Daily Archives: 12 March 2025

I Have Questions

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Bojan Pancevski, in his piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, thinks a researcher has identified the origins of half of humanity:

For about half the people alive today, the story of where they came from just became clearer.
…
For centuries, historians and linguists have been searching for the cradle of the Indo-Europeans, an ancient people who shaped history and created the world’s largest language family, now spoken by over 40% of humanity. Now research led by David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who specializes in the study of ancient populations, is making it possible to give a precise answer.

Maybe not so precise.

DNA detectives, including at Reich’s lab, analyzed DNA samples from the remains of around 450 prehistoric individuals taken from 100 sites in Europe, as well as data from 1,000 previously known ancient samples. In two papers published in the scientific journal Nature last month, the researchers combine genetic evidence with archaeology and linguistics to argue that sometime before 3000 BC, a previously unknown people migrated from the Volga River to the Ukrainian steppe north of the Black Sea, where they mixed with a local population and formed the Yamnaya.

All of that, though, only begs a number of questions.

Who were those previously unknown people?

Where did they come from before the Volga?

Why did they migrate?

Who were the local population people?

Where had they come from?

What were the climate pressures then?

Pushing the origins answer back in time is useful and important, but these data don’t provide data for the origins of half of humanity.

Impeaching Judges

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Especially those who rule against Trump—that’s a bad idea, as The Wall Street Journal‘s editors correctly note. Doing this—even were it possible just once—would destroy the necessarily independent and coequal status of our judiciary.

Impeach judges who violate their oaths of office—certainly. This would apply not only to those who engage in “severe misconduct,” but also those who rule other than on the text of our Constitution or the statute before them in a specific case. Activist judges, and Justices, who rule on the basis of their view of a living constitution or on their personal view of the needs of society or how social requirements have evolved, are among those who are violating their oaths of office, which explicitly require them to uphold and defend our Constitution. Violating an oath, of office or of any other reason or purpose, would be an especially egregious and severe misconduct.

But therein lies the rub.

There is room for honest, textual disagreement on the meaning the text—the words and especially the phrases—present in our foundational documents and the statutes subsequently enacted to give flesh to them. Proving a ruling to be based on activism rather than on honest effort at textualism is deucedly hard. Moreover, even were a proof possible in a given case, the political implications would damage the perception of judicial independence, and that would be as damaging as any actual assault on judicial independence.

Better to take the longer view and elect Presidents and Senates who will nominate and confirm judges and Justices that will rule on the basis of Constitutional and statutory texts. Those confirmed would be good for several generations of election cycles and for a couple of generations of citizens. That would provide sufficient stability in law and court rulings.