I’m tired of Bret Weinstein pushing conspiracy theories, and just as tired of him making proclamations about evolutionary biology that are misleading or flat wrong. I’m especially peeved today because, in the video below, he claims that both Richard Dawkins and I have said that “evolution biology is settled” because I, at least, claimed that the big advances at the beginning of the field, involving people like Darwin, Fisher, Haldane, Sewall Wright, and Ernst Mayr, established the foundations of the field, and we don’t see such big advances any more. Where are today’s Darwins? (This was a question posed to me by Dick Lewontin when I interviewed him some years ago.) And yes, I probably said that and do believe it. But that doesn’t mean that evolutionary biology is “settled”. It’s that our approach to understanding evolution in nature has been somewhat asymptotic, with a big leap at the beginning and then incremental progress since the 1940s. Indeed, I think that advances such as the “modern synthesis” of the 1930s and 1940s, showing that Darwinian natural selection was compatible with modern genetics, was a huge synthesis that hasn’t been equaled. And, of course, science of any sort never reaches an asymptote, for that would be “complete understanding: the ultimate truth,” which is unattainable.
In the video below, Weinstein and Heying argue that Dawkins and I think that evolutionary biology is “settled,” and that our view impedes progress in the field, allows evolutionary biology to stagnate, and, most important, impedes people’s failure to take Intelligent Design theory seriously for raising serious problems with neo-Darwinism. Further, he says that we’ve discouraged graduate students from entering the field and have not produced, as mentors, our “replacements.” He’s dead wrong here, at least for me: I’d put my graduate students (and their graduate students) up against anybody’s as having made substantial progress in evolutionary genetics.
Yes, we have nobody around today who’s made advances as big as those of Darwin or Fisher. But that doesn’t mean at all, as Weinstein and Heather Heying assert in the video below, that we think evolutionary biology is “settled.” Far from it! First of all, neutral theory was a big step forward in evolutionary genetics, and that was introduced in 1968 and is still being developed. We still don’t understand exactly why organisms reproduce sexually; we don’t understand how often speciation occurs without geographic isolation; we don’t understand what females, during sexual selection, are looking for when they choose a mate. I could list tons of other questions, but these are three that I’ve written about and are mentioned by Weinstein.
Weinstein and Heying’s claim in the video is that there are huge advances, on the scale of Darwin’s and Fisher’s, to be made, perhaps by people who are working in intelligent design. (Weinstein implies that he has a theory that may be on this scale as well.) To be sure, they note that the IDers like Stephen Meyer and his “high-quality colleagues”, are motivated by religion, but Weinstein sees them still asking important and serious questions that evolutionists haven’t answered, thus motivating evolutionists to better understand nature. Nope. ID adocates have wasted the time of evolutionists in refuting IDer’s specious arguments. Why do they do this? To let the credulous public, much of which buys ID, know that science can answer those criticisms. That’s why there were so many critiques of Michael Behe’s books by reputable scientists.
Three questions that evolutionists have supposedly set aside and neglected are these: “What caused the Cambrian explosion?”, “Why are there gaps in the fossil record?” and “How can we get complex working proteins when their existence is so improbable?”
The answer to the first question is “We don’t know, but there are theories and some of them are being tested.”
The second question has a spate of possible answers (lack of sediment deposition, rapid evolution in relatively short evolutionary times, and so on). But one thing we know is that Gould’s explanation—the theory of punctuated equilibrium—is not likely to be the answer, as the theory doesn’t work. (People don’t often realize that punctuated equilibrium, as advanced by Gould and Eldredge, is more than just a jerky pattern in the fossil record: it’s also a theory about why the pattern is supposedly ubiquitous. The ubiquity of the pattern in fact is still being argued, but we know that it’s not ubiquitous.) But in the end, Gould’s explanation—the really novel and non-Darwinian part punctuated equilibrium—was simply wrong.
As for the third question, the claim that the origin of complex proteins is improbable is not one taken seriously by molecular evolutionists, simply because we have no indication that it really is a problem. The idea that it is a problem comes from specious claims of IDers that such proteins assemble themselves randomly rather than by selection, or that mutation is too unlikely to fuel the process (there are other fuels, of course, like gene duplication and insertions of DNA).
At 2:56, in the video below, Weinstein asserts that evolutionary biologists have simply left the Big Questions “on the table”, questions like “where did all the species come from?” and “why do females put males in so many species to challenges that then cause them to burden their male offspring with elaborate displays that are not helpful?”
