Asians or east Asians exactly so before genomics people knew that there was a Southeast Asian connection the reason is the malagasy language um is very close to Malay and Bahasa Indonesia and this is something that you know missionaries Jesuits I think it was Jesuits in particular first noticed it because they went uh they went to Asia and you would come back uh through southern Africa in that region and they would encounter I mean there's there's slaves from Madagascar in Cape colony and stuff like that and so they realized okay they're speaking a language that's not like Swahili that's not like the Bantu languages of southern Africa it is a language like Malay or Bahasa Indonesian so it was known 500 years ago by Europeans that there was this connection but the details were hard to work out uh partly it's because you know archeology is not as well developed in this region of the world and you're up there's a lot of archeology going on probably because they've been investing in it for two centuries and you know if you're so if you're um it's government of Switzerland you're going to invest in archeology for Switzerland so there's this bias that happens that way so it has to be somebody else from the outside to support country okay um so let's set the archeology aside which there's some interesting thing related to that in terms of the forest getting burned down it looks like Madagascar was not settled by humans until at the earliest probably around 2000 years ago but really perhaps closer to 580 so 1 500. and you know we know this because there's all these endemic animals so for example the elephant bird uh the heaviest uh which looks like a huge bigger ostrich yes it's like it's like an ostrich on steroids yeah like they're they're they're they are very heavy and they were very heavy and they were around until like say 1200 A.D probably the Arabs mentioned it so probably the mythology of the rock which is like a huge Eagle um was inspired partly by the elephant bird so listen Sinbad the tales of Sinbad and the South Seas so the Arabs and other populations are other you know Traders have started showing up in Madagascar around this time but it looks like the people who really settled Madagascar is very specific they are from the south east region of Borneo so when you look at the language the Madagascar the language of Madagascar it is closest to a particular obscure dialect of I think C dayak austronesian language in southeast Borneo it's part of the burrito language family okay so we know this from Linguistics well you can do with genetics is okay let's look at the genetics of the people of Madagascar and let's see like which segments of their DNA match other populations in the world now you could only do this very recently we used to have and maybe we could get into at some point you know how far we've got in genomics in the last 20 years because it's orders of magnitude yeah okay so this is not like ooh they could have done this like first of all they couldn't have done this 10 years ago just too expensive too difficult so this is like a recent thing that I'm talking about but in any case so what you look at is you look at the segments of the genome so if you're related to someone there's a lot of matching segments the more distantly related you are to to someone the fewer and fewer matching segments you have so this is a way that you can get a very very precise level of relatedness so obviously you could just look at the Madagascar people and you can look at some primitive genetic techniques and see oh they're about half asian about half African like the precise number is actually like 40 East Asian 60 African there's a little bit one or two percent Arab and Indian probably through Traders and slaves or other things okay so let's set that aside uh so okay the East Asian component what they did is like they looked at the segments and they're like okay let's match it to all sorts of populations in the world okay well all of the best matches are happening in Southeast Asia so let's drill down in Southeast Asia and so they do the best matches and they sample and you know they knew that linguistically the language is like the Borneo language like the C dayak language so they have some samples from the sea diets and it turns out that is the closest Match in East Asia to the 40 of their genome that's Asian so genetics has just confirmed what we kind of knew from Linguistics so we know that these people show up you know all of these centuries ago and they settled Madagascar now the other part of their genome is African is sub-Saharan African um it's so the Bantu expansion and I'm working a post on that just forever and out there um is relatively recent so if it was a long time ago genetically they shouldn't have been banned to but generally they are banned too and so we know and the Bantu show up in Mozambique that area probably around 500 A.D maybe a little bit earlier but not too much earlier and the genetically they're the African ancestories Bantu and there are some records mostly by Arab traders talking about it of some of the kingdoms in Mozambique they started uh they were like invasions and there was interaction with you know what was going on in Madagascar so it looks like the uh Polynesian austronesia it's not Polynesians austronesians because they're the Polynesians of the other Branch the austrians show up around 500 A.D and they start clearing the land and uh it makes it aware to the people on the mainland um who just showed up recently the Bantu who were setting up their kingdoms that oh there's this island there and so there's a lot of gene flow like some of it is probably slavery but one thing that I mentioned in my piece is I'm not totally sure that it was mostly slavery because one thing that happens when you have ancestry that comes through slavery is it comes through women usually because male slaves I mean look they're just not very high status I mean they're not going to get a lot of times like the master they're not gonna leave Offspring often yeah yeah I mean like we don't need to get into the sociological reasons but yeah you see this in the Arab world the African ancestry is mostly maternal yeah in Madagascar that's not true there's actually more paternal African ancestry than maternal African animals and this is one of the most interesting things to me about population genetics is that because you have facts like the mitochondrial DNA only you only ever get it for Mothers Daughters yeah so my mitochondrial DNA came from my mother and her mother and her mother and her mother exclusively and then my Y chromosome comes correct me if I'm wrong pretty much unchanged from my father and unchanged from his father and unchanged from his father Yes whereas all my other chromosomes are just mixing mixing and recombining and so yeah I mean what I would say is like there is some mutation and that's why we can create a tree but it's very very like low levels very low and so basically I think try to do the math I'd have to look this up I think the probability is there's not going to be a mutational difference between you and your father but it starts to be much more likely I want you to get a grandfathers because I think there's like 30 but even if there were it'd be so similar right yeah it's very similar yeah and you need whole genome so just so I mean but that makes that makes it so that you're able to actually not just see oh there's African ancestry here you can say it's coming mostly from women uh breeding with this other ethnic group or it's coming mostly from men taking wives of a different ethnicity Etc yeah so in Madagascar the Y chromosome like you're implying there is informative of the fact that there's a lot of I think it basically um there's a skew towards East Asian maternal ancestry and African paternal ancestry okay and so I mean what does that mean um one thing is it's possibility that the original uh settlers were matrilineal so they passed like their cultural identity through their mothers and so these African men were integrated into those communities this is actually we see a little bit of this in among the Polynesians where the the Y chromosome is more papuan melanesian in some of these communities whereas the mitochondrial DNA tends to be just proportionately female so I mean I'm not an anthropologist so it needs to be more exploration of this but it's not a simple case of like oh like they brought some slave to me in my opinion it's not gonna be a simple case so they just brought some slaves because for the mainland because there's way too much mail um ancestry and also their cultural practices so they speak a language that's overwhelmingly uh Southeast Asian but there are obviously loan words okay we expect that but uh some of um so the religion is predominantly like pre-islamic pre you know before the world religions impacted southeast Asia they have an old type of austronesian religion that has particular types of burial mounds which you actually do see in places like Java and Borneo from like 2000 years ago okay but there are aspects of their religion and their magical systems uh that are clearly African so there's aspects and their music has a lot of African influence so this isn't a situation where um their culture was erased so that to me again indicates that it's not simply just slavery it's not an issue of subordination between two different populations so for example in the United States um you know African-Americans a lot of aspects of their culture are actually British you know obviously the religion language but um you know I'll give you a concrete example like jumping over the broom it's apparently Scottish you know yeah and it's because they came from all these different tribes and their culture was famously erased and it was a conscious choice that the the Masters made right they wanted to eliminate the cultural distinctiveness that made it something couldn't Rebel as like even a lot of African-American English grammar constructions like you ain't doing that like ain't it comes from apparently Scottish as well it was a great Thomas o essay yeah and the great um a book called Albion seed yes I'm sure you're aware of yeah yeah it's a great book it's a great book so I mean my point here is like okay so genetics is telling us that uh if we did have genetics for example I think I'm gonna be honest I think what's gonna happen is the Americans in particular would just be like oh well you know we know how this works they were slaves it was right that's what they'll say but I'm just trying to say that it can complicate all of these narratives and yeah it seems I mean your posts have made me realize that any historian doing deep history history more than say 200 years ago needs to be dealing with population genetics to confirm and test theories of migration Conquest intermixing yes Etc because yeah we really we we can now get accurate information here it's amazing and uh another aspect of this I want to talk to you about is uh 23andMe and ancestry.com you know a lot a lot of people are using this now I just did mine about one month ago all right what'd you get um so I'm about 55 sub-Saharan African okay 35 European okay which with two-thirds of that being Iberian Peninsula and one third of that being British Isles and I'm seven percent indigenous American all right so I've been joking that I'm blacker than Obama and more Native American than Elizabeth Warren your mother's Puerto Rican yes okay that makes sense though so that's where the I get you know indigenous 20 Iberian Spanish Etc from Spain and then seven percent indigenous and and one one aspect of it that I found interesting was and I don't know if if I if this was confirmation bias on my part but I was looking at the chromosomal pairings one two three and it seemed like I could identify which chromosome came from which parent because my dad has like no indigenous yeah and my mom I think had a lot of indigenous so even though there was crossing over there was one that had tended to have much more indigenous than another so I could almost see that and and um in my X chromosome for whatever reason maybe you know this they don't give you information about your Y chromosome yeah on 23andMe but my X chromosome was almost entirely indigenous yes which what's your mother right that's your mother's mother right