Bret Weinstein

It actually depends which field I come at it from to see what the blind spots are.

But I'm going to leave that primarily for another time.

Let's just say the two fields in question are my field, evolutionary biology,

and an interdisciplinary science called evo-devo.

Okay, evo-devo is the evolution of development.

And evo-devo is a much newer, in some ways a more vibrant field.

I would argue my field is stuck.

Evo-devo has been making progress from the developmental side on a number of different questions.

Okay, so now let's talk about adaptive evolution and what adaptive evolutionists seem to be missing that I think does a bunch of the heavy lifting in terms of explaining creatures.

So let me just start by saying the thing I said at the beginning about protein-coding genes being altered by random mutation resulting in changes, I'm not arguing that that is in any way a false story.

It explains a great many things.

My point is that what it primarily explains are things at nanoscale.

It can explain the difference in a pigment molecule very easily, and we know that it does.

It can explain things somewhat larger than that, like the very special structure.

When you're a kid, do you ever play with the feathers of a bird?

You pull them apart, and then they zip back together.

Those kinds of things can be readily explained by the mechanism as we present it.

What I'm going to argue is difficult to explain is the change from one macroscopic form to another.

So, for example...

The wing of a bat.