Weinstein is apparently unaware that I wrote a comprehensive and scholarly book on speciation in 2004 and outlined a lot of unanswered questions, so no, Dr. Weinstein, I did NOT think that the question “wasn’t worthy of my time”. And yes, we do have considerably more understanding these days about how species form. That’s also described in the book.
He’s also apparently unaware that many biologists have been working on sexual selection, which is simply a hard problem to test in nature. And he doesn’t understand that elaborate displays by males are helpful: they help males get mates. Peacocks with more “eyes” in their tails, for example, get more offspring. Widowbirds whose tails are artificially elongated by gluing on extra feather get more mates, too. Weinstein is ignorant about how sexual selection works, and how theories about it have been tested.
At any rate, I no longer take Weinstein seriously as a biologist, or even as an intellectual. He may have been a good teacher at Evergreen State, but he’s not on the rails when it comes to evolutionary biology (his last peer-reviewed paper was in 2005, and Researchgate lists 4 total publications). He’s also advanced specious theories about ivermectin being both a good preventive and cure for Covid, he’s suggested that AIDS was caused by party drugs and not a virus, and he’s suggested that the death of Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis was suspicious, perhaps because Mullis has criticized Anthony Fauci (did Fauci order a hit? LOL!). Weinstein’s even wrapped his cameras in aluminum foil because he suspected some sinister forces were impeding his transmission. He gave his cameras tinfoil hats!
A tweet from Michael Shermer, aimed at Weinstein, about Kary Mullis’s death:
In his Substack column below, Jesse Singal shows other conspiracy theories/dubious theories that Weinstein and Heying have advanced (Weinstein is more vociferous than Heying, so I give him most of the opprobrium). Click to read:
Here you can see Weinstein going after Dawkins and me by misrepresenting our views. Yes, I do think that understanding of evolution has slowed down since Darwin and since the 1940s, since most of these “founders” seem to have gotten the major parts of the modern synthesis right—except for neutral theory, which was a huge advance. But I surely do not believe (nor do I think that Dawkins believes) that we have pretty much completed our understanding of evolution. But I’ll let Dawkins speak for himself.
And of course the IDers love Weinstein and Heyer’s podcast, because they give so much credit to Intelligent Design in pinpointing the “neglected” Big Questions about evolution.It’s thus a pity that IDers, like Weinstein himself, hardly have any peer-reviewed papers in real scientific journals advancing their theories! Read below to see how much IDers love Weinstein.
Now I surely don’t think that Weinstein is stupid at all; he’s really quite smart. But I think that, in his desire to find a niche for himself, and garner a measure of public approbation, he’s deliberately embraced conspiracy theories, highly praised the gussied-up creationism of Intelligent Design, and, most annoying, almost willfully misunderstood evolutionary biology.
His book with Heying is also quite bad, packed full of pseudoscience. Heying and I interacted some on X a few years back, as she was pushing the idea that we don’t need vaccines if we get enough vitamin D or some similar garbage.
They are grifters now.
“now”? Maybe there was a good reason why he was at the world class Evergreen State College (it probably ranks right up there with UMN Morris….)
Weinstein is illustrating gnostic temptation — secret knowledge is inaccessible without some sort of Khunian revolution perhaps — that the orthodox establishment is hiding/preventing from getting out in the open. I mean, he can say all this other stuff, but why disparage a scientific advancement? Because it gets the audience intrigued.
It’s very strange because Weinstein is fully immersed as a victim of gnostic abuse himself.
Anywho…
Science, Politics, and Gnosticism
Eric Voegelin
1968, 1997
Regenery Press, Chicago;
Washington D.C.
I agree part of Weinstein’s approach does seem gnostical. But part of it is objective and popular and associated with the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: the effort by some mainstream developmental biologists and physiologists to put the phenotypic cart before the natural selection horse. I think the disagreement over the ESS is in part what Weinstein is criticizing: that opponents of the ESS (like Jerry and many others) are claiming that evolutionary biology is “settled”, while brave ESSers warn us that there is “An approaching storm in evolutionary theory”.
https://academic.oup.com/evolut/article/77/4/1170/7005661
That book review is among the most-read articles on the website of the journal “Evolution”. The review mostly praises a new 2022 analysis of Darwin’s original text in which the book authors conclude that Darwin wasn’t much of an evolutionist. I don’t agree but merely note that book publishers correctly conclude that there is a persistent lucrative market for books with this kind of “revolutionary” argument for turning evolutionary biology upside down and giving it a good shake.
