Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…It's a very unstable life. In some areas like in archaeology, for a lot of my colleagues whom I respect tremendously, the career trajectory is that you learn to become an archaeologist, you dig, and you have a set of digs that you're doing for dozens of years with similar or slowly evolving methods. My work has just changed so radically. When I started doing this work, one could not sequence a whole genome. The genome was not yet sequenced. We had very little genetic variation accessible. The amount of data has increased by orders of magnitude every few years. What’s changed is the types of data that we collect, the ability to collect ancient DNA beginning 14 years ago, the ability to generate the volumes of it we have. We had no ancient DNA in 2009. In 2014, we only had a few hundred individuals with genome-scale data. We have tens of thousands of individuals with genome-scale data now. We have data from places we didn't have data before. It's such a destabilizing process. Someone like me wanders into areas that I'm not expert in. I'm not South Asian. I get to be part of trying to learn about the history of South Asia. I get to interact with archaeologists at the cutting edge of learning about ancient Southwest Pacific or ancient China or ancient Southern Europe. It's like an incredible privilege, but also I’m a kind of rank amateur in terms of a lot of the work I do. One wanders from one area where one's an amateur into another area, where one is an amateur and tries to learn a lot. Maybe this is a little bit like what it's like in Silicon Valley right now. You’re constantly doing new things and bringing some skills to bear that are useful. You’re hopefully trying to be respectful of the people one works with and the tremendous knowledge people have. You’re trying to learn as much as one can, and to work with other people to try to produce some joint research product that makes progress. Somebody's doing archaeology for their entire career on a certain group in some mountain somewhere, and then you come in. Here's the paper. We figured out the exact genetic combination that explains all your research. Is the reaction usually… I don't know how much of this you can say. Are people sometimes disappointed that you've been able to figure out the things in their field with a different technique? A lot of people we work with are incredibly excited about being able to do this. Prehistory is a period of time we know so little about. We have such poor clues. True archaeologists who are truly dedicated to understanding the past are super thirsty for knowledge about the time periods. If a new scientific technique becomes available that can probe these times, the true archaeologists who are truly interested in the past get incredibly excited. They embrace it as they've embraced previous scientific techniques, such as scientific archaeology, such as isotopic analysis, such as radiocarbon dating . That's been my experience with people again and again in archaeology. People really want to know about the time periods before writing, when at some point one didn't even imagine one could learn anything. They’re excited about this new type of information. Sometimes people are dug in to particular views of the past that are challenged by the new findings that come from scientific research, such as ancient DNA. When the DNA is strictly in opposition to some of these models, that becomes an area of tension. I have found myself to be proven wrong in a number of cases, including by my own work or by other work amongst my colleagues. I hope to be someone who can welcome that. One of my idols in this field is the archaeologist Colin Renfrew, who is a British archaeologist responsible for the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origins: the idea that farmers spread Indo-European languages. The language spoken in Armenia and in Iran and in northern India and in much of Europe today, spread with farming after 8500 years ago from Anatolia in all different directions. The demographic expansion and economic transformation associated with that spread farming. It's very plausible. There was a debate with Marija Gimbutas and others who argued that these languages spread from the steppe, north of the Black and Caspian Seas. One of the main arguments for the Anatolian hypothesis was that steppe expansions could not have been demographically significant because they were much thinner on the ground than farming expansions. This is why the steppe could not explain it, even though other linguistic arguments made the steppe seem more plausible. When the genetic revolution happened with regard to our understanding of Yamnaya expansions and Indo-European origins in 2015, Colin Renfrew at some point said, "I was wrong. I was wrong about this topic." In fact, the weight of evidence now suggests that demographic transformation did come from the steppe. It's kind of amazing it did. Maybe it's from disease, maybe it's from something else. Who knows what it is? That's a very interesting topic. But we adapt, we learn. So this is incredibly inspiring to be able to change one's opinion.…

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