Transcript
Brett Weinstein (0:01)
Joe Rogan Podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Joe Rogan (0:12)
What's happening, man?
Brett Weinstein (0:13)
Hey, good to be back.
Joe Rogan (0:14)
Good to see you. So the reason why we had such a quick turnaround is because the last episode, one of the main reasons why you wanted to come on in the first place is you wanted to further discuss some discoveries about evolution.
Brett Weinstein (0:32)
Yes. Specifically, I have alluded in a number of different places, including here, to there being another level to Darwinian evolution that does a lot of the heavy lifting that we require in order to explain the diversity of forms that we see in biology. But I haven't been specific on what I believe that layer is, and I felt like it was time. I think, for one thing, the advances in AI mean that such things are going to emerge naturally, and I wanted to put it on the table before it simply gets discovered as a matter of computing horsepower.
Joe Rogan (1:13)
And we were just rambling about so many different things that we never got to it last time. So I said, all right, let's do another quick turnaround, come back.
Brett Weinstein (1:20)
Right? All right, so spill beans, let's talk biology. And let me just say, you know, I know it's not everybody's bag, but I do think just about everybody has at some point listened to the story that we tell about adaptive evolution and wondered if it's really powerful enough to explain all of the creatures that we all know and love. Right. So the classic story is that, that you have a genome, that it contains a great many genes. A gene is a sequence in DNA that results in proteins being produced. The DNA describes exactly the sequence of amino acids in a protein. And a protein would typically be one of two things. It would either be an enzyme, which is a little bit misleading as a term, but an enzyme. Well, enzyme is misleading, but an enzyme is a catalyst. Catalyst is misleading. It's really a machine that puts other chemicals together. So a lot of the genes in the genome are these little molecular machines that assemble molecules. And the other thing that proteins are likely to be are structural. So something like collagen proteins can make a matrix that allows you to sort of build a sculpture biologically. And what we say is that the amino acid sequence is specified by the genome in three letter sequences, Right? Codons. Each three letters specifies a particular amino acid that gets tacked on. You get a sequence of amino acids that then collapse into whatever they're going to be, whether it's an enzyme or a structure based on little electromagnetic affinities that they have little side chains that have a positive or a negative charge that attract each other. So basically, these machines assemble themselves by folding in very complex ways that then causes them to interact with the molecules around them in very specific ways, ways that greatly reduce the energy necessary and make the reactions much more likely to happen. That's why we call it a catalyst. But really the way to think of it is a little molecular machine. So we say the way evolution works is random changes happen to the DNA because DNA is imperfectly copied or is impacted by radiation, which will eliminate a letter in the DNA, and then that letter will get replaced by a different letter. There are only four choices, but some fraction of the time you get a three letter combination that specifies a new amino acid almost all of the time. That will make the little molecular machine worse or break it altogether. Occasionally it will leave the machine functional in a way that's somewhat better than the previous one. And then evolution will collect all of those advances. And that's how evolution works. That's the story we typically tell. And in fact, that's the story that is encoded in what's called the central dogma of molecular biology. Now, the problem, most people will have thought about that and they will have heard, okay, random mutations that change this code in ways that alter proteins. That doesn't sound, that sounds like a very haphazard process and a very difficult way to get from one form of animal or plant or fungus to another. So if you've had that thought, that just doesn't seem powerful enough. And then biologists have said, well, you're not realizing how much time elapses that allows these very occasional positive changes to accumulate. And that's true. If that's a thought you've had, this process isn't powerful enough to explain the creatures I'm aware of, then what I'm going to tell you is a way in which that process is not the only process. And by adding a different process, very much a Darwinian one, we can see that the power to create all of the creatures that we see is much greater than the story that we've been told. Okay, so I'm going to put a hypothesis on the table about what enhances this. And essentially what I'm arguing is if you sat down to a computer game, right, something very realistic, and somebody says, well, that's all binary. That's true, it's all binary. But what they're not telling you is that there's an intervening layer that greatly increases the power to use binary to make something like a computer game. Right? So there are multiple different levels inside your computer. One of them is that your computer can be programmed in a language that is much closer to English. And then a compiler can take the what you've written that a computer can't understand and turn it into a computer understandable code. And so the ability to make powerful programs depends on our ability not to have to program our computers in binary, but to be able to program them in C or whatever. That's the kind of thing I'm pointing to is a mechanism that enhances the power of evolution to do the stuff that we know evolution accomplishes. Okay, so here's what I think is the missing layer. And I will say I've done a bunch of research to figure out how much of this is understood. And I find a very confusing picture. It actually depends which field I come at it from to see what the blind spots are. But I'm going to leave that primarily for another time. Let's just say the two fields in question are my field, evolutionary biology, and a interdisciplinary science called evo devo. Okay. Evo Devo is the evolution of development. And Evo Devo is a much newer, in some ways a more vibrant field. I would argue my field is stuck. Evo devo has been making progress from the developmental side on a number of different questions. Okay, so now let's talk about adaptive evolution and what adaptive evolutionists seem to be missing that I think does a bunch of the heavy lifting in terms of explaining creatures. So let me just start by saying the thing I said at the beginning about protein coding genes being altered by random mutation resulting in changes. I'm not arguing that that is in any way a false story. It explains a great many things. My point is that what it primarily explains are things at nanoscale. Right? It can explain the difference in a pigment molecule very easily, and we know that it does. It can explain things somewhat larger than that, like the very special structure. When you're a kid, do you ever play with the feathers of a bird, pull them apart and then they zip back together? Right. Those kinds of things can be readily explained by the mechanism as we present it. What I'm going to argue is difficult to explain is the change from one macroscopic form to another. So, for example, the wing of a bat. The wing of a bat evolved from the foot of a terrestrial or arboreal, meaning tree dwelling mammal, like a shrew. So I sent Jamie a picture of a shrew's foot. Maybe we should just put it up. So what we'll look at is the foot of a shrew and it won't surprise you at all. It looks exactly as you would expect. It's got, you know, digits and it looks like every other map.