Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think that's right. There are lots of analogies that you have later. There's European farmers encountering steppe migrations. There's Native Americans encountering Africans and Europeans as they come from the Old World. There's various other groups encountering other groups. You have people who cognitively or culturally have all the capacity to thrive in other contexts. But just because of the nature of the interaction that happens, one group declines demographically and one group doesn't. It's just complicated. It's very tempting to think that at some level—I'm not trying to be politically correct—that it's something innate, some better biological hardware that makes it possible for these African lineages to spread into Eurasia. I have no good insight into that topic. I don't think there's very good genetic evidence or any other kind of evidence to say that that contributed in a very strong way. It’s just complicated. We certainly have many modern examples where people with better or more competitive cultural complexes encounter each other and the ones that are more organized in a certain way sort of thrive more demographically somehow. Let's jump forward then, since you mentioned this. Agriculture was developed in the Middle East like 10,000-12,000 years ago. Later, the population of Native Americans declined because of disease. One of the hypotheses that you talk about in the book is that potentially this happened with respect to people in Europe by the Yamnaya with the bacteria that causes the bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis. The question I'm trying to ask is going back a bit. James Scott, who I think just died a couple of weeks ago, wrote his book, Against the Grain. The whole book is like, “Agriculture sucked but we were forced to adopt it because it allowed some humans to organize nation states that were very abusive. But it did allow them to get the barbarians and co-opt them because they needed the labor to do this monotonous activity.” One thing I didn't realize until I read that book is just how new most of the diseases that afflict humans today are, everything from cholera to typhus to tuberculosis if you just go down the list. It might have been because of agriculture: domestication of animals and the density that was created. The theory he talks about in the book is that potentially the reason the hunter-gatherers, the “barbarians,” couldn't fight back against these early nation-states was because they were getting killed off by the diseases. I don't know how much evidence there is for this. Basically, the question I'm trying to ask is about the way in which Europeans encountered Native Americans in the New World. Did that just happen again and again throughout history? If you go back to Europe 9000 to 5000 years ago, is that just what human history has been like? That wasn't a one-off event? There's an amazing book by Kyle Harper. It's called The Fate of Rome. He's a Roman historian. It's a history of three major plagues in the Roman period, two of which are really not even very well known. It argues that the decline of the Roman empire is due to just weakening as the result of plagues and other climatic, biological, climatological worsening events. There is a lot of reason to think that some of these events have been recurrent throughout history. It's not just a difference between farmers and hunter-gatherers, but it’s actually a lot of different types of interactions that are occurring. The example that you mentioned is something that's been a big shock from the ancient DNA revolution. This is now maybe eight years, nine years old. The first large number of DNA sequences—from people who lived 6000 to 4000 years ago in the steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas and in Europe—were being published around 2015. This group in Denmark, led by Eske Willerslev and Kristian Kristiansen and colleagues, looked at their DNA. They discovered in their sequence, from the 100 or so humans they sequenced, that there was also pathogen DNA. In 5-10% of the random people they sequence from around 4000-5000 years ago, there was Yersinia pestis, the agent of the black death, but actually without the plasmid that contributes to bubonic plague. That's required for flea-rat transmission. So it must have been pneumonic plague with an aerosolized transmission or something. 5-10% of random deaths means that the percent of people who were dying must have been even higher, because they weren't detecting everything that was there. There’s a study by another group, Johannes Krause and colleagues, of people in plague pits in London from the 1300s epidemic. They found that when you apply this method to people we know died of black death, you only find a quarter of the people. So the rate was even higher. If people are bacteremic when they die, if they have bacteria in their teeth, they almost certainly died of that agent. A paper just came out a few weeks ago in Scandinavia. It was looking at these tombs from about 5000 years ago of farmers who were just on the verge of encountering people from the steppe. A huge fraction of them have Black Death when they die. They're buried in tombs and normal and they have rates that are even higher than 5-10%. It’s this whole pedigree with many, many generations. It's not all at the same time. It’s like the parents and generations and generations with a very large fraction. Well more than 10% have Black Death and have Yersinia infection. So it looks like this particular agent has been killing people for 4000-5000 years in western Eurasia. In fact, it’s killing a scarily large fraction of the population. As the quantitative person I am reading this literature, I think people are embarrassed by the implication. The implication is that a quarter to a half of deaths in this entire period are from this.…

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