Bret Weinstein

You get some innovation, it provides a hundred niches that you could move into from there.

It creates a hundred species.

And it turns out most of those niches are durable on the scale of 10,000 years, but not 50,000 years.

So you get a bunch of them going extinct.

But as long as one of them or two of them have gotten through that bottleneck, right?

The huge blooming of branches and then the pruning of branches.

the ancestor has now gotten to the future in the form of however many species made it through that destructive process.

It is selection at a different scale than we typically think of it.

Thinking of evolution as this dynamic process that is not only searching design space, but learning to enhance its capacity to search design space in order to get into the future is the way to think of it.

It's much more powerful than the clumsy version that we describe, even if we don't yet understand where that power is lodged.

If we were imaginative and we said, okay, what would I do if I was evolution to enhance the likelihood of getting to the future?

Well, then you start finding these explorer modes.

And I understand that I will be ridiculed for saying that because it imposes on selection a directionality that probably at a technical level we are right to assume does not exist.

But let me point this out.

We often say that evolution cannot look forward.

It can only see the past.

At a technical level, this is true.

On the other hand, we all agree that evolution built us.

I can see the future, right?

I can understand what is likely to happen.