Bret Weinstein

It would have gone extinct.

Right.

That's the story again and again, right?

It's a story with every clade of creatures.

This is a chaotic planet, right, at levels that I think maybe we don't even fully yet appreciate.

The difference between committing to a particular way of existing that seems really awesome for some period of time and then is suddenly impossible and the ability to leap from one way of being to another.

is the key to getting through time, which is what evolution is doing, right?

I always phrase it as the purpose that evolution points towards is lodging your genes as far into the future as you can get them.

And people don't, I think, fully appreciate when I say that, that it's not just a clever rephrasing of what might be more standard, might be found in a textbook.

The point is, anything that satisfies that objective is valid.

So for example,

So we have a process.

It's one of my favorites to think about, which is called adaptive radiation.

Adaptive radiation is where you get some creature that either solves some problem or gets to some new place and then diversifies, and we get 50 or 100 or 1,000 creatures.

species that are derived from that initial discovery right so you get this blooming of forms right the first bird what was the first bird even doing we don't know right but what we do know is that we have 11 000 species of these things now all doing subtly different stuff right some of them not even flying right some of them have lost the ability to fly so the point is

the discovery of birdness opens up a huge number of potential discoveries.

Evolution would be a dumb process if it didn't effectively search that space.

If it randomly waited to find each of those opportunities, that's so much less powerful than searching the space.

And then once you get the search of a space, okay, so you get, you know,

A hundred hits.