The Future of Ethnicity with Razib Khan

We discuss the potential extinction of ethnic groups, human speciation through space colonization, future gender differences, genetic caste systems, and using selection technology to create gifted children. Razib shares his vision for the long-term genetic future of our species.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] It's hard for me to wrap my head around it because I spent the first, like, all my childhood. Assuming, that everyone was just going to sort of become the same like golden ish color as everyone just interbred with everyone else.

And, and what I'm seeing instead is like everyone moving in the direction of glomming off in these more isolated communities becoming more different from each other instead of all kind of the same. It's just so weird. And then of course, speciation is going to happen when

Malcolm Collins: people get off. We ran a big study on this.

And one of the things that's most correlated with fertility rate, at least in the U S is xenophobia. Which means that we actually will likely preserve independent

Simone Collins: ethnic groups. It's just the opposite of what I expected, like, for the majority of my life. It's so weird.

Razib Khan: Yeah, I mean, the issue here is, like, also if you look at a country like Brazil or Cape Verde what happens is actually, like, even in, like, a genetically homogenous admixed population, there's still variation, and so people still look different, and so, if they're sorting based on physical type, There will be like, kind of like, [00:01:00] precipitation back out, if that makes sense.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello. We have a very special guest on Basecamp, Razeeb Khan. He is the CSO of Generate, which is a really, really cool startup, basically enabling people to use a lot of genetic technology and information that they haven't been able to use yet.

Plus he is the proprietor of unsupervised learning, which you can check out on Substack. Talk about deep dives on really cool genetic histories and all sorts of stuff. You had really better check it out. If you don't know about it yet, you're in for a treat. You can also just check out a lot of things that he's working on at razeemkhan.

Malcolm Collins: com. And he's probably one of the most famous in the world communicators on human genetic stuff when it comes, especially on the spicy side.

Razib Khan: Whenever people say that, I'm just like, why aren't there more communicators? I mean, it's like,

Malcolm Collins: Well, I'll tell you why there are more communicators. I'd say there are a number of other communicators, but I think a lot of the other communicators in this space go a little too hard on the race stuff.

Like they seem to have a [00:02:00] vested horse in the game, which pollutes their ability to Give the message. Whereas you come at it much more neutrally. Which I think is why you're such an effective communicator. And to that end, one thing I wanted to ask is where do you think the future of humanity is going genetically speaking?

Like, are we going to see a die off of ethnic groups? Are we going to see new ethnic groups? Are we going to see You know, who does well in this coming world? What's going on?

Razib Khan: Yeah, it's complicated because you know, these sorts of linear projections, not necessarily linear, but just like, I mean, obviously they're exponential too, but you know, like in 1900, if you had asked me this you know, the, the theory was like all the colored races were going to disappear because the fertility of.

of white Europeans was so high and they were conquering all the continents and settling everything. Obviously that's not what ended up happening. So it just goes to show you that these like very, very long term projections. So for example, like people like, oh, there's going to be like 5 billion people in Africa in 2100.

I mean, that's, [00:03:00] I'm exaggerating. I think it's close to like 3 billion or 4 billion. Okay. I just don't think that there will be I think that those are overestimates. Probably and you know, the transition will be faster you know, since like about the 1980s, the UN has actually consistently over predicted population growth because as you guys know, a demographic transition has been happening everywhere and fertility is crashing everywhere.

And so it just depends on where so in any case I think like Peter Zahon says, Oh, the Chinese people are going to disappear. I'm like, look. They got a low fertility, but like there's 1. 4 billion of them. I mean, you know, they're not going to like, they're not going to disappear. Okay. There's like 20 million Jews.

And like, we're not like, Oh, the Jews are going to disappear. You know, the reason the Jews are not going to disappear is ultra Orthodox Jews have high fertility. Right. So, they're still going to be around. If you read Frank Herbert's Dune, they're still around, you know? So you just need some of them that really want to reproduce.

And wait, who are

Malcolm Collins: the Jews in Frank Herbert's

Razib Khan: Dune? They work with the Bene Gesserit. Yeah. Really? That's fascinating! Yeah, they're still around. They're still around. Well, do you know Kweezout's [00:04:00] Hatarak is Hebrew? No! No!

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Alice Wilde! I had no idea.

Simone Collins: Yeah, mind blown. Mind blown. Are

Malcolm Collins: we going the Tleilaxi route with our family?

Razib Khan: You know what? So, I have a, I have a friend do you know what an axolotl tank is?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, of course, it's what became the Tleilaxi females. They basically turned them into birthing tanks. So

Razib Khan: I have, I have a friend who got her eggs harvested, and she has, like, she produced a lot of eggs. And so I was like, you would be a really great axolotl tank.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, how long till we get axolotl tanks? Like, do you see some groups basically getting rid of women when we get

Razib Khan: artificial wombs? Yeah. Yeah. So I do think in terms of what's going to happen, I do think diversification is probably going to be a thing within a hundred years. You will have like sects of humans that are naturals, others that are probably going to do like legit transhumanism.

I mean, assuming our technological civilization [00:05:00] continues, you know, and then I do think there will be. You know, I mean, look, there's got to be like groups of gay men actually just groups of people in general, like women as well, because they don't want to give birth, you know, they don't want to go through the body, all that information they're going to use our throttle tanks.

The main issue is. I don't think they're going to be necessarily benign, you know, they're not going to be like, you know, dead or like brain dead, you know, plexiglass, but but the point is like the issue, the issue though, is like, all right, actually, you know, this is going to be fixed. They're going to test it on, on like animals, but.

The first ones are going to be bad, right? Yeah. It's just like, you know, C sections cause some issues, et cetera, et cetera. You know,

Malcolm Collins: I'm going to push back here. I heard a theory on this that was actually pretty compelling to me that it may turn out when we first start doing artificial wombs, that the children coming out of them are actually dramatically healthier than children born from natural wombs.

Because they don't have any restrictions on resources. And so even though