Bret Weinstein, PhD, is an evolutionary biologist, author, and co-host of “The DarkHorse Podcast” with his wife, biologist Heather Heying. They are the co-authors of “A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life.”www.bretweinstein.netwww.youtube.com/@DarkHorsePodwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/618153/a-hunter-gatherers-guide-to-the-21st-century-by-heather-heying-and-bret-weinstein/ Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan Get a free welcome kit with your first subscription of AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/joerogan Try ZipRecruiter FOR FREE at https://ziprecruiter.com/rogan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What evolutionary discoveries does Bret Weinstein want to discuss?
the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day What's happening, man? Hey, good to be back. Good to see you. So the reason why we had such a quick turnaround is because the last episode, one of the main reasons why you wanted to come on in the first place is you wanted to further discuss some discoveries about evolution.
Yes, specifically I have alluded in a number of different places including here to there being another level to Darwinian evolution that does a lot of the heavy lifting that we require in order to explain the diversity of forms that we see in biology. But I haven't been specific on what I believe that layer is. And I felt like it was time.
I think, for one thing, the advances in AI mean that such things are going to emerge naturally. And I wanted to put it on the table before it simply gets discovered as a matter of computing horsepower.
And we were just rambling about so many different things that we never got to it last time. So I said, all right, let's do another quick turnaround, come back.
Right. All right. So let's talk biology. And let me just say, you know, I know that's not everybody's bag, but I do think just about everybody has at some point listened to the story that we tell about adaptive evolution and wondered if if it's really powerful enough to explain all of the creatures that we all know and love.
So the classic story is that you have a genome, that it contains a great many genes. A gene is a sequence in DNA that results in proteins being produced. The DNA describes exactly the sequence of amino acids in a protein. And a protein would typically be one of two things. It would either be an enzyme, which is a little bit misleading as a term, but an enzyme is a catalyst.
Catalyst is misleading. It's really a machine that puts other chemicals together. So a lot of the genes in the genome are these little molecular machines that assemble molecules. And the other thing that proteins are likely to be are structural. So something like collagen proteins can make a matrix that allows you to sort of build a sculpture biologically. And what we say is that the...
The amino acid sequence is specified by the genome in three-letter sequences, right? Codons. Each three letters specifies a particular amino acid that gets tacked on. You get a sequence of amino acids that then collapse into whatever they're going to be, whether it's an enzyme or a structure based on little electromagnetic signals.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Darwinian evolution in explaining biological diversity?
affinities that they have, little side chains that have a positive or a negative charge that attract each other. So basically these machines assemble themselves by folding in very complex ways that then causes them to interact with the molecules around them. in very specific ways. Ways that greatly reduce the energy necessary and make the reactions much more likely to happen.
That's why we call it a catalyst. But really the way to think of it is a little molecular machine. So, we say the way evolution works is random changes happen to the DNA because DNA is imperfectly copied or is impacted by radiation, which will eliminate a letter in the DNA. And then that letter will get replaced by a different letter. There are only four choices.
But some fraction of the time, you get a three-letter combination that specifies a new amino acid Almost all of the time, that will make the little molecular machine worse or break it altogether. Occasionally, it will leave the machine functional in a way that's somewhat better than the previous one. And then evolution will collect all of those advances. And that's how evolution works.
That's the story we typically tell. And in fact, that's the story that is encoded in what's called the central dogma of molecular biology. Now the problem, most people will have thought about that and they will have heard, okay, random mutations that change this code in ways that alter proteins.
That sounds like a very haphazard process and a very difficult way to get from one form of animal or plant or fungus to another. So if you've had that thought, that just doesn't seem powerful enough. And then biologists have said, well, you're not realizing how much time elapses that allows these very occasional positive changes to accumulate. And that's true.
If that's a thought you've had, this process isn't powerful enough to explain the creatures I'm aware of, then what I'm going to tell you is a way in which that process is not the only process and by adding a different process, very much a Darwinian one, we can see that the power to create all of the creatures that we see is much greater than the story that we've been told.
So I'm going to put a hypothesis on the table about what enhances this. And essentially what I'm arguing is if you sat down to a computer game, something very realistic, and somebody says, well, that's all binary.
