Bret Weinstein

The wing of a bat evolved from the foot of a terrestrial or arboreal, meaning tree-dwelling, mammal like a shrew.

So I sent Jamie a picture of a shrew's foot.

Maybe we should just put it up.

So what we'll look at is the foot of a shrew, and it won't surprise you at all.

It looks exactly as you would expect.

It's got, you know, digits, and it looks like every other mammal's foot.

Okay, now let's take a look at the wing of a bat.

So here we have the wing of a bat.

Now that wing is a highly modified front foot.

The ribs that hold the membrane, what we call the patagia, apart are highly elongated fingers.

So what you're seeing are the phalanges of that little shrew's foot elongated, very much so.

Now, what the evo-devo folks will tell you, and they are right about this, is that the difference between that bat's wing and its fingers and that shrew's foot and its toes is not a molecular difference.

There may be molecular differences between the foot and the wing, but you could build that wing and that foot out of the very same molecules.

what you're doing is distributing them differently.

You have different amounts of molecules distributed in different ways to make these elaborate structures from the primitive structures.

With me so far?

Yep.

Okay.

What I realized more than 25 years ago, many people who've heard you and me talk before will have heard us talk about my work on telomeres.

So telomeres, you'll remember, are structures at the end of every chromosome that are not genes.