Bret Weinstein

So you can imagine a story in which the shrew ancestor climbed things,

and had the same situation.

And maybe it starts out, in fact, it probably does start out with maybe a little webbing between the fingers that gives it just a little extra lift, right?

And you could imagine once you get onto that little foothill, a little lift, well, a little more lift would be good.

So those individuals that had just slightly more webbing outcompeted those individuals that had slightly less webbing.

Well, that's just it is, you know, you have... Is that random mutation?

Is that... Well, yeah, I would say at some level, these things all have to start there.

But my overarching point is selection...

not only discovers forms, it discovers ways to discover forms.

So I call these ways explorer modes.

This is a concept I've taken a certain amount of crap over, but I'm quite convinced of it.

I would argue that our consciousness is an explorer mode.

Our consciousness allows us to come up with ideas that might be useful and to kind of test them in our heads

And to figure out how we would try them out in life and then to build a prototype and see how it works and then discover how it might be improved.

And, you know, sooner or later you get from, you know, the right flyer of 1903, which can stay off the ground for barely half a minute.

to, not so many years later, a modification of the same aircraft that can circle the Eiffel Tower, right?

It's that process.

That is the ability to explore design space in some way that is not random.

And to the extent that the genome is capable of storing a large number of variables and then applying them, what that means is at the point that you have the first true bat, right, the first flyer, that animal has discovered something.

an adaptive landscape, a series of opportunities that we represent as peaks that is unknown, right?