That's true, it's all binary, but what they're not telling you is that there's an intervening layer that greatly increases the power to use binary to make something like a computer game, right? So there are multiple different levels inside your computer.
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Chapter 3: How does AI influence our understanding of evolutionary biology?
One of them is that your computer can be programmed in a language that is much closer to English, and then a compiler can take what you've written that a computer can't understand and turn it into a computer understandable code. And so the ability to make powerful programs depends on our ability not to have to program our computers in binary, but to be able to program them in C++ or whatever.
That's the kind of thing I'm pointing to is a mechanism that enhances the power of evolution to do the stuff that we know evolution accomplishes. Okay. So here's what I think is the missing layer. And I will say I've done a bunch of research to figure out how much of this is understood. And I find a very confusing picture.
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. 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.
So here we have an example of it.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of adaptive evolution on species development?
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. Yes. Yeah.
The idea that we tend to think that the longer something's been around, that it's overdue to be destroyed, but that often the answer is something that's been around a long time is actually built to last. And so if it's been around a long time, you might expect to see it last a lot longer. So it's that. It's the Lindy effect in animal or plant form.
So it's just essentially evolution nailed it. They developed an animal that's so adaptive and so designed to succeed in this particular environment that it doesn't really need to change.
Yes. And in fact, you know, we are in some ways, we haven't been around that long, but our it looks like we are a variation on that theme, precisely because we have a generalist body plan, right? The physical robot that is the human being is capable of doing a tremendous number of things. And the software program can be essentially entirely rewritten, right?
The culture that you inherit can take a person and it can rewire them for a very different niche, including the ability to avail themselves of whatever tools are necessary to do whatever things that the body plan doesn't do on its own.
So that's a cool strategy, to have a generalist robot and a software program that can be swapped out as needed, that evolution can rewrite very rapidly, that evolution can rewrite on the basis of not only the conjecture of an intelligent creature, but the pooled parallel processing of multiple individuals of the species, right? This is what Heather and I describe in our book as campfire.
The light has faded. It's too dark for you to be productive at whatever your niche is. You gather around the campfire and you talk. You talk about problems that you've run into, solutions that you're working on. You pool the information. People have different histories.
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Chapter 5: What are the key concerns surrounding mRNA vaccines?
But you and I know that the vaccine story has been breaking because I think in large measure, so many people, virtually everybody knows somebody who was injured. And so it's very hard to keep people in the dark about that. And people's acceptance of the boosters has plummeted.
People do need to understand that there's a huge number of mRNA shots that are being cooked up at this very minute, that the damage is not from the COVID part of the shot. It's from the platform itself. And so we need to stop that vast array of mRNA shots from ever making it to the market. And we need to get...
The COVID shots pulled, which again, another thing I want to get back to is Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk and I were working together trying to get the shots pulled. He had the president's ear. I was helping to inform him about what's really going on with the mRNA platform. And anyway, we were making great progress. He sent me a text at one point.
I had congratulated him on, I think, the shots having been pulled for no longer being recommended for kids and pregnant women.
Chapter 6: What progress has been made regarding vaccine safety and efficacy?
And he said something, I think it was, we're doing holy work together. And it meant a lot. I'm obviously not a religious person, but it meant a lot for me to hear that from him. And I do think among the many tragedies that are the result of his terrible death is the fact that it slowed progress on getting these shots removed from the market. But anyway, back to ivermectin.
We'll return to Charlie a little later. The vaccine story is breaking. Vinay Prasad is helping it break inside of FDA. That's a marvelous thing. The vaccine committee that Robert Malone is on with Martin Kulldorff and Retsef Levy is also doing excellent work.
So there's lots of positive signs on the vaccine front, although it's painfully slow from the point of view of shots that shouldn't be on the market are still being injected into people. The story that has not properly broken is the ivermectin story, right? More generally, the repurposed drug story. But this is when you and I lived very personally.
You know, you were... I don't know what they did to you. They colored you green. Yeah, they made me green on CNN.
Chapter 7: How does the ivermectin story relate to the pandemic narrative?