+1
It’s weird, but the “rising evolutionary storm” hasn’t yet hit us, and the ESS or “Third Way” doesn’t seem to have hit home yet. I think the reason people like to see Darwinism overturned or revised (and no modern evolutionary biologist would deny that Darwin made a ton of mistakes and had many misconceptions), is that they don’t like the materialism of Darwinism, and because it has implications that scare people (see Steve Stewart-Williams’s book). Therefore they welcome any attempt to show that Darwinism or neo-Darwinism is “in need of a good shake”. In fact, I seriously doubt that some new theory will overturn it; progress in the field is incremental, but there’s still progress and new cool stuff, which of course can always be construed as an “expansion” of neo-Darwinism. But new stuff in any field can be seen as an “expansion” of that field. Any new knowledge is an expansion but there hasn’t been the predicted tsunami. If I were to single out one “expansion” since 1940, it would be the neutral theory.
And no, I have never claimed that evolutionary biology is “settled”. If you think I said that somewhere, please give the reference.
Thanks for the reply. No I don’t think you’ve ever called evolution “settled”, I’m just repeating Weinstein’s misplaced criticism about “settled”. Agree the EES (jeez “ESS” sorry…) is favoured by blank-slate types. It’s also a grift for grant-seeking revolutionaries tapping the market for novelty (cf. Peter Nonacs @ 7).
I know you know but it’s worth saying :
ESS is Evolutionary Stable Strategy
Learned that in The Selfish Gene!
I had first heard of ESS some years ago from Larry Morans’ web site. What he said at the time was that the ESSers were “careerists”. They are academics who mainly want to be credited for inventing the Next Big Paradigm, only there is no such thing available in their field. I suppose other fields have their own versions of such people. The problem is the ESSers are over a century too late.
With a generous funding by the Templeton Foundation, of course.
https://extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com/about-the-ees/why-is-the-ees-contentious/
Mr. Weinstein is quite the polymath. Not only might he have a theory of evolution on the scale of Darwin’s, he also has his theory of everything, which he calls Geometric Unity, which has not been well received.
That’s his equally out there brother Eric, not Bret.
You are right. I need to pay more attention!
He’s a ‘nullimath’. He knows nothing about anything.
And he used to teach evolution.
I see nothing really wrong with saying that evolution is settled. There is nothing wrong with that statement other than that it begs for more detailed context as you have provided. Likewise, we can say that the genetic nature of inheritance is settled. The germ theory of disease is settled.
In all of these examples, matters are settled in that there is no reasonable possibility of overturning them, lest we find that our very ability to observe and reason is wrong. I could be a Platypus. Maybe my laptop here is really a banana.
“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that,’ No ordinary man could be such a fool.” George Orwell
I didn’t view the video, so maybe I shouldn’t comment, but some things simply must be addressed. The fact of evolution—that life on earth evolved and continues to evolve—is settled. Much else is “settled” as well. But a great number of questions remain. It’s the same with all the sciences. Each advance brings new questions that are not yet settled, questions that are subject to study. This is what scientists do. They build further understanding on top of what’s already settled.
Occasionally, a “settled” matter becomes “unsettled,” but only occasionally. It was once largely (but not entirely) “settled” that the continents were static, but then came plate tectonics. Every day I read of new advances in science, and the number of scientific papers published increases every year. No serious intellectual expects the pursuit of new knowledge in science—evolutionary biology included—to end anytime soon.
+1
Sure, the egghead scientists claim that the science of geodesy is “settled” (geodesy being the scientific discipline that asks the age old and very important question “What is the shape of the earth, anyway?”). Those pointy-headed secular humanistic intellectuals say it’s just a matter of grinding out a few more decimal points about the “polar flattening” or the “equatorial bulge” or whatever.
Bah! Fortunately, the Flat Earthers are Just Asking Questions (important and serious questions!) that could lead us to a truly transformative revolution in geodesy! Sure, the Flat Earthers (and don’t forget the Hollow Earthers as well) are motivated by religion and/or mental illness, but at least with them the field of geodesy won’t be “stagnating”!