well actually not necessarily because she has two x's so she has two exercises right yeah so yeah so but somehow it ended up that my X chromosome was like only seven percent totally indigenous my X chromosome is like 90 indigenous according to 23. so um just a couple of things um so uh for like you know the viewers out there uh listeners um so Coleman is talking about like a chromogram so there's you know like 22 well there's 23 with the X so you have 20 you have 22 pairs so that you have the X and he's seeing these bars with different colors yes and that's what the ancestry is that's right yeah so that's the representation of the linear chromosome uh chromosomes are arranged in length uh chromosome one is the longest chromosome 22 is the shortest um and he has the X the reason he doesn't have the Y is the Y doesn't isn't computable in terms of these ancestry functions because as we discussed earlier the why is passed intact from the father right so so why would that make it now because there's no admixture in the why it's not mixing it's not recombining okay okay but on the X uh x women have two pairs of X and so there's recombination there and then I have one pair so there's no recombination right okay so there's going to be no recombination on the male but two-thirds of the x's in a given generation are found in women with 50 50 population right so there's still stuff going on there so that's why you saw the X yeah now um in terms of these segments and what you're talking about your intuition is correct the technical term for this is ancestry deconvolution and I'll give the listeners a simpler example or the listeners reviewers a simple example I have a friend who's a fourth Japanese um and uh so her father is white her mother is half white half Japanese and so when you look at her chromogram you actually she she is 24 Japanese that's kind of what you would expect but um you see you see like one segment that's 100 European like it's like English German whatever and then you see another segment that is uh it's it's mixed it's 50 50 and it's alternated with East Asian and European ancestry every single one of those alternations you know 100 for sure because that it's a recombination event in her mother like you see exactly where the chromosome had happened because her mother has a Japanese mother and a European American father right and so this is a very very interesting information and this is one way that you can tell how long ago admixture happened so I can look at like since you reported how Puerto Rican um with a certain level of statistical power geneticists can actually look at your segments and figure out when the indigenous and African mixed into you know Iberia that's right yeah 23andMe actually they do have a function like this you know your British ancestry is from six or seven uh Generations ago Etc yeah yeah so what they're doing is they're looking at the length of the segments because every single generation there's recombination the lengths break down so when you look at Caribbean people their admixture of indigenous ancestry of Taino ancestry in Puerto Rico is like 300 years ago yeah so the segments are not very long at all they're very very small and so what you see is a bunch of segments of a very particular length indicating that the that the pulse at mixture happened over a 50-year period 350 years ago things like that when we look at the the people of Madagascar you can do a similar sort of thing statistical power starts to get a little wonky when you go beyond a 2000 years just to be clear but it's quite clear that the admixture happened like you know mostly between 800 and 1200 A.D in Madagascar between African people and East Asian people because the initial Generations had long segments and those segments would shrink over time with every generation of recombination so um what about these other characteristics at 23andMe try to you know they they give you these Health sure um assessments yeah so for example one thing I was very surprised by is they tell you whether you are likely to uh well your urine smells funny when you eat asparagus right everyone either when you eat asparagus either your pee smells weird or it doesn't for me it does um and I know that because it's impossible to ignore okay yeah but I like asparagus okay uh but it actually got that wrong oh it did it got it wrong and I was surprised because that seems like exactly the kind of trait that might be governed by just one yeah I think it is so but if you were governed by just one gene how could they possibly get that well there's there is a um last I checked there is a 0.4 missed call rate okay okay what is that what that means that um that means that in point four percent of the times that they make a call it's false it has to be higher than that though because they they there were three or four things out of you know 30 that were wrong for me okay but they were usually complex characteristics if it's a complex characteristic the problem is and you know I think most people who follow this aware of this um you're you are a very genetically complex person with your ancestry thank you that may I'm complicated yeah no that's a little tricky so like let's assume of a trading set so this is how you do it you have a trading set you generate a model and you're then you have like test data you put the test data into the training set well the training set is All European or all African-American okay there's not gonna be a training there's not a training set to my knowledge of people that are half African-American half Puerto Rican okay with your ancestral mix so um the more primitive models you know and also it's the Primitive but the earlier generation models they tend to like have problems with people of mixed Heritage in particular with complex traits because the trading sets are different some complex trades some genes don't operate in the same way against an African genetic background that they would in a European genetic background because there's enough genetic differences that Gene interactions can have like some effect right I don't want to overemphasize this this is uh I think the issue here is um it's a big deal because you don't ever want to make a missed call on a disease yeah but usually it's actually like pretty accurate the biggest difference is African to non-african because there's issues related to genetic diversity and genetic distance but even there um you know it's mostly right it's just that like you can't have a 20 30 Miss call rate and stuff like that that's way too high that's I'm overestimating my only Point here is when it comes to disease and trade prediction yeah it's going to be awkward if you're wrong yeah and so that's why they really emphasize oh well we can't predict in another population as well and stuff like that they have so they they try to predict even whether you have a fear of public speaking so they have uh you know and apparently 65 of people with my variant of this Gene Don't Fear public speaking yeah and it's true I Don't Fear public speaking but there's no way in hell that like fear of public speaking is governed by one gene by thousands of genes and yeah yeah and experience to some degree like yeah right so let's let's like bring it out so the mendelian traits mendelian single Gene monogenic things that's what you're talking about so like cystic fibrosis everyone knows cystic right I hope everyone well I hope it well you know what I'm saying cystic fibrosis is well known is that governed by one gene uh is that one it's mostly at one genetic position yeah one genome it's like cftr I think that's what it is anyway so cystic fibrosis you can look in there there's different mutations in there so you can't just find one single mutant you need to like look for them but in any case um cystic fibrosis is a one it's a breakdown in one genetic location there are other things like hype classical example um where there's you know thousands of genetic positions in the genome that can be used as as predictors and that's because your height is the final end product of a lot of genetic effects distributed across the genome it's like you know how how big how tall is your shin bone and how tall is your thigh but it's a complex developmental process right right so of course right and so what ends up happening is what you do is you look across the genome and you create a predictor a polygenic uh uh index like they're changing the terms around to make them a little bit more PC so I just apologetic index is the last one I remember so it's a polygenic index and it just shows you like like what your predicted height would be based on your genome compared to all the other genomes out there in their training set training sets for height are pretty big it gets a re and like height is about like 80 to 90 heritable in developed societies which means that 80 to 90 of the variation in the population is due to genes yeah and so the predictor okay it's pretty good 80 to 90 heritable doesn't mean that that's like you know for an individual it's it's actually like a little lower because that's a population-wide statistic I don't want people to like be like in the comments like oh he's confusing heritability with individual prediction I'm not but any case uh you can use these indices to make predictions your risk type 2 diabetes all these other things the way with type 2 diabetes it's like an odds ratio it's like oh you're like 10x more you know likely than the average person to get it um so they I don't know if they had a training set where someone did fear of speaking but a lot of these just have to do with your personality my sense is like for 23 and me it's a self-report yeah that is self-report they do have that yeah but the issue is like because your personality is like an endo phenotype that has a lot of Upstream Upstream variables what do you mean by endofino uh it's like uh like it's within you and it's not like um it's not like something you can measure the caliper or like you know yeah that's the one thing I suspect it's not really measuring people that don't fear public speaking of output it's measuring people that would report on 23andMe that they don't fear public speaking yeah you'll notice that there could be a confound in some way right well it's not it could be found it could be it could be overconfident people that are saying this right yeah so what I would say there's is picking up a downstream characteristic of your personality yeah so like if you want it because like psychology they have these like models with schemas with like boxes the Upstream is like introversion extroversion that's really what it is I'm 90 sure and that's about like last I checked like 30 to 50 heritable like the the instruments for like psychology are like kind of weird and not really great attention so I think underestimated it's much better with IQ because like you know psychometric tests are much more precise than personality tests you know but in any case personality is also I think most people know personality is also heritable just not as heritable as height right and so the less heritable the trait is the uh more of it is due to environment which is not necessarily like the external environment it's just various types of noise and so that means that those predictors are gonna be weaker and weaker um so you know when you're looking at personality related things that is I would just say for entertainment value only right you know right right now right so um do you think at all about Gene editing I know a few years ago Casper uh crispr and cas9 yeah were very much in the Layman public conversation that you'll be able to go into uh uh you know a um an egg or or a fertilized egg and delete this Gene and make your kid a little prettier a little taller a little smarter Etc what is the state of that technology and how do you think about that yeah I do think about that a lot so this is like I gotta like switch into like a different mode now because uh so what I'd like to tell people so I have a startup it's called generate um we do like genomic data storage management and Analysis so it's in the data science Big Data space and what I like to tell people my investors uh or you know potential investors want pitching is like okay like a lot of my work uh my academic work um work you might see publicly is about the past uh