Darwinian Evolution On The Ropes

I'm hoping this sparks some comments from Tim, Ohioan and Mut as well as anyone else who is interested. This is a really long post, but I think it's worth it.

I thought this was a fascinating conversation between Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein. They're both compelling characters and the topics were wide-ranging. At one point, Joe brought up the growing doubts about Darwinian evolution. Fortunately, there are transcripts online of the Joe Rogan podcast, so I didn't have to go through any technical gymnastics to get these excerpts. 

Here, I will edit for brevity, but that link will take you to the source. Search on Darwin and you'll immediately get the relevant bit. Emphasis in the text is mine.

Joe: We have to talk about evolution because one of the things that Tucker Carlson said on the podcast was essentially that He can't like prove evolution. It's not real. He doesn't believe in evolution as it's taught.

Bret: He said well, he said a couple things. It was a little confusing. He said that you know, we see evidence of adaptation, but we don't see evidence of evolution and that we've really gotten beyond the Darwinian model. We've essentially come to understand that it's not right.

It's an argument for intelligent design, I think. First of all, I want to clean up a little bit of what he said just so it's 

I don't really think he means we see the evidence for adaptation but not evolution. That's not coherent. I think what he means is we see evidence for what we would call microevolution, but we don't see evidence for what we would call macroevolution. This is a commonly believed thing in intelligent design circles.

I think people want the career evolutionary biologist to break out a bunch of examples from nature that make the case. Very, very clear so that they can relax.

Tucker's concern isn't based in science, and they can go back to feeling comfortable that, you know, the Darwinists have it well in hand.

That's not where I am.

I could do that, but I don't feel honorable doing that. I think, as a scientist, I should not be in the business of persuading people. I want you to be persuaded. I want you to be persuaded by the facts. I want them to persuade you. But I don't think I'm allowed to persuade you. I think that it's effectively PR when I attempt to bring people over to Team Darwin.

Further, as I'm sure I've mentioned to you before, I'm not happy with the state of Darwinism as it has been managed by modern Darwinists. In fact, I'm kind of annoyed by it. And although Tucker, I do not believe, is right in the end, there is a reason that the perspective that he was giving voice to is catching on in 2025.

And it has to do with the fact that, in my opinion, the mainstream Darwinists are... Telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood.

So all that being said, let me say, I think modern Darwinism is broken. Yes, I do think I know more or less how to fix it. I'm annoyed at my colleagues for, I think, lying to themselves about the state of modern Darwinism. I think they know.

I think I know why that happened. I think they were concerned that a creationist worldview was always a threat that it would reassert itself. And so they pretended that Darwinism was a more complete explanation as it was presented than it ever was.

Joe: What is wrong with Darwinism? What do you think that Darwinism is doing itself a disservice by saying?

Bret: There are several different things that are wrong with it. The key one that I think is causing folks in intelligent design circles to begin to catch up is that the story we tell about how it is that mutation results in morphological change is incorrect.

This is a very hard thing to convey, and I want to point out that if the explanation for creatures is Darwinian, that does not depend on anybody understanding it, and it does not depend on anybody being able to phrase it in a way that it's intuitive.

... (Here there is an example of forms morphing into other forms) ...

So what that means is there are chemical differences between an excavator and a sports car.

But they're not the story of the differences in what those two creatures do. The chemistry differences are incidental.

Now, when we tell you that the differences that a bat became a flying mammal because it had a shrew-like ancestor, and that shrew-like ancestor had a genome spelled out in three-letter codons, those three-letter codons specify amino acids of which there are 20, and that the difference between the bat and the shrew is based in the differences in the proteins that are described by the genome.

We are essentially saying that the difference between the bat and the shrew is a chemical difference. It's not a simple chemical difference the way it was when we were talking about excavators and sports cars, but nonetheless, it's a biochemical difference, right? The difference in the spelling of its proteins and structural proteins and enzymes and all of that stuff.

I don't believe that mechanism. Is nearly powerful enough to explain how a shrew-like ancestor became a bat.

There's a whole layer that is missing that allows...

Evolution to explore design space much more efficiently than the mechanism that we invoke.

(The mechanism is) random mutation, which I believe in. Random mutation happens. Selection, which chooses those variants that are produced by mutation and collects the ones that give... The creature an advantage. There's nothing wrong with that story. That story is true. Okay, random mutations happen, selection collects the ones that are good, and those collected advantageous mutations accumulate in the genome. All of that is true.

What I'm arguing against is the idea that that transforms a shrew into a bat.

What you need to get a shrew turned into a bat is a much less crude mechanism, whereby selection, which is ancient at the point that you have shrews, explores design space looking for ways to be that are yet undiscovered more systematically than random chance.

I believe there's a kind of information stored in genomes that is not in triplet codon form, that is much more of a type that would be familiar to a designer, either of machines or a programmer.

What we did was we took the random mutation model.

And we recognized that it was Darwinian, which it is. And we therefore assumed that it would explain anything that we could see that was clearly the product of Darwinian forces on the basis of those random mutations. And we skipped the layer in between in which selection has a different kind of information stored in the genome that is not triplet codon in nature.

Joe: So there's an information stored in the genome that is motivating it to seek new forms?

Bret: Nope, not motivating, allowing it.

