Bret Weinstein (2:31)
Sure. I am an evolutionary biologist. That's what I studied to do and that's what I hope to do for a career. And I did find out pretty early in the process I was at the University of Michigan, and I had actually intended not to do evolutionary biology. I had wanted to do what I saw as some of the harder biological science, something over in neurobiology or cellular biology. But as I hunted around the department in my first year as a graduate student, I discovered something which was that the high quality thinkers were not in the other quadrants of biology. They were effectively functioning like refugees in the Museum of Zoology, and in fact, specifically in the laboratory of Dick Alexander, who was a great evolutionary biologist. He technically was the curator of insects, and he himself studied insects. He also studied humans, but within the division of insects, there were all of these people who had gravitated there, because that's where the high quality thinkers were. And so there were people in the division of insects studying dolphins, birds, bats, monkeys, deer, you name it. It was an intellectually vibrant community. So I ended up studying evolutionary biology. I did field work on tent making bats, which was tremendously fun. I spent 18 months living in the tent making tent making bats. Tent making bats are bats that modify large leaves in the understory of tropical forests into a kind of structure that hides them, protects them from the rain. And anyway, not much was known about them. Nobody had ever seen a bat make a tent, though it was well established that they did. And so, Anyway, I spent 18 months chasing bats around a beautiful pristine island in the Panama Canal, Barrel Colorado Island. And anyway, it was some very formative time for me. I got to be completely surrounded by a very fascinating biological habitat, which is kind of what I would always prefer to be doing. But I did my dissertation work on biological trade offs, and the basic idea was that we had spent 100 years studying evolution, thinking of it as an engine of improvement, right? That things get better through an evolutionary process, which is absolutely true. But we had become stumped about many of the patterns that we see in nature with that program of study. And what I realized pretty early on was that there was another way to look at it, and that the engine of improvement I.e. darwinian natural selection runs up against limits just the same way engineering does. You know, you can't make, you know, a fighter jet that is also capable of hauling a huge amount of cargo, right? You have to choose. So I realized that if you think in terms of trade offs, that actually many of the patterns we see in nature that stump us are actually tractable. You can understand them by thinking about what it is that selection is balancing, rather than just simply always improving things, because it can't always improve them. So that's Where I did my work. And in that work, I studied a. I hope your audience will forgive me for this. It's a little technical, but it's worth it. In the end, I think I studied a question which is why creatures like us grow feeble and inefficient as we age. The process we call technically senescence, most people would call it aging. Aging is not a great term for reasons I won't bother with. But in any case, in studying senescence, there was a hidden trade off that I thought was tremendously explanatory. And it turned out to be that the trade off involves a limitation built into our bodies, where each of our cells, almost all of them, have a limit on how many times they can reproduce in a lifetime. And that's an odd thing, because the more you can reproduce your cells, the more you can fend off all of the things that break down our bod. So why, given that natural selection does not favor our growing feeble, why has it left us with this limit on how much cellular reproduction we can do? That's a paradox. And the answer turns out to be, I think we can now say, more than 25 years later, the answer turns out to be. May not be the only answer, but a primary answer, is that because of the way we're built, we are composed of, as adults, 30 trillion cells@ a time, something like that. And most of those cells have the capacity to kill you. If they become unregulated and just keep reproducing, they'll turn into a tumor and then a cancer, and that's the end of you. So that problem is huge when you're talking about a collection of 30 trillion cells. So how did selection protect us from getting cancer? So that in general, it's a very late life phenomenon, you know, after you've already done your reproducing and influencing the world. Well, the limit on the number of cellular reproductions does this job across your entire body. If a cell starts reproducing and reproducing and it becomes deaf to the messages that tell it to stop, it runs into that limit on cellular reproduction, and you don't even notice it. It turns out that every mole that you have is one of these. It's a cell that has run away and then run into this limit, and you can live the rest of your life, and it doesn't bother you. So that turns out to be true across almost all of the tissues of the body. And that explains the basic pattern. In order to protect you from tumors, you have to have this limit. And once you have this limit, it tells you how much repair and maintenance you can do, and therefore sets an upper limit for how long you can live. So that was one of the trade offs that I worked on for my dissertation. I also worked on questions of why there are more species the closer you get to the equator. It turns out that as much as that sounds like an obvious pattern that we must have explained, you know, 75 years ago, we haven't. And it turns out that again, you have to look into the world of trade offs in order to understand why that property of the. Of the biota is there. I worked on the evolution of human morality, again, downstream of a trade off. So anyway, that's my orientation. And it turns out, as much as that may sound like an odd background for a guy who now shows up talking about, you know, modern human political dynamics and things of that nature, it turns out that that same toolkit is broadly applicable. And because of that, although, you know, I'm not a historian, I'm not a political scientist, I'm not a psychologist, I'm able to walk into those realms as a generalist and make sense of them, hopefully more often than not.