generate is about the future and so you're talking about Gene editing that's the future that's not the past right so now we're like talking about genetics in a different dimension instead of like taking the tips of a phylogenetic tree and working backwards we are now like going to modify the tree somehow right so that's what you're talking about and so people really interested in this I would suggest like uh go to the generate podcast I have an interview with a guy who works at a company that actually uh it's called crispr QC uh Zach Rayborn and what he does is like I talked to him for like an hour and 10 minutes so if you want to get detailed on this because he's the expert uh is uh basically you need to figure out which you know genes you need to edit which positions to get the most Fidelity you don't want to do experiments on human beings so a lot of the crispr work that's done on animals or plants whatever like no offense to the animal rights people out there you know uh but with humans you don't want to mess people up so with Gene editing there's a bunch of Technologies we prominent DNA Technologies the oldest one that goes back to the 1970s so uh it's very expensive and very difficult there was a there was I think it was 1999 there was a horrible experiment gone wrong uh where a kid died and he was a teenager and really g90 didn't need to be done and uh it you know he died and so there's been like a Paul that was cast Over Gene editing for really the past Generation Um the uh the trial regime is much more stringent and stuff like that okay so why is crispr cast not a big deal and it's not just crispr cast nine like one thing I've recently learned uh or been made aware of is there's a bunch of different castes so it's just let's just say crispr cast Okay the reason it's a big deal is because it's cheap and it's easy so it brings Gene editing to the people right so the idea of g-dudging abstractly like you go in you take a a base pair of degrees or the genome you excise it you put something else in okay that's easy to understand how do you do it in engineering sense well it turned out bacteria they have ways to do it because you know they have billions of years of evolution and this is a bacterial system that was actually known in the 1980s and 90s but they never thought to apply it and that was like the quote genius it was this like you know stumbling upon this that uh doodnan sharp pontier uh Carpentier did um you know they got the Nobel for everything like that right um okay so how do I think about it and how important is it well I wrote an article for a magazine called return I think I wrote it like end of 2020 and I talked about oh they're gonna like cure cystic fibrosis sickle cell and all these things like the really bad mendelian diseases that you hear about you know Jerry's Kids ALS uh Lou Gehrig's Disease and in the last three years uh and that that piece was actually only published on the internet like a month ago and someone you know some guy was saying well this is like you know puffery like is any of this happening and I just like you know I post a link to a girl who had been curious or not a Sickle Cell in 2021. so they're working on sickle cell with Gene editing yes with Gene editing um they're already starting to work out Sickle Cell they're already people walking around that were cured as adults uh they're working on cystic fibrosis cured as adults yes so how does that work I mean if if every cell in your body already has a copy of your full genome how do you go in and edit yeah so what you do is uh so this is the big issue Gene I think's big issue uh for at least that you know developed organisms is how do you deliver the edit and so you know they use like vectors like viruses that's very common so viruses will infect your cell and you know they're the payload that transfers uh the crispr cas9 right so uh let's say lungs I'm going to use cystic fibrosis as an example you know the life expectancy is like 4 you fifty dollar I think with good treatment um and the issue here is uh not the issue the the dream which I think will happen within the next 10 years really the next five um is that you will have a payload that will get in there and restore maybe like 10 to 20 of lung function you're gonna be like basically be able to survive and do everything except for like strenuous Sports then wow so with a lot of these issues you just need to rescue some minimal level of function so they can live most of their life out you know right uh you don't need to go up to like the level of like oh I'm gonna be like doing like high intensity you know exercise right right so yeah that's what I'm thinking for that with ALS uh Lou Gehrig's disease where it's like it's a muscle you know uh muscular Muscular Dystrophy and stuff like that um obviously uh when they fix it by like transfecting somehow the muscle tissue delivering into the muscle tissue um they're gonna have some issues they're not going to be very strong but they're not gonna like die of like heart collapse you know or like uh asphyxiation because the muscles do not work anymore right right that's the dream that's why I think that's gonna happen in like five to ten years but um you know there's gonna be like pretty you know non-trivial changes I don't want to say like radical but not trivial changes in like genetically editing um you know so in agriculture uh these big companies like bear Monsanto I think they're Monsanto was bought by bear I think but anyway one of them um they've been able to do this stuff for decades because it was extremely expensive and only they had the economies of scale and also the regulatory regime is really strict the thing with crispr technology from what I've been told by my friends in plant genetics is extremely easy you can have like a small lab and start doing experiments and so right now the regulatory overhead is really putting a clamp down on that but you know not every country is is going to um you know regulate as much as the us so I think we're going to see like a lot of different um you know a second Green Revolution possibly that's what I hope for you know there's things with animals as well that they're working on with fertility and other things so um I think we're gonna see that visibly first when it comes to more to traits besides disease okay right now we're going to focus on diseases that adults have uh try to fix all of the and like you know I think like five percent of Americans have some sort of congenital disease they're all they're not all horrible you know um but um that's millions and millions of people yeah you know and so if it's cheap and like right now there's issues with price and stuff like that if it's cheap I think most people will do it and then you know I mean I hope the drug industry is investing in this because they might lose some you know there must be some Revenue issue it was like people not needing to take drugs for the next like 30 or 40 Years of their lives right right so they should they should like know to invest in that sort of stuff probably those Pharma companies will Lobby Congress to make this illegal and scare people about Gene editing being um to sci-fi that's my prediction I mean I mean because it's it well it'd be a very easy thing to scare people about because yes editing your genome there's something very invasive and very I mean for for everything you want to say about why humans get scared of vaccines the needle going in the arm and the concept of getting a small Dead version of a disease all these things make trigger kind of an irrational fear in people yeah um I mean all of that is 10x I think for for changing your genome I agree right I mean one thing I've said before and I've said over the years is genes are not magic there's just a real thing we understand them really well now all of a sudden you know because of genomics um you know uh but that doesn't matter like psychologically people do think they're kind of magical yeah you know so um I want to Pivot a little bit uh you you have all these interesting posts about how the genome relates to ethnicity and uh mixtures of people and migrations and conquests and uh and and all of this stuff and this is relevant to the the question that has been you know debated ad nauseam and papers and and and books and and popular culture and so forth is race a social construct or a biological reality and my race I mean the the sort of typical five or six categories that people tend to think about that we would check on a you know Government Census form white black Asian Hispanic Etc uh so do you conceive of these categories as as a biological realities or as a social construct yeah I mean in terms of race um you know we're both American uh in America it's you know a particular thing which is different than in other country so obviously there's a social construct aspect to it um but you know we look a particular way and uh if someone was like you know you know two Swedish men talk talking maybe like okay like when did their ancestors come to Sweden I mean they would immediately know that like we are not descendants of at least mostly Vikings like you might have a little bit of Viking in you actually maybe yeah yeah yeah like you know there's Northern England the Dane law but the point the point is you know when you say it's a social construct um people know what that means so I'll give you a concrete example the word Caucasian is still used in the United States for white people it's not used uh for white people in Europe this is just like a weird thing I mean a Caucasian comes from caucus white it's actually not a PC thing but somehow became pcified okay um I have a friend she was Finnish and they got like they got a genetic test that they were going to do for some like experiment uh and it was from an American vendor and it sounds like you know that you should uh the predictiveness of this test is only viable for Caucasians issue in Finland though is they were thinking wait why would you decide a test for people from Georgia Armenia the caucuses yeah yeah so in Europe like and if you go to Russia and you say someone's Caucasian that's like saying they're you know you know like Mexican you know like Caucasians have like their reputation is like you know these dark uh criminal people from the caucuses that cause problems right obviously in the United States it's totally different so okay yes it is a social construct in some ways um I think that's extremely obvious you know there are there are people like I'll give you I'll give you another concrete example uh the whole like Latino thing which is like Asian American was just created yeah uh in the 1960s and 70s by American like governmental bureaucrats you know um you know I've talked to like Latino people who are white they have blue eyes and like they want to do brown solidarity with me and I'm just like like I'm proud you know okay like just like yes you have like a Spanish surname so I guess technically you're an underrepresented minority well I'm quite adjacent in the United States but you know which is like literally true for a lot of things you know uh but I mean we know what's going on and this is like a social political ideology thing it has nothing to do with your ancestry which is mostly from the Iberian Peninsula like you're a white person like when you walk down the street they don't point at you and be like yo you're a brown guy no you're you know but they point at me they're like okay yeah you know so I I think like okay yes it is obviously social but what I write about a lot and what I focus on is you know like population structure population history um a lot of times people get caught up in the semantics and um I mean you had Charles Marion you know and you know Chuck is uh he like a band of the word race uh because it's just got too much baggage and it confuses people so you just use population structure genetic ancestry and things like this right so I do have a question that people often come back with me uh to me uh you know often they're like well-educated professionals uh you know like lawyers so this is usually lawyers actually uh and they were told that racist social construct has no biological reality and then they do a test like you did and then they're just really confused because wait they're like wait a second how does it know how does it know