Bret Weinstein

I can extrapolate and see things that haven't occurred yet.

And I will do hypothesis testing to see if my understanding is correct.

But the point is evolution can't see the future, but it can build creatures that see the future on its behalf.

Isn't that kind of like it looking into the future?

It feels a lot like it is to me.

Crocodiles, dragonflies, sharks, horseshoe crabs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this is a place where I think a good evolutionary course says the right thing about it.

What a good evolutionary course says about this is...

we think of these creatures as backwards.

they are the opposite.

They are so good that in spite of competition from more modern forms, they still persist.

If you've watched a dragonfly, it's a super agile creature.

It's a formidable predator.

And so anyway, when you see one of these creatures that has been very little modified, it's because it did find a form that's durable over a very long period of time.

And, in some ways, that's the greatest strategy, right?

Having to change in order to deal with the changes in the environment is perilous.

Having found something that is so durable that it persists era after era, epoch after epoch, is at least a very comprehensible strategy.

and arguably the better one, because anything that has existed that long, maybe we talked in a past podcast about the Lindy effect.