On fatherhood, but done the super-progressive way.
What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?
Why did Rome, rather than any of its many rivals in Iron Age Italy, become the core of an empire?
A muddy settlement on the Tiber turns into a machine that can raise armies, write laws that outlive empires, build roads that stitch a continent together, and carry water for millions through aqueducts, while running a Mediterranean-wide bureaucracy for centuries. The usual explanations are familiar: institutions, military discipline, geography, luck. All true, and none of them feels fully satisfying on its own. Many societies possessed some of these advantages. Rome was unusual in how consistently it turned them into scalable institutions.
There is another angle that is rarely discussed, mostly because until recently it was not testable. What if part of Rome’s advantage was carried in its people, as average differences in traits linked to learning, planning, and administration?
Ancient DNA makes it possible to ask that question directly. Using the AADR dataset and educational attainment polygenic scores, Iron Age and Republican-era Romans come out unusually high. Besides exceeding earlier Italian groups, they sit at the top of the entire ancient European distribution, even after accounting for sample age and genomic coverage.
That by itself does not explain the rise of Rome. But it does suggest a sharper hypothesis: Rome’s institutions may have been built and operated by a population that, on average, was unusually well suited to master and scale complex social systems.
We Need A Famine
The people who want to ban Round-Up are the people who want us to eat fake meat.
And defying all odds, farmers who sprayed first generation (now banned) crop herbicides from open tractors are still around in their 80-90's. https://t.co/8GDpyelrvi
— Katewerk (@katewerk) November 24, 2025
The Sound Of Settled Science
A comparative genome study of earthworms and their marine relatives could challenge Darwin’s theory of evolution by showing that worms colonized land in evolutionary jumps. […]
The team has shown that marine annelids (worms) reorganised their genome from top to bottom, leaving it unrecognisable, when they left the oceans. Their observations are consistent with a punctuated equilibrium model, and could indicate that not only gradual but sudden changes in the genome could have occurred as these animals adapted to terrestrial settings. The genetic mechanism identified could transform our concept of animal evolution and revolutionise the established laws of genome evolution.
The paper is here.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
Very Much In Agreement
The Sound Of Settled Science
When humans entered America is one of the most debated questions in archaeology.
People in South America share a complicated connection to groups in South Asia and Oceania? Do they share ancestry from a mysterious group geneticists call Population Y?
All Your DNA Are Belong To Them
All Your DNA Are Belong To Them
The genetic testing company 23andMe, once a pioneer in consumer DNA testing, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy amid financial struggles, a leadership shakeup and growing concerns about the security of its customers’ genetic data. […]
When a company like 23andMe files for bankruptcy, its assets, including customer data, can become part of the sale process. While privacy laws in some states, such as California’s Genetic Information Privacy Act, require explicit consent before transferring genetic data to a new owner, the risk of misuse or unauthorized access remains.
23andMe has assured customers that any buyer will be required to comply with applicable privacy laws. However, genetic data is a valuable asset that could be exploited if not adequately safeguarded.
Additionally, only a week and a half ago, 23andMe updated their terms and conditions, which I’ve reviewed. They’ve added an important legal disclosure that could prevent an individual from filing a lawsuit with expectations of a court trial. Instead, unless you opt out by notifying 23andme within 30 days of first use, you are automatically bound to the new terms that force parties into an arbitration path for any legal remedies that could arise now or in the future.
Shoe-Sizing Trauma
You see, she’s upset that her feet aren’t being affirmed as “non-binary.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
Two hours.
From the tribe of 1k-10k modern humans who killed off all the other human species 70,000 years ago, to the Yamnaya steppe nomads 5,000 who killed off 90+% of (then) Europeans and also destroyed the Indus Valley Civilization.
So much of what we thought we knew about human history is turning out to be wrong, from the ‘Out of Africa’ theory to the evolution of language, and this is all thanks to the research from David Reich’s lab.
Let Sleeping Pachyderms Lie
I do not need to see a woolly mammoth in my headlights at night.