how does it know if it's just a social it's like 23andMe trace my ancestry to a specific town in Puerto Rico specific area of Puerto Rico where I happen to know through family lore is where my yes grandparents yes yes and so how it knows is because um you know if you think about your ancestry there's this genealogy that goes back into time hundreds of thousands of years and your genetics is a reflection of that genealogy so my ancestors you know like my ancestors is you know within the last 300 years all seem to have lived in the Bengal province of the East northeastern part of the Indian subcontinent right and so they intermarried with each other and so there's a particular genetic signature associated with that region of the world because of the people that live there and then if you go back like 10 000 years my ancestors actually lived in the middle east in Central Asia uh parts of Europe yeah the Indians have continent you know so it's like you're the outcome of all of these historical events of mixing between populations but each of those populations themselves are separable into individual units and these individuals uh they have their own stories in their own histories it depends on population to population so some populations are what we call uh padmiktik which means that yes they are varied within each other but they've been mating as an endogamous unit for you know hundreds thousands of years and so they have a very very specific signature of very very specific mutations that emerged in that population Jews and I have like several posts on this ashwinazi Jews uh are the product of the fusion of a western european-like population uh Middle Eastern population a central European population and they all base basically the fusion happened by about like 1200 or so maybe a little earlier and then at some point in the medieval period they stopped taking new genes in they stopped taking like new no no more applicants to the club you know and so for 500 600 700 800 years uh that's how it went and now obviously in the United States and in Europe uh the social barriers are different and so now ashrazi Jews a lot of them you know are intermarrying I have a lot you know we all have friends that are part you part Jewish quote unquote right but you know in 1500 uh basically everybody that was raised with the Jewish religion had Jewish parents now there were people who were Christian who had been raised with the Jewish religion but those people uh would interview with other Christians and kind of like the genetic signal there would disappear aside from the conversions or a special case where they you know crypto Jews that maintain their identity yeah so I mean the way I look at this question is I think um I think of race as a social construct that's inspired by biological reality sure uh you know as opposed to something like biological sex which just is a a reality in in my view right yeah you know biological sex clusters almost perfectly if you you can separate people into x x and x y it's dichotomous and correlate them with their their genital type and you will get 99 yes plus two groups right yes if you try to do that with um with the genomes and they're there I know that you're aware that there are studies like this you you say how how many clusters should we separate the human the human species into just based on the natural principles of statistical clustering you can cluster people into the five or six races but the Clusters are much weaker right they're like uh I I don't know the paper that I looked at it's like 0.8 or something yeah and that means that there are clusters but they bleed into each other very substantially so that you have probably you know but you know hundreds of millions of people that are more genetically similar to people in a different cluster than their own and their their boundaries are very blurry here yeah yeah and and the way that I think about it is it's a bit like the concept uh the concept of race is to biological reality what the concept of a month is to the lunar cycle right it's like um clearly the fact our months are like 30 days or 31 days that's because they're inspired by the lunar cycle which is precisely you know whatever it is 29.5 on average but that social construct of calendar month has just flown the perch of the thing that inspired it so that if we were to discover tomorrow that the lunar cycle is actually like up 35 days we're not going to change our calendar months right and race is very much like that it's like whatever you discover about uh the madagasi on Madagascar you know we're not going to change the box that they check or or uh or anything like that because the social construct has flown the perch of the thing that inspired it yeah yeah um so let's like the back of the size well you're talking to the 0.8 so I think what you're talking about is like a fixation index FST and also the stylized facts which is pretty much true is that uh you know like point one basically 15 of the variation between Continental races when you when you take like okay let's really concretely when you take uh a bunch of people from Nigeria and a bunch of people from Sweden let's say 100 to 100 and then you pull them together and you have three billion base pairs in the genome uh you have about like you know four to six million variations per genome okay so this these variations are um the variables in your statistic that you're generating how much of those variations um are found within within the populations versus between the populations so there's a subset of the variations that make swedes distinct from Nigeria's you know this because they look very different okay but then there's a bunch of other variations that overlap between the two and that's what you're talking about right so about 80 to 90 of the genetic variation overlaps where you know there's like an adenine a in a Swede or it could be a guadine g and then there's a bunch of Nigerians so it's like the guanine is 57 swedes and maybe it's like 52 Nigerians okay so just to give the viewers a concrete example so there's a little bit of variation but really it's just with in the population you can't differentiate there's other cases like so for example uh concrete SLC 2485 is a solute carrier it's a cell membrane but anyway the tldr is uh in Europeans uh it's 100 percent in the a variant and in Africans it's about like 95 to 98 in the G variant so when you're saying like uh oh there's overlap there's a little bit but mostly that actually differentiates the two populations so those are the type of genes they're usually not that extreme those are the type of genetic positions that differentiate populations right um and so obviously this is not like sex where it's kind of a clear and distinct category you know this is an Aggregate and you're looking at a statistic so I can tell you with really really really high confidence uh that someone is an ethnic Swede or an ethnic Igbo just like 23andMe did that you saw uh because when you look over millions and millions of variant you're aggregating all of that information and so you can actually say with a high Precision what ethnic identity someone is but um it's pulling out of this vast pool and how you cut and like align the pool in terms of categories is somewhat arbitrary it's not arbitrary and so far as like so for example um if you do like a naive like phylogenetic tree it's going to separate out Africans first it's going to separate poissons Southern Africans first and then there's going to be a second tree and that's tree will separate other Africans and non-africans and then the non-african tree will separate out uh East eurasians or actually except for West eurasians like Middle Eastern Europeans and then uh it'll separate out everybody else which is like you know people in Australia China the new world and then like South Asians will be like kind of in the middle anyway you know like there's gonna be like a natural flow to that but then like how many how many clusters do you define so for example Asian American was created you know I think in 1970 census um or maybe the 80s census because I think Asian Indians were separated out initially it was the 80 census the Asian Indians wanted to be aggregated to Asian Americans because there's affirmative action contracts that they wanted okay and that's really the truth but um I've seen medical genetics papers where they've talked about the fact that uh Asian people have like Indian subcontinental Heritage are genetically closer to Europeans than they are to East Asians they're kind of in the middle but they're closer to you know on average okay so okay say it again the people of Indians have continental United are closer to Europeans than they are to East Asians okay and is that does that have anything to do with the the Aryan it does some connection between yeah so I don't know if you want to get into Indian swastika that was like slightly turned as opposed to the Nazi sauce yes I know we've been like getting like Pretty Dirty like I know you have a long post on this as well right now yeah yeah yeah I've written about like yeah so um there was a guy who like an Indian guy in Germany Indian German who claimed that there was a hate crime against him and so there was a swastika on his car and people pointed out that that's not enough so the Indian swastika so we saw another Indian put no he did he did it later they found out that he didn't but it was because he didn't do the research like he did the Indians the cops immediately looked at it and they're like we're German swastika anyway so that was funny so yeah so a lot of um a lot of populations actually uh so India is the one but Europeans are another did not really exist more than 5 000 years ago that's why that's why when I talk about the tree yeah it's not really a tree it's a Gladys with like multiple nodes that are verging and coming together yeah so like you know people that look like me like I mean maybe like there was some people 4000 BC but not really before four thousand you know what I'm saying so I have like my ancestry like I'll give you like a quick breakdown just a little viewers know so I'm Bengali I'm about like 15 East Asian like Burmese which is not common in Indian subcontinent but you know if you look at where I'm from it makes sense like my family's from a really really far north east and then the rest of the 85 I'm about like 10 to 15 uh indo-aryan like step like like straight out of like Poland you know from like 2 500 BC okay and then the rest of my background is like 50 50 mixed of like like something ancient in the Indian subcontinent that's related to animal Islanders and you know it's closer to East Asians and the other part is more like Iranians I see so injury with these tests what uh how do they choose when to draw the line because like you know we're all from like roughly East Africa if you go back far enough and then people migrated around 50 000 years ago the major Out of Africa migrations and so forth but people have just been migrating sure all the time so like at what point do you say you're this because your ancestors at this time were here as opposed to there this is an easy answer because I've been in the rooms like so just so you just so people know like you know so like you know I do the sub stack thing and I've done writing but I've been working in this space actually for a decade so I work for family tree DNA I work for the co-founder of 23andMe Linda Avey 2010. so I worked and I've done like development for National Geographic for their tests and stuff like that so I have background on this a lot of this like there's marketing research market research that comes in so people want certain things and they don't want to people want a certain certain far back but not further yeah like if I told if I told if I told someone that they were like you know 15 Western European hunter gatherer you know like 35 uh early European farmer and 15 uh courted where 50 corded wear there's gonna be a certain subset of people that are gonna be into that like hyper nerds but most people are like what does that mean yeah so so for example 23andMe um they they had a decision that was made early on I think I can talk about this because like this is so long ago now um they really decide to use nationality like nation state names yeah because people