They made you green on CNN. And basically, even people who are awake about the vaccines... largely have arrived at the conclusion that ivermectin showed promise and then it turned out it didn't work and that the evidence is overwhelming that it didn't work and that those of us who said otherwise, it's time that we admitted that. And this is a maddening nonsense story.
Even the trials that say that ivermectin didn't work, if you dig into what they actually found, you find, A, a huge amount of fraud designed to produce the impression that ivermectin didn't work. And amazingly enough, even in trials that are designed to give that result, it still shows that it's effective.
And there is something I want to show you, one of these that I think you probably haven't seen yet, that makes this point really clearly. So can you bring up that tweet, Alexandros Marinos' tweet on the, I think it's called the principal trial? Yeah. Anyway, this is shocking. This is another one of these multi-arm platform trials.
So these are these highly complex structures in which many drugs are tested simultaneously so that they can share a placebo group. Okay, let's look at the whole tweet. It says, I think that's supposed to be no.
Did you know that the principal trial out of the UK found that ivermectin was superior to the usual care in practically every subgroup it tested, but it sat on the results for 600 days when it finally published, buried these results on page 364 of the appendix. Now look at this chart.
The way to read this chart- 346, page 346.
What did I say?
364. Oh, okay.
Dyslexia strikes again. If they go back and- Yeah, 346. Okay. So what this is, is a forest plot in which there's a line, a vertical line at 1.00. Okay. That's the line that delineates effective with ivermectin on the right and with the usual care on the left. In every single tested category, ivermectin is better than ivermectin. No ivermectin.
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Chapter 8: What implications does the discussion on central bank digital currency have for freedom?
Now scroll down. Let's get a background. Method. Stop. Go back up a little bit. Interpretation. So this is their take-home message from the paper. It says, Ivermectin for COVID-19 is unlikely to provide a clinically meaningful improvement in recovery, hospital admissions, or longer-term outcomes.
Further trials of Ivermectin for SARS-CoV-2 infection in vaccinated community populations appear unwarranted. So here you have a trial that overwhelmingly shows ivermectin is effective. It reduced the recovery time by a couple of days, even though they gave it super late, which with all antivirals makes them very much weaker than they would otherwise be.
And here they are reporting that the answer is it's unlikely to create meaningful outcomes and there's no further work needed. OK, this is absurd. This is the quality of trial that we're going to. And what it does, this is them gaslighting us, right? You and I said, look, the evidence suggests that this stuff works. It's quite safe compared to almost any other drug you could take.
In fact, I can't think of one that's safer. And that therefore, in light of the evidence that it seems to meaningfully improve outcomes, it's a good bet, right? They mocked us over that conclusion. This study makes it very clear that even when people are trying to hide that conclusion, that it's there in the data if you go looking. Now, there's an even better one, though. There is a
Have you read Pierre Corey's book, The War on Ivermectin? No. Okay. There's something reported in this book that it really stops you in your tracks. It is an accidental natural experiment. Okay.
So a natural experiment is something in science where maybe you happen on an archipelago in which you have a bunch of different islands that have different conditions and you can go to each island and measure whatever parameter it is. Because nature has given you an experiment that you can analyze. You don't have to build islands, right?
In this case, what Pierre reports is that there were 80 court cases in which... a family sued a hospital that was refusing to give ivermectin to a desperately sick family member and they wanted the courts to intervene and force the hospitals to administer ivermectin, 80 cases. In 40 of those cases, the courts granted the family's request and ivermectin was administered.
In 40 cases, they refused to intervene and no ivermectin was given. In 38 of the cases where ivermectin was given, the patient survived. In two, the patient died anyway. In 38 of the cases where no ivermectin was given, the patient died. And in two, the patient survived. Wow. Okay. Now... I find this, like this is incredibly ... I cannot vouch for the data itself.
Because it's not published in the scientific paper, I can't go look at the methods, I can't go find the court cases. But assuming that the data is accurately reported, and I know Pierre well, he didn't make it up. Assuming that the data is accurate, the level of statistical significance on that accidental study is absolutely astronomical, right?
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