/sarcasm
I feel some sympathy for Heying & Weinstein in that in midcareer they suddenly found themselves unemployed. with a settlement that was not going to last for the rest of their lives, and basically unhireable within traditional academic settings. Maybe it seemed like the only option was to try to monetize their fame before everyone forgot who they are. I remember the earliest episodes of their podcast which weren’t wacky and really tried to explain biology. I guess they found that you can’t make a living doing that. Jerry can weigh in as to how much dosh WEIT generates for him. Unfortunately, what sells is to be controversial, outrageous, and conspiratorial. I guess Bret has decided to be his generation’s von Daniken or Dembski, who probably ended up with a pretty nice bank accounts. In evolutionary biology, all the really big and foundational ideas have already been discovered by Darwin, etc. Unfortunately for Bret, similarly all the ripe grift (space aliens, bigfoot, ID) already have their grifting ‘stars’. What’s left are sad little mini-conspiracies such as ivermectin, CIA creating super-viruses, evolutionists conspiring to hide the truth, and so on. Wait a bit and I’m sure Bret will be pushing lizard people and Jewish space lasers as he truly slides away into complete irrelevance.
I make exactly zero dollars from this website. In fact, I have to pay WordPress about $600 per year to use them, and more to keep the URL. I’m not sure why people think I make ANY money from this site, especially because there’s no advertising; I’ve refused it consistently.
In other words, the net income from WEIT is nil. In fact, I make negative dollars. It’s a labor of love; I do it because I like to.
My point being, that if it is one’s goal to make a ton of $$$, running a site like WEIT isn’t going to get you there. I think Bret quickly found out that “cancelled evolutionary biology academic” brings a bit of fame but is not a lucrative career. You can only make a living by selling what a lot people are willing to buy – which too often is junk science.
I am going to try to keep this comment brief as possible and “in a nutshell” as possible since my wife and others have proven recently that I tend to “ramble in the b rambles chasing squirrells” (also aware I’m late to this conversation). So here it goes ;: I recently inherited some money from a brother and my father and to most folks that know me & my wife think is “more than he knows what to do with (it isn’t, thanks, wife& daughters). So, when asked what charitable things I might do with it, I often say, ” I wish I could order a purchase a huge order of books starting with approximately ??,000.00 dollars worth of “Faith versus Fact” and WEIT and hopefully be at least able to aid in distribution (not Florida or Louisiana since it would only fuel some fires and fan some flames both literally and metaphorically). And maybe, just maybe purchase some of the many “books by other like minded authors” with related subjects (such as the 4 Horsemen). Here’s hoping this comment “fits” where I placed it.
You wish you could. Any reason why you can’t?
And we thank you for it. We (my wife and I) read it every day.
If they’d stuck to discussing the excesses of wokeness they’d have been fine.
But Bret in particular seems to be susceptible to conspiracy theories. That can lead a person to strange places.
Lots of people flunk out of academia mid-career but don’t become notorious whackjob podcasters.
The missing element in your analysis of Weinstein’s choices: ego.
I pretty much think that ego is a given in academia – else why are we so concerned about if our work is cited. and who gets credit for an idea?
I take your point, but seems to me there’s did-they-cite-me ego and then there’s polycontrarian-podcast-host ego.
[btw, I remember you from UCLA. I was in Ken Nagy’s lab in the late 80s and taught Bio 5 a couple times as a lecturer in the early 90s.]
HAH! That’s an ego stroke for me! I just remember when the Evergreen mess first broke, I thought 2 things. Bret is completely right and I sure the hell wouldn’t want to be in his shoes (soon to be unemployed with kids). It was never going to end well for them. Whether he truly believes in the stuff he’s selling, or just believes it will sell … either way a very sad denouement.
There is a great term for this, called “Grift Drift” and it was explicated in a youtube video (google “grift drift” Russell brand and you find it) with the hilariously hard right turn from Russell Brand, who started out as a left-wing/prog type, then into conspiracies, and now finally full-on into evangelical Christianity–mostly likely all for monetization purposes. Maybe Bret/Heather are heading down the same path for the $$. The same way it has worked for Brand. The nod to ID is perhaps the first shot down that path for them.
Have Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying reached out to you to discuss these disagreements? I would think a fair minded approach would be to invite you and/or Richard Dawkins on to their podcast in order to hash it out.
No, but I’m not interested in going on their podcasts. As always, I avoid oral debates as much as possible and would prefer to hash out differences in writing, which is the way I deal with creationism or ID. They are welcome to go after me on their podcast, or in writing, and I will respond in writing.
I hope he will at least be willing to engage with what you write.
That’s wise.