understand that yeah that causes some problems so you know like every population geneticist who's looked at this well we'll confirm this there's really no German genetic cluster okay what does that what does that mean that means that people in Eastern Germany are more like polls people in Northern Germany or like Danes people in Western Germany are more like Northern Germany which is made out of a multi-ethnic Empire yes in the middle of Europe middle Europa yeah so that's what it was and a lot of people the East for example were germanized during the drive to the east of the medieval period this is all like understandable by the history but it's just a pain in the butt because a lot of Americans are german-american they want to know that yeah but like how do you divide and there are statistical techniques you could do but it's kind of like you have to you have to like want a certain outcome so you want to tell someone that they're German American okay so you take these like four or five clusters you find the particular unique signatures to them and you label them all German and you make sure that you don't confuse someone who's poll or French for one you know there are things you have to do but this is not naturally coming out of the data what naturally comes out of the data is that there's like there's a Polish there's a Ukrainian there's a etc yeah but the Germans are not sorry Germans are not a natural genetic cluster interesting uh and that's been a major French to the lesser extent have the same problem the British they don't have as much of a problem you know why there's another Island exactly right so that's natural right Islands a lot of this is just about natural barriers yes like nature creates barriers and so people procreate with uh you know availability the available limited set of people for a very long time yeah and that's how you get these clusters popping out exactly you were about to though explain the the the Indian Aryan connection I'm gonna get like anything as mad but they always Indians really care about this sort of stuff which like not like they're the ones who really care about this really deep ancient history just because of colonialism so basically uh so I'll tell you guys my Y chromosome the earliest place this is like a pretty weird fact the earliest place that it's been found in ancient DNA is basically around the privet marshes uh border of like Poland and um Poland and Bella Russia and so just like the sequence is quick like ignore the like you can look up the names but they're not relevant so basically what happened is around like 2500 BC um there was a a group of indo-europeans um called the corded Ware culture um a little earlier actually some of them decide to go west um and they become like ancestors of like slobs and other people basically Central Europeans uh some of them decide to go East which just like if you're going to draw the straw that's a short straw like going Eastward into Eurasia when you're an aggro pastoralist is not good but anyways they became something called the fatianovo balenovo culture they basically like expanded like right between the step and the Taiga like in that like little Zone where there was like agriculture was feasible in central Russia they kept going Eastward and they hit the Ural Mountains and the Euro mountains they decided that they wanted to start killing each other so they start creating these towns these fortified towns and you see evidence of these burials of people that are killed in massacres and they were just they just decided to go go for war on each other they invented something called the light War Chariot around 1900 BC that spread all across Eurasia really quickly and it looks like they were the mediators these people they're called the centasheda people they're the meteors the Light Warrior uh the light warcharia so in Northern Syria we have records of a population called the matani where their Chariot class were called the Mariano which is the Sanskrit word for young Warrior so it looks like these uh indo-iranian people started spreading out of the Southern euros about 1800 BC right so the indooranian languages they're spoken to the north Caucasus now but they used to be spoken all across uh Central Asia with the cities and the starmacias all those groups they got overwhelmed by the Turks in Iran obviously they speak sparsity Iranian all those languages those Iranian languages Indian subcontinent three fours that speak people speak indo-aryan languages which you know the closest languages in the Indo-European language family uh to them are Baltic Islamic okay and so what started happening um so there was always this idea of the areas because the languages and you know like some people in India they look kind of white you know we just let people like okay like why do they you know so what's up with that I mean aside from their skin color what do you mean even if you look at their face yeah like like their facial features look closer to Europeans yourself okay like this is like really weird but like there's a group that uh called jots from Punjab like Nikki Haley's a judge um and like if you look at some jobs they don't look middle eastern white they look Eastern European white huh which is actually what the genetics has ended up confirming they have the highest proportion of Step ancestry in the Indian subcontinent about like 30 or so so about 30 of their ancestry is like straight out of Belarus that's the way you can think about it you know uh you know at least four thousand years ago and so you know there was always these suspicions but what the genomics came back with was like um and I started doing the analyzes when the data started coming back and I was like okay there's a minority of the Indian ancestry especially people in the northwest or the upper castes that looks more like Europeans and particularly like Eastern Europeans which is weird Okay so if you're gonna think that people the Indian subcontinent have like Western ancestry well like Iran West Asia yeah that's closer right you know but so what happened was there was like a mass migration of these Chariot guys all over Eurasia and uh my Y chromosome like you could find in Mongolia you know you can find it all across Central Europe you could find it in Sri Lanka like it's all over the place okay so these guys went everywhere so that's like the minority component so depending on like what part of the I did like an estimate that like overall the whole of india-pakistan Bangladesh about 15 of the ancestries from these indo-aryans but they're critical because they brought the language Sanskrit which is the ancestor the indo-aryan languages but it also affected like the dravidian languages in the south of the subcontinent and then like a lot of the skeletal structure of Hinduism comes from these people so if I need to like learn something about early indo-europeans you go to the Hindu holy texts because they actually like preserve that stuff a lot of the stuff in the Hindu holy time like you can find it in fragmentary um in fragments in like in Greek and Roman stuff but they you know after Christianity and other things like their oral like traditional culture was really really kind of fell away whereas modern Hindus like they preserved a lot of that old stuff so brahmanas brahmanas are like you know their mantras like have elements that I think clearly come from the step you know and also like when you read um I'll give you just I'll stop here because this is weird but uh this to me is like we'll show you guys what's going on so you know it's famously they're the Ashman Twins or these twins uh these Gods uh that show up in Indian mythology they're basically the equivalent of Gemini twins in Greeks and like there's also twins in the Germanic mythology okay so this is an ancient Indo-European Primal things I was like I knew that when I was reading the Mahabharata for the first time there's a part of the Mahabharata though that jumped out of me because I've read The Iliad relatively recently where um someone has sex during the day and that was like really immoral there's a part of The Iliad where uh um Helen and Paris have sex during the day and that's like stated as very immoral so I think like these sorts of weird things are fragments of like step taboos that are preserved and they have no meaning to us now but you know if you're living in like wagons I don't know maybe you don't want to have sex during the day because the wagon's you're rocking and like it's awkward I don't know what I'm trying to say I'm just trying to give up but I mean like I read that in both those you know and like these are like two totally different cultures probably separated four thousand years ago but it's still there you know wow that's amazing I mean you you should write a book I mean are you writing a book oh the band was like I have a startup it's called generate everyone out there if you want to look it up so if the startup fails just amazing to me how many aspects of what we thought might be true about deep history can be tested confirmed or refuted yes with population genetics exactly I I don't think that your average history PhD right now has a population genetics course but they probably should yeah right if you're talking about demographics because what this is is demographics yeah and so when people say things like you know it's like I've I have talked to historians and sometimes I'll just be like no you're wrong and then they get pissed because there's like well I have a history PhD and I'm just like exactly archives and well the human genome is the ultimate archive yes it is it is and this doesn't go to like all the cultural stuff that's right there's a lot of stuff going on that that can't be tested this yeah but you know I'll give you an example like you know archaeologists are frankly um they're really butt hurt so now you pissed off Indians archaeologists think about archaeologists they've spent their careers like assembling these pots and being like well the pots changed there and like this pot style obviously evolved from that pot style and stuff like that okay so um one of the most shocking things that happened in the last 10 years is uh so you know Indo-European languages are spoken in India Iran and obviously Europe and you know there was a hypothesis that oh well maybe they spread from Central Asia or maybe they're indigenous whatever you know where'd you get the details but what happened is uh you know several different Labs mostly asking Wilderness labs and David reich's like groups but whatever there's other groups out there about like 2015 they they like started digging up samples from northern Europe well it turns out that uh it wasn't like Elite cultural diffusion they just killed everybody you know like it was bad I mean it was it's shocking like you wouldn't have believed it if they you wouldn't have believed it if they told you without genetic evidence okay so you know there was like more than 50 replacement pretty much everywhere in northern Europe but in some places like so for example in Sweden there's a group of farmers called The Funnel Beaker culture they created these great megaliths so there was a megalith culture Stonehenge is the most famous but there's plenty of others the megalith culture people were originally from you know the Mediterranean really Anatolia originally they brought farming to Europe uh those people were like really really decimated by the arrival of indo-europeans between 2300 BC and 2900 BC depending on where they came in from the East so but in in Sweden they totally exterminated the funnel Beaker people there's no genetic imprint of the funnel Beacon people in Britain the Stonehenge people uh about like 10 of the genome is from them so they mostly overwhelm that you know there are other areas like southern Europe it's like 30 to 40 percent so um mostly they're still mostly like the original farmer ancestry so this like really shocked people and this is a big deal because there were some anthropologists and archaeologists that had created these models of like okay well this corded so specifically there's something called corded wear Pottery that's associated with the arrival of a we now know it's a culture from the step they're basically from Ukraine they're the yamnaya people um they ran around with maces and they smashed