Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2427 - Bret Weinstein
Uploaded: 2025-12-17T18:00:39.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2427 - Bret Weinstein' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-12-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2427 - Bret Weinstein' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-12-17. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2427 - Bret Weinstein

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
What's happening, Matt?
Hey, good to be back.
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.
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.
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.
All right.
All right.
Still 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.
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, well, an enzyme isn't 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 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.
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 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.
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?
You 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 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 mammal's foot.
So here we have an example of it.
Okay.
Now let's take a look at the wing of a bat.
So here we have the wing of a bat.
Now that wing is a highly modified front foot.
The ribs that hold the membrane, what we call the patagia, apart are highly
elongated fingers, right?
So what you're seeing are the phalanges of that little shrew's foot elongated,
very much so.
Now what the Evo Devo folks will tell you, and they are right about this, is
that the difference between that bat's wing and its fingers and that shrew's
foot and its toes is not a molecular difference.
There may be molecular differences between the foot and the wing, but you could
build that wing and that foot out of the very same molecules.
What you're doing is distributing them differently.
You have different amounts of molecules distributed in different ways to make
these elaborate structures from the primitive structures.
You're with me so far?
Yep.
Okay.
So what I realized more than 25 years ago, many people who've heard you and me
talk before will have heard us talk about my work on telomeres.
So telomeres, you'll remember, are structures at the end of every chromosome
that are not genes.
They are repetitive sequences.
They're written in DNA, but it's basically just a repeated series of letters
again and again and again.
And the telomere, basically the number of repeats that are there, dictates how
many times a cell line can duplicate.
It loses repeats each time it duplicates.
And when it gets down to a critically low number, it stops reproducing.
Now, we've talked before about why that system exists.
The short version is in creatures like us, it prevents cancers from happening
because if a cell line runs away and just starts reproducing, it runs into this
limit, the Hayflick limit, and stops reproducing.
So it prevents cancer, but it limits the amount of repair that we can do in a
lifetime.
So it causes us to senesce, to age and grow feeble as we do so.
But what it said to me when I was doing that work was that there is a kind of
information that can be stored in genomes, in DNA, that is not protein-oriented.
It's not what we would call allelic.
It's not written in three-letter codons.
It's actually a number stored the same way you would store a variable in a
computer program, right?
The telomere, the length of the telomere, is a count of how many times a cell
line is allowed to divide over a lifetime.
It's a number.
And what occurred to me all those years ago was that the ability to store a
number in the genome is fantastically powerful.
What it means, if you could store a lot of numbers in the genome, is that you
could describe creatures by allotting something,
either a quantity of material or an amount of time in development, that you
could specify things in the language of numbers that you can't specify in the
language of amino acids.
So, the hypothesis that I'm putting on the table is that the evolutionary
process has built a system in which variables,
in which integers are stored in DNA, and those integers dictate phenomena like
developmental timing,
turning on and off something like the growth of one of those phalanx, the phalanges
in the fingers,
if you could radically increase the number that dictated the length of one of
those bones,
then selection would effectively be in a position to play with adjacent forms.
So, am I confusing you, or is this making sense?
No, it's making sense.
Okay, so the question is, all right, the telomere is a special case.
The telomere exists at the end of a chromosome, and it can only exist at the
end of a chromosome because of the way it functions.
So, a telomere is not actually just a string, it's actually a loop.
And the telomere loops back, and at the very tip, there's a little section
where the DNA is not double-stranded.
It's single-stranded.
And that single-strand inserts between two other strands of DNA.
So, if you loop the DNA at the end of the chromosome back, it's called a D-loop.
And then you get this one little single-stranded DNA that inserts between a
double-stranded and makes a very tiny triple-stranded, like, cap,
so that it holds the loop in place.
You can't