Bret Weinstein

In fact, when I've talked to Dawkins about his effective discovery, the meme, he doesn't seem to understand the power of it.

He thinks of it as, I mean, he says in chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene, he says,

that the landscape of memes is like a new primeval soup, which is not what it is.

It's actually a solution that the genes have come up with for how to evolve things like humans

more rapidly than can be done at the genetic level.

We can evolve at a cultural level, which solves a problem for the genes that the genes can't solve directly.

And that means that all of the space of human culture and the culture of other creatures, but our culture is vastly more refined and powerful and diverse.

But that space is basically an enhanced – it's another enhancement to the toolkit of Darwinian evolution, which we have unfortunately often dismissed as –

non-evolutionary or as a parallel kind of evolution rather than as a turbocharged adaptive evolution that is targeted at the same objectives as our genes are, which is what it really turns out to be.

So in any case, that was 1976.

thing that has been a revolution since then was evo-devo, evolution of development.

But it didn't come from the Darwinists.

It came primarily from the developmental side.

These are people who were focused on mechanism.

And so in some sense, the story of the failure of biology to

update our evolutionary model is the result of a historical accident, right?

So the first Darwinists, including Darwin himself, were not focused on molecular scale mechanisms because they couldn't be.

They didn't have any tools to look at those things.

And so they looked at the creatures

And they saw patterns.