I’ve posted a new video, but I’m making it complicated to see.

OK, I’ve put it on my Patreon account. If you’re a sponsor, you can watch it there right now, ad-free. I’m going to be doing that from now on, I think. Join and you get it before everyone else!

It’s going to go live on YouTube at 6pm Central time today, so if you’re patient, you can get it for free there. YouTube will stick a few ads in it, I’m sorry to say.

Or if you don’t want to wade through this video nonsense, I’ll post a transcript right here at 6pm, so you can just read the damned thing. That’s especially good if you don’t think my amateurish video abilities are worth a half hour of your time

The video is a dissection of Bret Weinstein’s conversation with Joe Rogan about Tucker Carlson’s idiotic denial of evolutionary biology, so it’s not as if this is essential stuff. I try to explain why Weinstein’s vague handwaving about mysterious “layers” of genetic information that no one knows about except him. Here’s some news: we do. We don’t know everything about information in the genome, but we know enough to be aware that it isn’t magic.

Anyway, check back in about 6 hours for my explanation.

[Note: where I’m quoting from the Rogan-Weinstein video, I’m directly copy-pasting from the video transcript…which kind of disregards capitalization/punctuation. You’ll just have to figure it out!]

Bret Weinstein was on the Joe Rogan show a few months ago to talk about Tucker Carlson’s outright denial of evolution. Carlson had said there is no evidence at all for evolution, and further claimed that “we” had given up on evolution, and that evolution had been debunked, and that it simply is not true. Rogan brought on Weinstein to explain what Carlson meant, and to whitewash the nonsense for him.
This is a big mistake, because Weinstein is almost as stupid as Carlson on this topic, and further, he’s one of those wanna-be conservative grifters who is going to take great care to avoid criticizing Rogan, Carlson, or their whole right wing audience. I’m not going to rehash Carlson’s BS again, but right now am more interested in watching Weinstein twist himself in knots to justify anti-evolutionary dogma.

yeah um we have to talk about evolution because one of the things that Tucker Carlson said uh on the podcast was essentially that you can’t really prove evolution it’s not real and he doesn’t believe in evolution as it’s taught
yep
I’m I’m paraphrasing
yeah I went back and listened to it
what did he exactly say

That’s actually a good start. Rogan is ignorant of the science, so the first thing he does is ASK A QUESTION of someone with a degree in evolution. I approve; that’s exactly how a fool can become less of a fool, and I encourage all creationists to do likewise. Unfortunately, he’s asking a biologist who’s more interested in ducking and dodging than in answering the question.

say uh he said well he said a couple things it was a little confusing he said that you know we 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 that’s
is this essentially an argument for creationism?
uh it’s an it’s an argument for intelligent design?
intelligent design okay I think. first of all I want to clean up a little bit of what he said just so it’s interpretable
okay
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…

This is not an honest approach. He’s going to “clean up” what Carlson said — but Carlson’s words were simple and straightforward. He rejects evolution. What he wants to do is reword and rephrase everything to be something Weinstein finds more palatable. When he says, “What he means is…” we can be sure that he’s about to twist those words hard.
I won’t bother repeating his efforts to revise what Carlson said. Instead, he’s going to make excuses for why he doesn’t demonstrate that Carlson is an ignorant buffoon.

the correct response to Tucker, I do not believe involves what most people want me to do in response to something like what what Tucker has said
what do you think that is what do you think most people want
I think people want the career evolutionary biologist to break out a bunch of examples from nature that make the case very 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

Wait, what? He isn’t going to present the evidence that shows Carlson is wrong, because he wouldn’t feel “honorable”? Telling the truth in a very very clear way is “dishonorable”? I want to hear the reasoning behind that!
Also, “Darwinists”? I can see trouble coming.

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 a um that it’s effectively PR when um I attempt to bring people over to team Darwin.

This is bizarre. By his definition, education is PR, and is bad. As a scientist, it is your responsibility to advocate for your position and to persuade others of the correctness of your argument. You do that by presenting the evidence and justifying your interpretation — just listing facts, as he suggests, is not very effective, and it’s especially ineffective if you don’t even present the facts, as he does here. Is he afraid his audiences reasoning will be overwhelmed by his charisma?
No chance of that, anyway.
So what is his real concern? It’s Darwinism.