people's heads okay like it's just like stylized fact was true um but like there's these archaeologists that developed this theory that well actually they came from the baskets of the previous people and so they just kind of evolved culturally into this new culture no they just were killed okay we know that now but like these archaeologists have been doing this for 30 or 40 years so all their papers are wrong so they're kind of pissed yeah because they're just like look we put a lot of work into this I don't think I'd be wrong you know I don't think we brushed a lot of dust off yeah and I'm not trying to hate so actually there is an explanation for the corded wear so the the word lady is not an Indo-European word it looks like about 25 of the ancestry that corded wears from a culture called lobular m4a which is the last Neolithic culture in Poland and it looks like it was that there was what we call male-mediated migration that's just a way for saying that like you know the women were taken and so these women brought some of their cultural Traditions so a lot of the words for certain farming things in northern Europe are not Indo-European because they didn't Farm they were they were pure pastoralists when they first arrived and also the corded wear baskets those those patterns are not baskets um the pottery they probably were local women who were did the pottery um but the men who showed up from the step they're used to baskets so the corded the chords that shade that uh imprint it's mimicking baskets so it's a cultural synthesis the pottery is from the native people yes from the women that they took but the the the unique like corded pattern is probably a reflection of the fact that these guys they grew up with everything in baskets right so now we know so another post interesting post you had along these lines was the the deep roots of the Han Chinese oh yeah what has population genetics revealed about the large well I think it's still the largest country in the world maybe India may have taken it just recently but the Han are the largest ethnicity in the world the largest ethnicity in the world and your post revealed to me the most continuous in the sense that yeah Han Chinese people today have the most in common with the Unearthed bones of Han Chinese from thousands of years ago yeah yeah yeah so what I'm what I'm getting at here is like so uh David reich's book how we uh who we are and how we got there has a bunch of stuff on this Day 2018 it's still pretty pretty accurate there's still some changes now but in any case so you have Europe and so like let's say like we have like three uh three let's say four herds of the Eurasian like white cream like the Civilized you know whatever like 2000 years ago you have Europe Mediterranean you know West Asia the Middle East you have India and you know China and then everything else kind of comes like southeast Asia is kind of a combination of India and China a lot of ways culturally uh but uh okay so when you look at India and Europe the ancient DNA is quite clear there was a massive like cataclysm um about like 4 000 years ago and there was admixtures and changes so people in Europe 10 000 years ago looked nothing like people in Europe today like they're very dark skin they have blue eyes dark hair very like robust course features okay like they were totally dark skin but blue eyes yes totally different people they're what called Western heart gathers Google it um those are the indigenous people that were there at the end of the Ice Age okay um and so in the Indian subcontinent uh there's probably no West Eurasian ancestry like so half of the ancestry the Indian subcontinent today was not there uh they're you know you know dark-skinned people they looked more like Africans although like if you look at animated Islanders like they have like you know African you know curly hair but like if you look at their faces you can tell they're not African like you know I mean it's just like not all very dark-skinned people look the same believe it or not yeah um so you could kind of I've seen animated Islanders where I'm like oh that kind of looks Indian like yeah you can see like Indian features that came from those type of people right so anyway so yeah those type of people there obviously Europe and India's changed in radical ways in Europe more than India but both of them changed radically you would not recognize the people in West Asia it's a little different West Asia had like a lot of genetic differences at the beginning of this period with agriculture but they kind of like mixed and mushed into like one like hole that's the way I'll say it so West Asia changed in terms of like people from Iran were totally different than people from Syria the genetic distance is actually the same as modern Chinese versus Northern Europeans back then wow yeah and those people mixed together though so they created this this Amalgamated whole okay so that's the change there China is the weird one or not weird um but it's the it's the exception in terms of like the Neolithic people in northern China exhibit rough continuity of people in modern day Chauncey and and hanon and like those areas in the Yellow River there's some stuff going on in the South that's different but there was some gene flow back and forth there was some mixture there was expansion out of the North and you know it from the post but basically it wasn't totally different like it was like okay uh I could believe this because the stuff from Europe and India if you're not gonna be 15 years ago I would have believed it it just doesn't comport with what we know in anthropology and other things like like how would like these people move like why would they be so brutal are people that evil are the people that meet yeah they are you know that's what we know now but in China it's like okay there was some migration here and there but basically the base is what you would think it is so the people that live in China today are descended from these Ice Age foragers that were like wandering the Yellow River Basin 11 700 years ago that's not true in India that's not true in Europe uh there's new people that came in West Asia there's been like a lot of mixing in a way where it's hard to recognize that they are the same people even though the basic elements are there in China it is a predominantly uh Yellow River base and expansion uh I think the early two culture that is remarkable in some way it would it would um match with how the history of China is generally talked about as pretty much the oldest continuous civilization that has one people with a self-concept I think it's true um and you know thousands of years of dynasties that have seen themselves as one nation right so in some ways it confirms 5 000 years of history and that's kind of like wrong because the really first date you have is I think like the defeat of the song by the Zhao and I think that's like 1076 or 1100. we know this because um they're into astrology there's a particular alignment the stars and the moon and all these things yeah they record it and so we can actually use like astronomical techniques now to get the specific date yeah so we have that date uh around like 3 100 years ago and so that's what his we know that the Shang Dynasty from the Oracle bugs we know that they were the Shang Dynasty so we have writing we don't know what the previous dinosaur but that's probably the heirlo2 culture but basically I think 5 000 years I think that's I hate this phrase but it's not not that's not really wrong you know I mean it is kind of right yeah um and the continuity is true like Indians sometimes like to say oh we have continuity but I'm like yeah but like Indians are a synthesis of different things so yes Indians do have continuity like if you want to know what the original indo-europeans are were like you go to The Vedas because they've actually like maintained that but genetically and culturally look I mean you know like so like Indian gods are obviously even the earliest Vedas show like subcontinental influence so like the Sun God is in a chariot um just like Helios but like he's waving at parrots okay that's like like something's changed there there's no parents of the Eurasian step so like Indians have like changed so I think like you know because like Indians will sometimes argue with people like we're just his agent I'm like yeah but it's like a little different because the Chinese it's like a Chinese person from the Shang Dynasty is genetically very similar to a modern Chinese person and the Shang Dynasty the Oracle bones those characters is the ancestor of modern opinion you know that's pretty that's pretty amazing it is remarkable yeah it's it's amazing so uh this brings me to a question which is controversial right now because of the new Cleopatra I guess movie um get me canceled for the 30th time that's the point of this podcast man what did Cleopatra look like because people are upset that she is Egyptians are upset that she's being portrayed by a black woman and not even a particularly dark-skinned yeah she's a Mexican mixed-race British black woman yeah yeah so what did she look like yeah well we know what she looked like because they're like there was a bust that was created when she was being held I think she was that was when she was held hostage in Rome under Caesar um and there's like coins she looked like a Balkan woman I think there's like records of her having maybe auburnish hair um she had like a big nose uh like not necessarily even a Roman nose but just like a big nose uh just you know pretty Balkan features most of our ancestors we know what it is she's Macedonian uh you know Greco Macedonian is what maybe the way you want to say it and then she has a little bit of Iranian ancestry through uh her um cellucid and uh pontic and to this point would she look more like a person from that region today or Greece I think she would look like a person from Greece like a woman from Greece yeah I mean 80 of the ancestry in the Levant um dates to 1800 BC I'm saying 1800 BC very specifically because there are some ancient DNA remains from the port of sided and you take those people and you like substitute them into modern Middle Eastern people and it's like 80 okay 20 is new stuff so that's that's why I say numbers like this and with specific dates we have ancient DNA I have a date I'll give you a date and I give you the percentage based on the calculation right yeah and so um the issue with Cleopatra is like it's not controversial she's known this is just American ideology uh infecting history the reason I get angry about it is like there's a lot of history we don't know and there's history we do know this is history we really know she's just making stuff up yeah and like most people you want to say like oh well they know they'll know the truth like they don't know the truth and a lot of the Afrocentric stuff um the hotep stuff is starting to like bleed into the regular discourse and it's like I don't really care like if like you can think whatever you want to think like you shouldn't take it seriously right but then like intelligent people are taking it seriously now right so it's like what do we do about this so the Egyptians are they know that she's Macedonian too like they have a whole history and I have a post about ancient Egyptian DNA basically like modern Egyptians like they're mostly from ancient Egypt they have a lot more sub-Saharan African ancestry than they did in the past and that's because the Islamic period brought in a lot of that right you know yeah and then there's also like there's also some Northern ancestry like the mammal looks were mostly kit check Turks and circassians but yeah so I mean I I remember I think people got upset when um Zoe Saldana was was tapped to play was it Nina Simone yes yes right and and I understood that because she she looks nothing like me she was just like Nina Simone was a dark-skinned black woman and that's why it's not true in the spirit of Houdini's mom was yeah right and like just as a viewer I do want to see somebody that really looks like the I mean that's part of the uh suspension of disbelief he's like I go to a movie theater I go to a show I you're asking me to suspend my disbelief that this is Nina Simone for a few hours and that becomes more difficult if she doesn't look anything