Joe Rogan’s recent podcast episode with evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein took an unexpected turn into foundational questions about Darwinian evolution.
While Weinstein wasn’t challenging evolution itself, he proposed that the traditional explanation of how species diversify is incomplete and potentially insufficient to explain the remarkable variety of life we observe.
The conversation began with Weinstein acknowledging a question many people have wondered about: “I know it’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 it’s really powerful enough to explain all of the creatures that we all know and love.”
The standard evolutionary story, as Weinstein explained, centers on random mutations to DNA that occasionally produce beneficial changes to proteins, which natural selection then preserves.
“Almost all of the time that will make the little molecular machine worse or break it altogether,” Weinstein said. “Occasionally it will leave the machine functional in a way that’s somewhat better than the previous one.”
He pressed on the central problem: “That doesn’t sound, 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.”
Weinstein stated that biologists typically respond by pointing to vast timescales, but added, “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.”
The discussion turned to one of evolution’s most striking transformations: the bat wing. Weinstein used this as an example of changes that seem difficult to explain through gradual protein modifications alone. When examining the difference between a shrew’s foot and a bat’s elongated finger bones, Weinstein noted, “You could build that wing and that foot out of the very same molecules. What you’re doing is distributing them differently.”
This led to his central hypothesis: that genomes store numerical variables, similar to how computer programs store numbers, which dictate developmental parameters like bone length and growth timing.
He pointed to telomeres, repetitive DNA sequences that function as cellular division counters, as proof that genomes can store information as numbers rather than just protein-coding sequences.
“The ability to store a number in the genome is fantastically powerful,” Weinstein explained. “What it means if you could store a lot of numbers in the genome is that you could describe creatures by allotting something either a quantity of material or an amount of time in development.”
When Rogan asked the fundamental question about flight evolution, “How does an animal go from being a shrew or some other rodent type creature to something that eventually can fly?,” Weinstein acknowledged this has been a perplexing question for biologists but argued it becomes more explicable with his proposed mechanism.
He cited flying squirrels as an intermediate example, explaining how even slight increases in gliding ability would provide survival advantages. “Any squirrel that had just a little advantage in getting to that next tree would out-compete ones that got consumed or died,” he said. But he emphasized that the key innovation isn’t just the physical changes but what he calls “explorer modes,” mechanisms that allow evolution to search design space more efficiently.
“Selection not only discovers forms, it discovers ways to discover forms,” Weinstein stated. He suggested that once the first bat achieved flight, “that animal has discovered an adaptive landscape, a series of opportunities that we represent as peaks that is unknown.” His proposed system of variable storage would allow rapid exploration of adjacent possibilities.
Rogan brought up animals that seem to have reached evolutionary perfection and stopped changing, like crocodiles and dragonflies. Weinstein responded that these represent the opposite of evolutionary failure: “They are so good that in spite of competition from more modern forms, they still persist.”
The conversation also touched on animals that have rapidly adapted to new environments, such as duikers in the Congo rainforest that have developed the ability to swim underwater and eat fish. Weinstein noted this represents exactly the kind of rapid adaptation that traditional mechanisms struggle to explain: “Imagine what would have happened if there was not an enhanced evolutionary toolkit to that creature. It would have gone extinct.”
Throughout the discussion, Weinstein emphasized he wasn’t challenging Darwin or proposing intelligent design. “Darwin is untouched by this. Darwin is still the guy. He nailed it. And this is just as Darwinian as protein coding genes. It’s just vastly more powerful with respect to taking a form that you’ve already got and finding a similar form that you don’t yet have.”
He expressed frustration that evolutionary biology seems stuck, with the last major conceptual advance being Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene” in 1976. “I’ve thought my field was stuck in a ditch since really before I entered it,” he said.
