Bret Weinstein

And so they became very focused on recognizing the patterns and what they imply about what must be going on inside.

But they got out of the habit of thinking about mechanism because the mechanisms weren't available to them.

The developmental biologists were exactly the inverse.

They didn't really have patience for evolutionary thinking.

They were purely about mechanism and all kinds of experiments like taking a piece of one egg and grafting it into another egg and watching the weird monster that is created when the egg is getting the same signal from two different directions, that kind of thing.

And, you know, Evo Devo is a very good start on bringing these things together.

But I don't know if it's academic territoriality or just lack of imagination seems to be preventing the revolution in our understanding of the most powerful process that exists.

And it's frustrating.

So anyway, I hope...

I hope others will take this to heart.

It could easily be that the larger point is right, that variables in the genome are very important and that the variable number tandem repeats are not the way that they are stored.

That would be interesting.

Maybe the variable number tandem repeats are the way it's stored, in which case there's an awful lot to be learned about how that information is read.

In other words, once you know that that's true, if it is, then the question is, okay, well,

how do we look into a particular genome and see the mapping of those variables onto the creature that we see running around in the forest, right?

That would be an amazingly powerful mapping to have.

So anyway...

I didn't want to leave it as a vague allusion to a hidden layer.

I wanted to point to a hidden layer that would explain how this process that we've all learned about might be much more powerful than the story we've been told about it.

This is exactly the thing that bugs me is imagine what would have happened if there was not an enhanced evolutionary toolkit to that creature.