Dwarkesh Patel

I am back with David Reich, who is a professor of ancient DNA at Harvard.

How do you describe what it is that you study?

Great.

And so we did an interview, was it two years ago at this point?

Which ended up being one of the most popular interviews I've ever done.

I think people just found really compelling that there's so much about human history we don't know and are just learning about now as a result of the kinds of techniques that your lab is using.

And you have a new preprint that's very exciting and I wanted to talk to you about it.

So let's begin.

Can you give me a little bit of context on what we're talking about today?

Can I ask a question?

I'll be asking a lot of naive questions through the next few hours, but why are frequency changes especially interesting?

Interesting.

Okay.

So what did you guys find?

Can I ask a clarifying question here?

So why are we discounting population admixture or replacement as selection?

Because if you think about it at a group level, if one population replaces another population, isn't that selection?

I remember from the last episode, you were explaining how there's been huge changes in what kinds of people are in a specific area.

One population came in and kind of replaced the previous one.

And then a new population came in and replaced the previous one.