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 by reporting that yes Darwinism is true and we know how it works and people who aren’t compelled by the story are illiterate or ignorant or whatever they are pretending to know more than they do 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 uh 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

Cool. He complains about Darwinism or Darwinists 7 times in that short segment.
To dissect his claims in a little more detail:
1. There aren’t any Darwinists around any more. Darwinism was a nineteenth century hypothesis suggested by people who didn’t know anything about genes or genetics; it was abandoned and replaced by better explanations in the 20th century, and is even now currently changing as new observations and theories evolve. “Darwinist” is a term used as part of a rhetorical strategy by creationists to pretend that evolutionary biology is old and obsolete.
2. No one is lying about how much we know. Science is pretty explicit about defining the boundaries of what is known and not known; when was the last time a grant proposal was submitted that said, “We already know the answer to this question, but we’d like some more money please?” Evolutionary theory is a general description of a framework for answering questions.
3. “Darwinism” was broken, he says . That’s a safe claim to make, but it relies on the audience not understanding that our modern ideas about evolution have moved well beyond Darwinian hypotheses of natural selection.
4. The idea that scientists are so concerned about a “creationist worldview” that they are pretending to a certainty they don’t have is absurd. Most scientists don’t pay any attention to creationists; creationism is laughable. In fact, the problem goes the other way, in that most scientists are so blithely unaware of creationism that it has been able to creep into our schools and government with little pushback.
5. The real pretense here is that Weinstein is pretending that Tucker Carlson was making an informed critique. He wasn’t.
What I found most interesting in Weinstein’s rant was the narcissistic idea that he knows what’s wrong with biology and that he knows how to fix it. OK. But he won’t be explicit in explaining any errors — that would be dishonorable — and he’s definitely not going to tell us what his replacement theory might be.
But we’ll get some strong hints.

what is wrong with Darwinism like what do you think that Darwinism is doing itself at disservice by saying
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

Oh. This is a standard issue creationist argument: they all hate mutations. I’ve lost track of how many creationist excuses I’ve heard along these lines: mutations only delete things, mutations only lead to a loss of information, or here, the Weinstein variant, mutations can’t produce new morphological features.
His misconceptions are not at all hard to convey. He’s just a poor communicator who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
And oh man, he’s going to start by making excuses.

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 okay I think could probably do a decent job on those fronts but if you happened onto the earth 100 million years ago you would have found lots of animals running around lots of plants growing you would have recognized where you were and more or less what was going on there’s not a single creature on the planet that would have any idea what an abstract thoughtwas there would be no creature that had any inkling that there was even a question about where all this had come from and Darwinism would still be the answer so somehow whether Darwinism is the answer does not depend on anybody knowing it or being able to explain it

He’s pandering to the Joe Rogan audience! It’s OK if you don’t understand what he’s talking about, because creatures did not need to understand Darwinism in order to evolve.
Yeah, Bret, but you need to understand evolutionary theory to explain it.
You also need to understand a little biology to see how badly flawed his argument by metaphor is.
Oh god, brace yourselves.

okay here here’s the problem let’s say that we went into the parking lot and in one parking space there’s an excavator and in the next parking space over is a Maserati now let’s say we took those two machines and we tore them apart so that we just had a stack of the compounds that they were made out of right the rubber the vinyl the various Metals all that stuff there would be differences between the excavator and the Maserati right they would just be made of some different stuff and then there’d be a lot of stuff that they had in common now you could look at the differences in the materials that they’re made out out of and you could say well the excavator is really good at you know lifting materials and moving them around and the Maserati is really good at going fast on a paved surface and those differences are due to the differences in materials that they’re made out of that would be wrong probably you could take the list of materials that an excavator is made out of and you could give it to a bunch of Engineers and you could say I want you to make a Maserati but you’re limited to these materials and they could do it wouldn’t be quite as good because there’d be some places where the ideal material wasn’t available to them anymore but there’s no reason you couldn’t make a Maserati out of the stuff
or a sports car
right yeah 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

Aaargh. This is a terrible metaphor. I have to mention two words familiar to all evolutionary biologists: PATTERN and PROCESS. They completely invalidate Weinstein’s thought experiment, and he ought to know it.
As stated by Chapleau, Johansen and Williamson,

The distinction between pattern and process is a central issue in evolutionary biology. The study of patterns deals with the detection of order in nature while the study of processes deals with the mechanisms generating and maintaining this order. Patterns result from processes. Consequently, the study of patterns must be free from any assumptions about processes, if they are to be used to test hypotheses dealing with the mechanisms of evolution. This simple observation was one of the important issues at the heart of the controversy that has been raging in systematics over the last 23 years (see Eldredge and Cracraft 1950, Wiley 1981). Although the debate has been restricted to systematics, it has ramifications throughout the other disciplines of evolutionary biology (ethology, evolutionary ecology, etc.).
François Chapleau, Peter H. Johansen and Mark Williamson, 1988

Weinstein’s example doesn’t work. If you completely pulverize two cars, you have destroyed the pattern, and you also have lost any information about the process that assembled them. You would not be able to reconstruct any one car from the debris, let alone use the materials to build a different car. You would have to obtain blueprints, molds, casting information, machinery for forming the parts and tools for assembling them, and you have just obliterated even indirect hints about how the cars were made.
He has just recited an extremely reductionist view of biology, one that no one, other than possibly some creationists and Bret Weinstein, believe. There have been legitimate scientists who argued that all we need is the DNA sequence of the genome to understand an organism, but I think they’ve all gone crawling back into their holes and are trying to convince everyone that they never really said that.
If he thinks the problem is that modern biologists, or even Darwinists, think that species properties are determined only by their chemical constituents, well, he’s full of shit.
But he’s not done. He’s going to try to fit his metaphor to real organisms.

