Bret Weinstein

The creatures we see exist in a design space and that selection finds the things that are similar to what you've got near enough to be accessed and advantageous, right?

So if you have a rodent of one size and there is, you know, let's say you have a rodent that specializes on a particular species

seed, and it exists in a habitat where there's another seed that's similar but much bigger, well then you need to access the adjacent possible in order for a second species or subspecies of this rodent to evolve to take advantage of this untapped resource.

So if you think of all of the things that you've got.

And then all of the things that you might want that are similar, that's the adjacent possible.

And my point is variables as one of the primary modes of information storage in the genome provides a mechanism for evolution to explore the adjacent possible in a radically more effective way than variables.

the story we typically tell about random mutations to protein coding genes, right?

There's nothing un-Darwinian about this.

Darwin didn't know anything about genes, probably to his advantage in the long term, because if he had understood genes, he might have made many of the same mistakes that

we made in the middle of the 20th century in evolution where we became overly focused on the genes we understood.

But basically everything that Darwin said was about a vague hereditary information and numbers is no less a candidate for that than triplet codons stored that code for amino acids.

So my point is Darwin is untouched by this.

Darwin is still

the guy.

He nailed it.

And this is just as Darwinian as protein-coding genes.

It's just vastly more powerful with respect to taking a form that you've already got and finding a similar form that you don't yet have.

Now there's lots of nuances about how this could work.

There's lots of questions I certainly can't answer.

I will say, as I was mentioning at the top, this story seems to be largely unaddressed