…there are now biologists hoping to recover some of the celebrities in the record of lost species — the woolly mammoth, the dodo, perhaps even the legendary North American passenger pigeon. On Thursday, researchers for the de-extinction company Colossal announced a remarkable discovery: they claim to have recovered a near-complete genome for the thylacine, the doglike “Tasmanian tiger” whose last living exemplar died in captivity in 1936
War On Agriculture
Research out of Tufts University three years ago created the Food Compass—a new guide to what is healthy that rivals the Food Pyramid for sheer lunacy. Advising us that Froot Loops and Pringles are healthier choices than meat and eggs, the authors of that research are now promoting ESG + Nutrition, in which their Food Compass informs governments and private enterprise on how to get the population of the world to follow along.
The Bedlamite Contagion
In any other branch of medicine, doctors would ask why. If you saw a sudden, 5000% increase in young people with bipolar disorder, the mental health world would investigate immediately… If you saw a 5,000% increase in girls suffering from anorexia, immediately we would want to know – what was that trigger, what is causing this? And yet, with gender, the 5,000% increase happens and nobody says a thing. Everybody’s pretending that it’s perfectly normal and healthy. Why? Because… it’s gender. You’re not allowed to question anything. You can only celebrate.
It’s almost as if we’re supposed to celebrate a 5,000% increase in teenage girls showing up at gender clinics and wanting their breasts cut off.
Andrew Gold interviews the formidable Mia Hughes, author of The WPATH Files, about pseudoscience, malpractice, and experiments on children.
Liberties Taken
There is no way that you can say to a man who identifies as a woman, insists he is a woman, that, fine, he can do what he likes, but he can’t actually come into women-only spaces – and that you reserve the right to say that the reason is because he’s a man – that doesn’t offend him…
What has happened is that a lot of women have seen their willingness to be polite absolutely taken advantage of… What it’s come down to is that people who don’t identify as their sex have taken other people’s politeness as license to override other people’s desires, needs, rights, and boundaries…
Helen Joyce on transgender overreach, exploited politeness, and belated pushback.
HOW AWESOME IS THIS?
Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts
How It Started
Some 6.9 million 23andMe customers had their data compromised after an anonymous hacker accessed user profiles and posted them for sale on the internet earlier this year, the company said on Monday.
The compromised data included users’ ancestry information as well as, for some users, health-related information based on their genetic profiles, the company said in an email.
Privacy advocates have long warned that sharing DNA with testing companies like 23andMe and Ancestry makes consumers vulnerable to the exposure of sensitive genetic information that can reveal health risks of individuals and those who are related to them.
Experts.
Obliterating the competition
Imagine the public outcry, and justifiably so, if boxing associations dispensed with weight categories and let heavyweights literally smash their way to the top. But when it comes to trans-athletes competing in womens’ Jiu-Jitsu, the gods of gender identity demand sacrifices.
“I hadn’t been notified,” Wilk said. “The only thing that brought it to my attention was my teammates. They kept asking me, ‘Are you fighting a man?’ and I was honestly too focused on coaching the rest of the crew to really pay attention to my opponent.”
“The fact of the matter is that he had a man’s strength,” Alexander said. “I train with men and women and the difference is massive. After my match with Cordelia, I sat mat-side and cried as my teammates massaged out my cramping forearms.”
The Patriarchy Made Him Run Faster
In sports that are dependent on skills other than speed, endurance, and raw power – say, archery or shooting – the difference in peak male and female performance may be negligible. But where such things are decisive – as in most sports – it requires a feat of ideological contortion – a kind of learned stupidity – to not concede the obvious.
Needless to say, stupidity ensues.
“Organic” Is The Latin Word For “Grown In Pig Shit”
The kitchen at the epicenter of the major E.Coli outbreak in Calgary, Fueling Minds, is a full-service catering company with a "strong commitment to sourcing organic and locally grown seasonal ingredients."
Fueling Minds website: https://t.co/3meObqwgQ5 https://t.co/Ug8Tk3Hxqv
— The Food Professor (Dr. Sylvain Charlebois) (@FoodProfessor) September 12, 2023