#2427 - Bret Weinstein

Bret Weinstein (0:01)

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

Joe Rogan (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Bret Weinstein (0:06)

Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

What's happening, man?

Bret Weinstein (0:13)

Hey, good to be back, good to see you.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

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.

Bret Weinstein (0:32)

Yes. Specifically, I have eluded 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.

Bret Weinstein (1:20)

Right. All right. Spill beans. Let's talk biology. And let me just say, 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. All right. So the classic story is 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 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 all together. 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. OK, 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 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 an 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.