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 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

But…but…but no one thinks that the differences between bats and shrews are solely due to chemical differences!
It’s about PATTERN!
Bats and shrews are made of mostly the same stuff, having the same genes and proteins. The difference between a bat and a shrew is not a simple chemical difference, it’s a change in the timing and strength of chemical signals. For instance, bats express the molecules BMP2 and BMP4 more strongly in their forelimbs than mice do, which prolongs the growth of forelimb bones to make wings.
If you think that all that is involved in evolution is changing the amino acid sequence of proteins, you’re missing out. A larger percentage of the genome is dedicated to regulation, that is, bits that are not necessarily transcribed, but are controlling the timing and strength of the expression of other genes.
So yeah, he’s right that the “spelling of its proteins” is not an adequate description of how changes in the genome translate into changes in form. But he’s not the one who figured that out. All those people he ignorantly calls “Darwinists” called it 75 to a hundred years ago.
Where did he learn biology, anyway?
Warning: he’s going to become increasingly incoherent as he tries to describe his novel idea.

so what do you think is missing
there’s a whole layer that is missing that allows Evolution to explore design space much more efficiently than the mechanism that we invoke
and the mechanism we invoke is natural selection adaptation
the mechanism it that’s the one
okay the mechanism that we invoke is
random mutation
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 transform forms a shrew into a bat

OK, a “layer”. What layer? How does Weinstein identify a “layer”? I’d say that the layer he wants to define into existence is simply the structure of the genome and the molecules it interacts with; that the sequence of the genome, beyond coding for amino acids, is a dynamic structure that binds to regulatory molecules, proteins and RNA, that are present in the cytoplasm in concentrations that vary over time and that can change patterns of growth and the strength of their contacts with other cells that have consequences for the morphology of the organism.
It’s nothing mysterious or unknown. We’ve been studying it for decades. What he thinks is a missing piece of evolutionary biology is the stuff that molecular biology has been studying since at least Jacob and Monod in the 1950s, and that is the primary subject of interest in evo-devo since the 1980s.
He doesn’t think the accumulation of mutations is what transforms a shrew into a bat. Then what is he thinking of?

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
and what would be that
well
what is that Force
it’s not a force
what is that desire that what is that
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

It’s not a force, or a desire — note that he has already confused Joe Rogan, which admittedly not that hard to do — and it’s not in triplet codon form. But he can’t or won’t say what it is, probably because he’s just as confused as Joe.
But I’m not confused. The secret to a clear mind is to simply ignore all the nonsense coming out of Weinstein’s mouth. I know that there are a lot of different kinds of information in the cell: there’s the structure of the genome, which contains many regulatory sequences; there’s the contingent properties of the other molecules in the cell that can interact with DNA; there are signaling pathways that involve lipids, proteins and nucleotides; there are factors in the external environment that can modulate gene expression. I’m not some kind of super-genius savant to know these things, they are basic principles that every serious student of biology should have figured out in year one of their training. Every credible biologist knows that there is far more to cellular information than the triplet code.
This was a 2 and a half hour interview between Rogan and Weinstein, and I’ve only dug into 15 minutes of it. I don’t need to go further to the point where he claims his mechanism has to be able to look forward in time, or that human cognition is somehow part of it, or the bit where he praises Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute, saying he’s a quite good scientist (he’s not, he’s a quite poor philosopher), I already know that Weinstein is an idiot.
I am embarrassed and have to confess something, though. Weinstein was a certified professor of evolutionary biology from 2002 until 2017 at Evergreen State College. I applied for a biology position at Evergreen in 2000. I didn’t get it. I wasn’t good enough. But Bret Weinstein was.
I must admit that I sometimes wonder how that happened. Any Evergreen faculty/administrators out there who can tell me how I failed while Weinstein succeeded? Maybe you can also let me know if you regret your choices now.
Anyway, if you can stand to listen to a failed Evergreen applicant, you’ve found my YouTube channel. My blog is at freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula, and I have a Patreon account at patreon.com/pzmyers. I use the donations I get through Patreon to feed my spiders, and also to fund freethoughtblogs, where many other progressive godless folk have blogs. Check it out!