Didn’t Bret try to bait Sam Harris repeatedly into having a podcast debate with him about Ivermectin?
Bret is after a spectacle.
As Mark Twain once presciently said about Bret and Heather long before they were born:
“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
Except that they are not stupid people, which makes it all the more infuriating.
Weren’t they promoting adenovirus vector vaccines (e.g. AstraZeneca) as being safer than mRNA vaccines, including on Bill Maher? AstraZeneca has since been pulled from the market because it causes blood clots.
Imagine being so overconfident in your heterodox health position that you go on national TV and basically give medical advice, despite having absolutely no expertise, training or experience in that area. And getting it wrong.
That, to me, is stupid.
Weren’t government officials and those with medical expertise proclaiming AstraZeneca was “safe and effective”? No caveats required. Weren’t some demanding that people take it or risk losing their jobs? Weren’t many scoffing at the idea of a cost-benefit analysis of individual COVID risk weighed against potential side effects of the vaccine?
Imagine being so overconfident.
If I remember right, AstraZeneca was pulled because some people developed blood clots (I think it was young people for some reason). But the risks were statistically very low. Still, it was sensitive times and so it had to go.
Replying to Mark and Doug: a preventive intervention that causes blood clots even at low frequency is not a viable product no matter how effective it is. It’s one thing for cancer chemotherapy to have predictable dangerous side effects in people who already have cancer, or even an antibiotic used to treat a life-threatening infection. But a vaccine being given, by definition, to people not yet sick with anything is another matter entirely. The blood clots were of a particularly dangerous form in large arteries causing fatal strokes and limb ischemia and could occur in young people who had nothing to fear from Covid.
There was a chart making the rounds at the time that advised if you were old enough to have a non-trivial risk of dying if you got Covid and Astra-Zeneca was the only vaccine you could get without delay, as was the case in Canada where we had lost a gamble on a Chinese vaccine, then the percentages favoured taking the vaccine (voluntarily), as my wife and I did. This was in those early days when we had reason to believe that getting everyone vaccinated with anything would get us all out of quarantine sooner. But no one in his right mind would take A-Z once the alternatives became available to us.
My recollection is that A-Z was dead and gone by the time governments started coercing certain occupational groups to get vaccinated.
@Leslie MacMillan: “a preventive intervention that causes blood clots even at low frequency is not a viable product no matter how effective it is. ”
That depends very much on circumstances. If we’re looking at a pandemic that cannot be stopped by other measures and is bound to infect pretty much everyone and that kills, say, 30% of the infected, and no better vaccine is available, a vaccine that kills one in 10000 of the vaccinated is still a sweet deal.
The thing with Covid is that it was neither harmless enough to be ignored, nor dangerous enough that drastic measures were clearly and obviously justifiable; also, its profile shifted from “really nasty (especially for older people), but can be kept in check with social distancing and vaccinations” to “bad flu-level dangerous, but so infectious that it’s impossible to to suppress”.
Generally the first theorists in any field are the best known, and all subsequent progress is by definition incremental. The only way someone will outshine Darwin would be to come up with something as groundbreaking, which would probably generate an entire new field of study. So, a silly accusation.
I was just listening to Sam Harris interview Bill Maher. They talked about the danger of being hijacked by your audience (i.e., you justifiably call out some craziness on the left, and the right wingers show up and begin praising you. Then you get hooked on the praise and just keep getting a little more crazy in order to keep the juice flowing). Bret Weinstein seems to be an illustration.
I initially held a high opinion of Bret Weinstein, believing he had significant depth and integrity. His courage in standing up for liberal values at Evergreen during a time of intense ideological conflict is praiseworthy. However, as Weinstein has spoken more on various technical topics (evolution, epidemiology, virology), I have become increasingly convinced that his statements are not credible or well-founded. Though I am hesitant to say it, I feel that Weinstein now resembles Alex Jones if Jones had taken the drug from Limitless, which enhances cognitive abilities.
This is more or less how I feel. If you go back to the days I was reporting on Evergreen, I was praising Weinstein for his courage. And he was courageous, and weathered a lot of bad stuff. But now he’s doing things that I can’t really praise, and some of those things, like pushing Ivermectin or denying that a virus causes AIDS, can be dangerous.
His subsequent positions do kind of make you wonder if his retelling of the Evergreen events was entirely accurate though, don’t they.
