PifferPilfer Turns One
On July 1st, this Substack turns one year old.
I launched PifferPilfer as an experiment in writing in public: a place to sort through data on population genetics, ancient DNA, intelligence, fertility, personality, and the stubborn little cultural puzzles that keep pulling me back in.
With the first birthday approaching, I decided to look back through the archive and rank every post by reader likes.
A Quick Birthday Note: As you look through this list, please keep in mind that most of these deep dives are currently locked behind a paywall for our premium community.
Because it is our first anniversary, I want to open the doors a bit wider. If you want full, unrestricted access to the entire archive listed below, plus everything coming in year two, you can claim a limited time discount via the First Birthday Special Offer.
Now, a quick caveat on the numbers: likes are an imperfect metric for quality. Older posts naturally had a smaller subscriber base at launch, paid posts face a smaller potential audience by design, and some pieces are written to be reference tools rather than viral hits. Where posts tied, I broke the tie using restacks, then comments, and finally recency.
Perfect or not, the ranking provides a fascinating record of what you, the readers, chose to signal back.
The 20 Most Liked Posts
The Four Races of Europe (Part I): The Aryan paradox — 82 likes Revisits nineteenth century European racial labels through the lens of ancient DNA, arguing that while deep ancestry components still structure modern variation, they do not map neatly onto old romantic categories.
The Origins and Spread of Blue Eyes in Europe: Evidence from Ancient DNA — 81 likes Traces exactly where blue eye associated variants first emerged in Europe and tracks how their frequencies shifted across hunter gatherers, early farmers, steppe groups, Romans, and later populations.
The Genetic Evolution of the Human Race and Its Consequences for the Industrial Revolution — 68 likes Connects deep time genomic trends to Gregory Clark’s thesis on long run selection, asking whether detectable shifts in cognitive related polygenic scores helped lay the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution.
Cognitive Genetics Through Time: Surprises From 3,640 Ancient Genomes — 66 likes The post that launched this Substack. A deep dive tour of educational attainment and cognitive polygenic scores across 3,640 ancient genomes, featuring a few major surprises from ancient Rome and beyond.
Debunking the Caricature: What Polygenic Scores Actually Show — 64 likes A long form defense of what polygenic scores can and cannot tell us, aimed at replacing the usual media strawmen with actual, rigorous statistical claims.
The Right-Wing Immigration Paradox — 62 likes Uses Meloni’s Italy as a case study to show that immigration politics are not a simple Left versus Right binary. The real friction often lies in motives, selection, and hard state interests.
The Rise of Rome and the Rise of Polygenic Scores — 55 likes Asks why Rome, rather than its immediate regional rivals, became the imperial core by comparing ancient Italian population shifts and the rise of polygenic score signals.
Genetic evidence for race differences in behaviour — 53 likes Uses behavioral variation among brown bear populations as an analogy for how geographic isolation and domestication like selection pressures can drive behavioral divergence in populations.
What Akbari’s Reply Gets Wrong About Science — 44 likes A response to Akbari’s reply, arguing why replication, proper credit, and citation norms matter immensely when new work builds directly on older polygenic selection analyses.
Why Northern Europeans Seem Aloof and Southern Europeans Outgoing — 43 likes Turns a familiar cultural stereotype into an empirical inquiry, asking whether North-South European differences in personality and social warmth have measurable, deep rooted biological signatures.
Imitation Without Citation — 43 likes A more personal post reflecting on the experience of seeing proprietary ideas reused without attribution, exploring the blurry boundary between ordinary intellectual influence and scientific erasure.
There Was Never a Sapient Paradox — 42 likes Challenges the conventional archaeological view that anatomically modern humans sat around cognitively idle for millennia before culture suddenly took off, arguing the paradox relies on flawed assumptions about behavioral modernity.
What Harari’s Sapiens Gets Wrong — 39 likes A critique of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens for rendering human history entirely dependent on shared fictions while ignoring biology, population divergence, and genetic change.
Intelligence Isn’t Really Sexy — 38 likes Reviews dating app data, behavioral experiments, and genetic evidence to ask if intelligence is actively selected for in mate choice, and why the reality is far more counterintuitive than people assume.
Do Parents Ever Share More Genes with Coethnics Than with Hybrid Children? — 33 likes Applies the Wright-Harpending model to a highly controversial kinship question: how a parent’s genetic relatedness to their broader coethnic group compares mathematically to their relatedness to their own mixed ancestry children.
Ten Myths About Human Genetics That Refuse to Die — 32 likes A compact, no nonsense myth busting guide tackling common misunderstandings surrounding recent human evolution, ancient DNA, polygenic traits, ancestry, and race.
Why Some Provinces Do Better in School (and Math Olympiads): The Answer Is Written in Their Surnames — 30 likes Links Italian surname geography to regional academic outcomes, using deep rooted surnames as a historical tracker for regional ancestry and internal migration.
How Germanic is Northern Italy, Really? — 29 likes Untangles language, history, and genetic data to estimate what Germanic actually means in Northern Italy after centuries of Roman era migrations, Goths, Lombards, and later genetic mixing.
Was Pale Skin an Elite Trait? — 29 likes Asks whether depigmentation in Europe was purely a functional adaptation to high latitudes, or if it also operated as a status linked trait favored within historical elite structures.
Throwing Cold Water on the Cold Winters Hypothesis: A Global Test — 29 likes Puts the classic evolutionary claim that harsher winters selected for higher cognitive capacity to a global empirical test, finding a reality that is vastly more complicated than the popular narrative suggests.
What the Archive Tells Us
The pattern here is pretty clear. The posts that travel the furthest are not just the ones making the sharpest or most provocative claims. They are the ones where a dense, highly technical question is tethered directly to something human beings instinctively care about: ancestry, history, fertility, intelligence, social status, climate, language, and how populations shift across time.
Moving forward, that is exactly the lane I intend to stay in.
The editorial philosophy for year two remains unchanged: data first, but never data as mere decoration. I want to explore genetics without pretending that culture, geography, and history do not matter, and I will always explicitly label speculation as speculation.
To everyone who has read, liked, commented, argued, subscribed, or sent over papers and datasets during this first year: thank you. The publication is still young, but the archive is finally taking a distinct shape.
If you want to unlock these 20 posts (and more) and join us for what is next, don’t miss the First Birthday Special Offer before it expires.PifferPilfer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.