Dwarkesh Patel

And why are the people with the archaic mitochondrial DNA not surviving?

Interesting.

Okay, the Neanderthals.

So 300,000 years ago, our lineage interacts with them, but mostly their lineage survives and there's cultural diffusion, et cetera, and genetic diffusion.

And then, is it 70,000 years ago that we interact again?

Yes.

And they don't survive.

The genetic ancestry doesn't survive.

So presumably there was also other contact in between 300,000 years ago and 70,000 years ago.

Is it just sort of like there's not really an answer or just contention to why one time there's this kind of diffusion where most of the archaic genome survives and the other time it's total replacement?

Because otherwise you'd have to believe that Neanderthals independently developed Stone Age.

Right.

But it did.

Interesting.

Do you want to recapitulate the thing you were saying about the analogy to the Ptolemy and the epicycles?

It was quite interesting.

What is counterintuitive or unexpected or hard to accept about this alternative model?

What is the hesitation that people have for adopting this as the... I don't know.

There's an asterisk, so Aristarchus, ancient Greek, had the heliocentric theory because he had done a bunch of observations about how far the earth, or had deduced how far the earth is from the sun, had noticed other things, but it was not adopted because his fellow Athenians were like, look, if we believe that the earth revolves around the sun,

for it to be the case that we don't see relative movement of the stars to the Earth.