Joe: Allowing it. Allowing it. So what's the motivation to seek new forms?

Bret: Oh, the motivation was there. It's primordial. Right. So the point is, let me try by analogy.

Darwinists will tell you that evolution cannot look forward. It can only look backward. And there's a way in which that's just simply true. On the other hand, a Darwinist will also tell you that you are a product of evolution and you can look forward.

Right? So if evolution can't look forward but it can build a creature that can, then can evolution look forward?

I think it effectively can. So my point is that random mutation mechanism is in a race to produce new forms that are... Better adapted to the world than their ancestors?

What if it can bias the game? It can enhance its own ability to search, right? If you lose your keys, you don't search randomly, right? You go through a systematic process of search, and that systematic process of search results in you finding your keys sooner than you would otherwise.

So we should expect evolution to find every trick it can access to. Increase the rate at which it discovers forms that would be useful in the habitat in question. And this is simply that. I'm not really saying anything that extraordinary, right? If I say, you know, do you know that computers, all they do is binary? Well, that's true.

But if you then imagine that that means that the people who program computers do it in binary, well, there was a time when that was true. But it's not true anymore. It's not how you do it.

There's a much more efficient way to program a computer, and it involves a programming language, which a computer itself can't understand. But you can build a computer that can either interpret the language in real time, or you can build a computer that can accept the code as it's spit out by a compiler.

These are mechanisms to radically increase the effectiveness of a programmer. But it all comes out. Binary anyway, in the end. That's really what I'm arguing, is that there's the initial layer of Darwinian stuff, the random mutation layer that it looks like what we teach people.

There's another layer, which we're not well familiar with, and it results in a much more powerful capacity to adapt than we can explain with that first mechanism, which is why guys like Tucker Think there's just something these Darwinists, they keep telling me that the shrew becomes a bat.

And then they go on this rant about the random mutations and the triplet codons and the, you know, mutations that actually turn out to be good. It's just not powerful enough. And they're not wrong.

They're detecting something real. And frankly, you know, Tucker is the layperson example of this. You've had Stephen Meyer on, you know, he's actually. He's a scientist who's quite good, and he's spotted that the mechanism in question isn't powerful enough to explain the phenomena that we swear it explains.

Joe: What do you think that force is?

Bret: It's not a force. So I don't know how much of this I've made clear. If you fill in the missing layer, it's purely Darwinian.

None of this establishes that Darwin had it.

It's another Darwinian mechanism, right? I mean, and let me, this is, there's nothing strange about this. If you think about the way a human being works compared to, let's say, a starfish, a human being has a software layer. A cognitive layer in which the human being is born into an environment.

And that environment could be, you know, a hunter-gatherer environment of 10,000 years ago, or it could be a modern environment. And the human being doesn't have to be modified at the level of its genome in order to function differently in those two environments. It has to be sensitive to the information in those environments so that it can become adapted to them developmentally.

Right? So development is one trick that the genome uses to make a human being more flexible than other creatures. Right? You do not come out of the womb being ready to do human stuff.

Right? You are profoundly hobbled by not having a complete program. But it means that the program you develop can be highly attuned to your particular moment in time and location in space. That is...

The Darwinian mechanisms that store information in the genome solving an evolutionary problem in a different way. So this is already a second layer that doesn't function like that random mutation layer.

So evolution should be expected to find all of the cheat codes and to build them in. Because any creature that has access to all of these different ways of adapting more rapidly or more effectively, will outcompete the creatures that have fewer of these things. So you should expect, what I often say is, we have to remember, we are not looking at Darwinism 1.0.

You're looking at Darwinism 10.0. You're looking at a highly sophisticated evolutionary structure that is the result of all of the discoveries of the prior structures. And that includes some things that... Modern creatures can do, but it also includes an evolution of enhanced evolutionary capacity, including things like culture.

A couple of things jumped out at me as I listened to them talk.

First, in mathematics, you most certainly are trying to convince people. That's what proofs do. I don't understand how that cannot be said for physics, chemistry or biology. How is that supposed to work? Do we just share massive spreadsheets of experimental data with each other and everyone comes to their own conclusions? How does peer review work in such a world? It sounds like a cop-out.

Second, it was a bit of a stunner for Bret to admit to the flaws of Darwinian evolution. I have liked Bret since he first came on the scene in the Evergreen State imbroglio, but this deep honesty and integrity surprised me. Well done, Bret!

Thirdly and finally, Bret tries to hold on to Darwinian evolution by an appeal to magic. Apparently, there is an unknown motive force working at the molecular level that gives the necessary turbo boost to Darwinian evolution, allowing shrews to turn into bats and, for all we know, back down to shrews again.

Hey, why not? 

Here's my problem, one where I am open to corrections. I had thought that molecular chemistry was a pretty well-understood thing. Bret seems to be arguing that there is a layer on top of molecular chemistry that we don't understand. Further, he is making an argument of faith. That motivating force is necessary to preserve Darwinian evolution and that's why it exists.

Nature abhors a vacuum and, apparently, it abhors a vacuum in Darwin's theories most of all.

So tell me, scienceological thinkerists, where your thinkerations lead you.

It seems relatively clear to us, but I'm a simple man and Cat is a simple cat.