like me so I understand what where the Egyptians are coming from like they want someone that looks like what we know Cleopatra may have looked like and if you don't have that um you know it's it's it's more difficult to enjoy the show and look there's some is there some aspect of colorism to this of like Arabs not liking the darker skinned probably yeah probably almost certainly yeah that doesn't mean we should rewrite history based on you know current ideology I think I really think you should try to be faithful to what people look like in in these movies to lean towards that um I will say that I don't really care about the new Bridgerton thing uh what's the new Bridger it's like the queen is it the new the Netflix show yeah they have they have black people in the show right yeah and like basically Queen so okay this is a thing to start on the internet the early internet so Queen Charlotte uh I think like her title is like something of Mecklenberg she's a German princess but some of her like there's a there was an internet rumor that she was black and she does have like a Portuguese ancestry like in 1300 but anyway um but she wasn't black okay there's like one photo there's one painting that looks like maybe looks African features but like no one ever described her like that I mean she lived 200 years ago and there's plenty of other paintings so it's like that's just made up okay but no one cares about Queen Charlotte in the United States no one's ever going to look her up like no one's actually gonna there there are people who think that yes Queen Charlotte was black like this is big in the hotel Community I think but the reality is she's just not historically important so I don't care you know it's just not something that I'm gonna like freak out about it's Bridgeton everyone knows there weren't black and Indian people in uh Regency area you know what I'm saying the register area aristocracy like it's just some weird fantasy somehow changing it completely is less upsetting than getting it slightly wrong that's true because because when you change it completely you understand you're in like a fantasy alternative right now but with the Cleopatra thing it's the docu-series yeah and you know they're like portraying it as you know like her family was black I guess like some from the pictures that I've seen and whatever it's not that big of a deal but it's annoying and it's also an issue where it's like the media knows they're trying to call that on it because you know you don't want to be so a couple of years ago like four or four or five years ago Vox actually vox.com explain might have been uh black because there was a tomb that might have been her sister uh in Asia Minor and it could be that her sister was Black based on the remains now they made this first of all it's not actually conclusive that it's her sister anyway um this is really funny they concluded that she was Black based on the skull science like literal science yeah because I actually I clicked through because I'm like how would they say this but it's literally like uh you know and like that's not always wrong you're saying Vox is pro phrenology in certain contexts it's all about like the the means of the ends right yeah and so I think it's really important uh if you're a scientist if you're a scholar I think you know the truth matters and it doesn't matter if you hurt the feelings of you know the people that you're ideologically aligned with but that's just not very that's not like people still like pay lip service too but let's get real I mean I mean we all saw what happened during covid people like flipped and changed around based on the coalitions it's I mean it's history no one cares about history I mean I care but you know I'm not yeah no one cares they're gonna lie you know right they'll lie straight to your face yeah it happens in the Indian contest that happened it was like uh when it was quite clear that there was like an indo-aryan migration from the genetic data um the Indian medium so wait tell me why does this upset some people in Indian Community uh because there was a theory so there's there's a couple of things one thing is um the British colonialists realized that the languages of Southern India Twain about 25 in the Republic of India now are dravidian they labeled the dravidium they're not indo-aryan they're not Indo-European and it's quite clear when you listen to them uh but you look at they're not into European okay and so they're like oh okay well you know like you guys aren't any more close to the people in the North and then it turns out the people in the north are descended from Aryans so they're different people so there's no like real India it's just something that was like made up and we can like you know rule you because like you know and stuff like that there's lots of natural divisions culture et cetera and they would tell like uppercass Northern Indians what you know like we're actually Aryans like you and you know we're actually not aliens like you know we're all into European and India's actually bought into this um they thought that their ancestors were from like the Arctic and all this stuff and actually turned out it's not like that's not that part is not false okay but in any case in terms of that's where the the satosha were like in the Euros it was cold but in any case um and so what happened is like the Chinese the Indians now kind of like the regnan ideology partly related to Hindu nationalists although this is like very new to internationalists themselves the Internationals had no problem with the Aryan Invasion theory for a while but a new thing is like well actually no we were always here and everyone's the same and we're indigenous and all this stuff and stuff like anything it doesn't make any sense because like that means they know Europeans have to come from India why is there no genetic Indian ancestry like all over the world why is it like European like ancestry in India Etc it doesn't really make any sense but you know um I did see Indian scientists straight up saying that and the Indian media I mean media is like they're dumb they don't know what's going on they just like you know the science says so what the scientist says is what science says so they're going to say it so they just like straight up like like because like people email me they're like wait that's not what the paper says I'm like exactly but nobody knows they don't care you know so I feel a lot uh you know seeing that happen in India I'm a lot less judgmental about other cultures uh after also like you know things in America where it's like you know uh I'll give you like I'll tell you guys like a funny story because like so um I think it was like 2012. I don't think I was like well maybe it was earlier I don't think I was in grad school yet so uh Tallahassee back when he was still engaged with comments yeah yeah on the Atlantic um here he was like talking about race and I was just like what you should like talk to a scientist and so I recommended Neil Rish Neil rich is uh and he's a Meredith so I can say this and he's not going to get mad although people still get mad I'm gonna say this he published a bunch of papers in the early 2000s that you can like identify someone's racial identity with not that many markers very easy 30 markers 30 genetic markers yeah like wallet what you know population informative discriminative markers but you could do a 30 you know but you have to pick the 30 careful yeah because they have to be the ones that are very generous you know right but you know he just published some papers there were some statue on papers and he just showed like look like population structure is real it's easy to figure out blah blah and so uh you know in the early in like 20 years ago that was basically you know race has a biological component you know um and that was what you know he made a big you know I mean he's very old and he's very evident he's done a lot of other things I don't want to over emphasize it but anyway so I recommended Neo and like tomahawee reached out to Neil Neil like talk to him you read Neil's interview he's like being totally PC I was like oh okay I see how this goes it doesn't matter like how famous and how established you are you're just gonna tell them what they want to hear and like multiple people like uh like Zach beechum I don't know if he's still at Vox where he is but you know I got into an argument with him once where I was like well I'm not all Genesis think race is has no biological basis like did you see the tadaasi interview with Neil rich and I'm like well I recommended Neil rich I don't know maybe some people criticize me for saying lying but I'm just like he told tanahasi what townhouse he wanted to hear that's it's quite clear like he just couldn't my point was like there is this at the point when tanasi was really really a big deal not yet but not quite yet yeah I mean if he wasn't listening to me he wasn't a big deal right you know right so but I mean my point don't sell yourself short that's a long time ago you know but yeah I mean I'm just saying like he wouldn't he wouldn't respond to my emails now right right I just was like just like look it up but you know whatever it is what it is um I still like do I still do my own thing but like the rest of the world has uh agreed on certain different things let's put it this way like you know scientists are way more I mean woke wasn't a thing like 15 years ago right so whatever it is it is the truth is what it is and like you know uh it'll all come back eventually right so I don't know well I think there's I know some people find this whole line of discussion to be taboo and suspects but I think I don't think there is much to fear here if responsible people are curious about um history and migrations and population genetics and and and so forth and really the totality this this I don't want to uh be glib because this stuff can be used to divide people and it is but just as much it can be used to show us how much we have in common and um really one does reading your sub stack one does not get the sense of a divided Humanity one gets the sense of an ultra complicated human story going back thousands of years uh and um and that's why it's really interesting for for me to read and I I highly recommend other people read it too it's called unsupervised learning right yeah okay so Rajiv Khan unsupervised learning and then before I let you go can you just talk a little bit about your startup yeah what are you doing at your startup what's it called Etc yeah yeah so yeah thanks thanks so um you know this is most of my time I actually do spend at the startup it's just like um it's it's a platform as a service business to business so you know it's not one of those like sexy public spacing things so you know we talked about 23andMe and ancestry uh they use um they use genotype arrays right now and so the 23andMe is like 600 000 markers ancestry is like an 800 000 marker so these are alumina arrays okay so these are like chips uh you put you put the sample on and it returns positions at these markers so these markers are variable markers are very informative but the whole genome was three billion based pairs okay so it's three billion and you're only getting you know less than a million out of that right um and that's still a lot of information but my belief uh and so I've been holding on sequence you can find it just type receipt Cloud whole genome sequence onto Google you can like look at all the raw data um I put it out there uh my son my older son is the first human who was sequenced before he was born you can like Google MIT tech review resume con like that was profiled in 2014. so I'm really Enthusiast for genetics and personal genomics and like genomics like what it's going to do for our future but the issue is with data so the first human genome was three billion dollars to sequence in today's money right now you can get a medical grade whole genome sequence like you could for 200 okay so the price point has really come down so we've gone from one genome 20 years ago one human genome to probably around a million it's hard to keep track of now it's slowly commoditized so we have a million right um but you know what's like uh you know to be cliche what's more informative than a million genomes a billion genomes right we're going to get