Bret Weinstein

What can you do if you can fly that you couldn't do when you could only climb?

Well, you can move between distant trees and collect fruit.

You can catch insects that are flying on the wing.

You can seek out mammals and birds and slit them open and drink their blood.

You can catch fish that come to the surface and cause ripples.

These are all things that bats do.

And the point is the initial bat presumably didn't do much of any of that.

It did some probably a generalist something.

But having achieved flight, there's a question about how evolution can find all of the opportunities that are now suddenly available.

And the idea that this happens through occasional random mutation of a protein-coding gene that alters something important is, in my opinion, ridiculous.

That more likely, vastly more likely, is a system in which parameters like finger length and the length of each phalanx in the finger is stored as a variable.

And those variables get readily modified.

In other words, if you looked at the hand of every human being, you would see that there's already a ton of variation in the relative lengths of the different digits and the relative lengths to each of the knuckles.

And that if those things are reflective of a particular state stored as essentially an integer in the genome, that all of the adjacent states are very available

And therefore, evolution can explore what Stuart Kaufman would call the adjacent possible.

Right?

Have you heard that term?

Have you had Stuart on?

No.

So, Stuart Kaufman is a complex systems theorist, and his point, one of many, is that effectively