Today, Razib talks about a new paper, A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans:

Understanding the history of admixture events and population size changes leading to modern humans is central to human evolutionary genetics. Here we introduce a coalescence-based hidden Markov model, cobraa, that explicitly represents an ancestral population split and rejoin, and demonstrate its application on simulated and real data across multiple species. Using cobraa, we present evidence for an extended period of structure in the history of all modern humans, in which two ancestral populations that diverged ~1.5 million years ago came together in an admixture event ~300 thousand years ago, in a ratio of ~80:20%. Immediately after their divergence, we detect a strong bottleneck in the major ancestral population. We inferred regions of the present-day genome derived from each ancestral population, finding that material from the minority correlates strongly with distance to coding sequence, suggesting it was deleterious against the majority background. Moreover, we found a strong correlation between regions of majority ancestry and human–Neanderthal or human–Denisovan divergence, suggesting the majority population was also ancestral to those archaic humans.

On this episode of the podcast Razib talks to John Sailer. Sailer is currently the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He covers issues of academic freedom, free speech, and ideological capture in higher education. Sailer has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Free Press and Tablet Magazine. Sailer holds a master’s degree in philosophy and education from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from The King’s College. Prior to joining the Manhattan Institute, he was a senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars.

Following on last week’s podcast with Jacob Shell, Razib continues to discuss the rise and fall of woke politics in academia, and the current backlash exploding out of the Trump administration. Sailer discusses his previous work back to 2020 showing how blatant universities became in their discriminatory policies against white males in particular, and how easy it was to demonstrate this dynamic with even the most minimal level of due diligence like freedom of information requests. They also discuss the reality that universities are attempting to adjust to a new landscape with the administration pressuring them to revoke DEI policies, while many faculty are urging that they instead dig in their heels. Higher education is adapting, but Sailer argues that since fundamental values have not changed, some evasion is to be expected.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jacob Shell. Shell is a professor of geography at Temple University and author of Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals, and the Giants of the Monsoon Forest: Living and Working with Elephants. Educated at Columbia and Syracuse universities, Shell is active on social media, where he comments extensively on the politicization of the academy.

The conversation begins with Shell’s piece in Compact Magazine, To Save Academia, Hire Conservatives. The more than 3,000-word essay argues that academia must diversify ideologically to save itself, but also engage in a wider range of scholarship. Shell points out that US academia has become an ideological monoculture, with an overwhelming dominance of left-leaning faculty, especially at elite institutions. This imbalance, driven by extreme partisan ratios in fields like anthropology, leaves universities politically vulnerable and out of step with the broader public. He challenges the common view that this trend is due to self-selection, or the “pipeline problem,” suggesting instead that informal screening mechanisms discourage or exclude conservative scholars. Shell also argues that the grant system encourages conformity and limits academic freedom. More audaciously, he argues that some academics should be singled out by their peers, whether through their institution or professional organizations,t when they engage in politically motivated misrepresentation of their scholarship. Ultimately, Shell insists that academia’s unique role in public life is to observe and understand the world, not to risk co-option as an arm of any political movement.