there uh but how are we going to store it how are we going to analyze it so a lot of the data um data storage uh rubrics or maxims for like you know a dozen genomes don't really apply to thousands of genomes you know this will start to get some serious serious there's going to be um as of like I think the NIH predicted the next year there's going to be more genomic data in the world than there was data on the internet in 2010. right so it's like we're getting into like petabytes it's crazy so how do we manage this um obviously I like I like what genomics can tell us about the past which it can do massive amounts I think it'll be able to tell us a lot about ourselves uh like you know you you talked about some interesting funny things right but this stuff is going to get serious soon um already like uh babies newborns that don't flourish uh they're sequencing them at 40 of the time they can figure out a congenital problem because they obviously can't tell you what their problem is right so this is going to get really actionable and serious and ubiquitous so you have all this data uh my company generate um what we want to do is make you know obviously the data storage and management easy uh accessible to scientists and then also the analyzes we want to make them rewarding um rich and also easy because a lot of these things um this is a field where you know genomic sequencing cost beat Moore's law for seven straight years so it's gotten so fast that there's law being that the price price comes down yeah how much every I think it's like is it every year it goes down by half something like that yeah and so basically we you know genomics outran Computing for a while um and so it's really hard to manage the data analyze the data so one of the reasons that I believe we are not where we should be when it comes to medical prediction and all these things is just because like geneticists we were not trained with the mindset and the tools to analyze Big Data you know like a lot of people that are you know like a Gen X or older were trained on Excel uh yes the younger Millennials Zoomers some of them are trained on you know using python you know databases and like in SQL databases but not too many and so um this is just a situation where our culture uh has not matched what our technology we have the technology but we don't have the culture we don't have the skills so what generate wants to do is make a lot of that easier we want to have a platform for people to do science so they mostly focus on science instead of Information Technology and this is not super exciting on one level right like I was talking about like you know the ancient history of Madagascar or the you know whatever all of these things we're talking about controversial things but this sort of stuff uh nuts and bolts is what's going to make it so that we can actually have the genetic future that was promised 20 years ago right so there were a lot of promises made a lot of it what a lot of it has not panned out we have not cured cancer so let's talk about cancer um a third of us are going to have cancer diet cancer okay I mean if we had lived forever for 120 years would be a higher percentage right but um cancer are mutations in your cells so Steve Jobs was one of the first people that had cancer genomics done on him it was super expensive then it's it's pretty cheap now so yes there's one whole genome sequence uh for you right now and that's like one and done but if you have cancer they need to like do tissue sampling and stuff they're gonna have to like sample multiple times so the data needs are going to be really big but we shouldn't have to think about that we shouldn't have to think about data needs as a limitation you know uh and so there's a lot of companies my company generated is one of them uh there's other companies getting into the space there's some of the big boys getting in Amazon has a good genomics unit but you know what uh to anyone out there who has a biotech company uh good luck uh getting Amazon to do work for you because like they're looking at big farm you know so like big companies like Amazon they want to work with massive companies they want to probably with like six big companies you know and make a bunch of money off that we're here to service like the smaller companies that still have needs but that don't want to hire like an I.T Tech Team you know right so you know increase productivity more science uh brighter future all of those Silicon Valley things I'm all about that and um you know we have a lot of the technology already can you imagine what it's going to be like when we have like you know like you could just like take a sequence yourself and like put it in with a thumb drive into your computer I mean that's going to happen probably in 10 to 15 years I predict it will yeah it's amazing um I just realized there's some question I want to ask you after I forgot to um does epigenetics mean that intergenerational trauma is a real thing no I wrote a whole thing so I thought I know you did too like I have friends in Academia who do not tell people that they work on epigenetics anymore because they are sick of having to deal with the questions because it's all misleading from the media um and so they just say that they work on Gene regulation so no so epigenetic trauma is basically something happens to you and it's passed out genetically uh to your Offspring there's really no evidence for this uh in humans there is some evidence for the they're called insults that these things could happen in plants and maybe in certain types of mice but there's no evidence in humans epigenetics is a massive deal like that's why like you know like your cells are different in your nose versus your liver right it's actually like because each cell has a full copy of the genome so which which part turns on to tell this to be a little never sell as opposed to a bone cell yeah so epigenetics is this whole molecular biological process that's a really big deal and that's why so many people study it because stuff like cancer also happens to epigenetic modifications and mutations right Epi mutations or whatever so it's a massive deal but what people really want to care about is like oh like there was a famine in the Netherlands in 1945 and the grandchildren are sicker and that probably honestly most people in the field think that that's probably publication bias where it's just like yes it's nothing they didn't do anything fraudulent but randomly some things will just happen with the p-values you guys know right so yes I have a post if you have a 95 confidence interval that means five percent of the time Something's Gonna just be wacky exactly right and you really like the P values for some of these big data fields like for example in genomics for genomide associations which like detect the mendelian diseases you're talking about the people the real p-value is like you know rule of thumb is like 10 to the negative eight okay you know yeah so it's just like the 0.05 is not even applicable there so yeah I have a post it's free you guys should check it out December I wrote about epigenetics I wrote that was like that I wrote not because I have a passion for debunking public myths but because like I did it as a service because I heard so many complaints privately yeah and you know um so I mean yeah maybe someday I'll write a book by the way uh if I have time after the startup like so Stephen Pinker was like I'll tell you he's on my podcast too but uh but yeah so Stephen was like giving me a hard time about that after we were done not writing a book yeah and I was just like you know when I have the time bro and I'm like but he did say I mean I think if I a book well go on no but he did say that epigenetics piece like he said that to everybody because he was like I was thinking about writing something like this yeah and you already did it so yeah I was like really happy I mean it would be great to have a book just about population genetics overturning all these things we thought were true about history yeah right that just like that that would be awesome okay so my last question which will probably make me seem like an idiot but I just want to get your potted quick response to this when people say we share 97 of our jeans with a banana right they also say you you share 50 of your genes with your sister yeah yeah how can this be true yes we must mean it in two different senses so can you like explain that yeah yeah so I have a post on this by the way for anyone here I think that July 30th or something of anyway it has like chimpanzee or something in the title I have a post on this from July of 2022. um last year but any case I'll explain it really quickly yeah um okay so when they say they're you're 97 like 99 like a chimpanzee what they're actually doing is they're looking at the three billion acgs and T's and they're doing like a comparison with the other three billion approximately like they're slight differences in the sizes but but basically just doing a one-to-one comparison positionally right each exactly so like the sequence identity is very close I don't think it's 99 I think it's less than that but whatever it's around there okay but when they say you're 50 related to your sister that means okay if you do like a comparison you're actually like 99.9 identical to your sister but that 50 is assigned to the genomic segments that physically came down from one side of your parents does that make sense so you're 50 of your genes are from one one of your parents okay there's recombination and so so I'll make it concrete uh my daughter is 30 my dad 20 my mom it's because recombination made it so that there was more uh my dad's genes that went into uh my daughter my son is like closer to 20 25 25 and so that's the variation where like that's why you're not 100 obviously and 50 is the average because you're getting like a 50 sampling from each parent right right but that doesn't that doesn't refer to what the state of the genome is the genome the the strands are actually much more similar than that but it's just like if you labeled if you had labels of strands of like maternal and paternal grandparents yeah um what it's doing is it's adding it's like those are labeled as different that's called identity by descent and this is actually not a stupid question even if even if some of the specific nucleotides are actually identical if that's in those two the vast majority are because most humans are identical right but what what they're doing is looking at identity by state and with like something like 23andMe you could look across the genome and so let's say like one percent of you this is like this is way underestimate but let's just say one percent or it's overestimate one percent of your genomes differ from your sister but what you what you what you could do is like if you look across the segment you can see where the mutations are and if the pattern of mutations will tell you if the two segments are matching right so when you look across a long enough strand you can figure it out enough differences that you can tell who the Strand came from so it's quite clear that it's from like your maternal grandfather as opposed to your maternal grandmother right so that's does that explain you answer your question yeah yeah it does yeah yeah that's a good question all right well that's all I have for you received thank you so much for coming on my show that was my pleasure man and uh we're done all right that's it for this episode of conversations with Coleman guys as always thanks for watching and feel free to tell me what you think by reviewing the podcast commenting on social media or sending me an email to check out my other social media platforms click the cards you see on screen and don't forget to like share and subscribe see you next time foreign

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 30,943

Keywords: politics, news, politicalupdates, policies, currentaffairs, political, society, highsociety, modernsociety, contemporary, intellectualproperty, debate, intellect thoughts, opinion, public intellectual, intellect, dialogue, discourse, interview, motivational, speech, answers, Coleman Hughes, talkshow, talks, ethics, intelligence, discrimination, music

Id: I862ksIkEtE

Length: 101min 7sec (6067 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 03 2023