Bret Weinstein

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 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.

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, 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.