I think his retelling was self serving and designed to attract attention. I read a Reddit thread full of Evergreen faculty who basically said that he mislead people into thinking that the Univeristy “forced” him to stay home that day which was false. Then when he immediately went on Fox News to yap about it the general impression was that he intended to create a scene all along.
Bret and Heather are proof of what happens when you go too far down the contrarian rabbit hole and make public commitments to those contrarian positions that you can’t walk back.
If they were rational to begin with, they might still be rational now if they had never started a podcast.
“we don’t understand what females, during sexual selection, are looking for when they choose a mate.”
That point, alone, means the field will never be settled.
Well, the problem is, as with speciation, there are no “laws” about how sexual selection works. All we can do is say “females select for good genes here, but other stuff there” and get a distribution of examples. Surely females in different taxa are looking for different things, but all to the end of spreading their genes. But what they’re looking for, and how, will differ among taxa.
Thank you for this statement: “And, of course, science of any sort never reaches an asymptote, for that would be “complete understanding: the ultimate truth,” which is unattainable.”
Science is about understanding and developing good explanations for what we observe. Of course there will be updates to theories, and some will be discarded in favor of better explanations. Sometimes theories last hundreds of years until something better comes along. However, one should not go about the business of disproving theories by using inaccurate explanations of those theories and falsely claiming superiority. I’m disappointed in Weinstein.
I would add, however, that some theories are unlikely to be changed: like the idea that a water molecule has two hydrogen and one oxygen atom, or that infectious diseases are caused by specific microorganisms. In such cases I think the “truth” is unlikely to ever be changed!
Very true! Great point.
Thank you for your hard work to create and maintain this site and to keep the ideas flowing.
Worth repeating:
“If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.”
-Richard Feynman
The Character of Physical Law
1965
True in physics. Experiments in applied human biology (aka medicine) are sometimes wrong. It is very difficult to design and execute a randomized controlled trial that has low enough alpha and beta error levels (i.e., is big enough) to utterly refute a theory that was plausibly based on biological reasoning. And that’s assuming there is no frustration of random allocation or blinding of subjects and outcome evaluators or frank cheating and fakery that introduces enough bias to get an invalid result. Most human trials are done to confirm a hypothesis that is probably true a priori. That is literally where the money is, and for ethical protection of subjects (human and animal), you don’t want too many negative trials that, in retrospect, had no serious chance of being positive. Alpha level of 0.05 and beta of 0.2 are just not very convincing hurdles to get over, by physics standards, especially since human trials are stopped as soon as the data appear to cross a stopping boundary so subjects are not denied a treatment now proving to be effective. It’s a bit like declaring the winner in a baseball game tied after nine innings to be the team that made more hits, instead of carrying on to count runs scored in extra innings.
Motivated reasoners can find enough fault with any experiment involving human subjects to give them cover to say the experiment was wrong and their theory is therefore not disproved. Trans-activists in North America are doing this with the Cass Review (which isn’t an experiment but is being used by necessity to guide policy-making.). There is no rule about how convincingly error-free a trial (or systematic review) has to be before you can force the critics to shut up or, conversely, what counts as a fatal error that vindicates the critics.
In connection with the mention of punctuated equilibrium, Prof. Coyne, what happened with the work of your colleague David Raup, specifically the book Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? The argument of the book was that contingency plays a much greater role in evolution than the (then-current?) doctrine held, which certainly seems related to the argument made by E&G. Has that also been rejected, or was it accepted?
Thanks! (Sorry about accidentally posting it in response to a different post!)
Sorry, but I never read the book so I can’t comment on its thesis or arguments. Nor have I followed any debate in the literature about this issue.
I knew him and read the book—as well as most of his other articles. Dave was a very careful writer. The gist of the argument in his book is that there have been times in the history of life when unexpected physical events dramatically changed the course of life’s history. The most notorious of these events was the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous.* Physical catastrophes of that magnitude, Raup argued, mess everything up to such an extent that what survives or dies is a matter of luck, at least in part. Consistent with Raup’s argument, it has often been conjectured—and there may be some truth to this—that the ascendancy of mammals would not have taken place without the asteroid impact that led to the untimely demise of the dinosaurs (excluding birds). Under this view, the mammals were lucky.
Despite the provocative title—Raup accepted the basic tenets of the Modern Syntheses AFAIK—his claim was that random events have had a significant role to play in the course of life’s evolution, and that the composition of life on today’s Earth was in part fashioned by these physical events.
I haven’t been actively involved since 1995, but I do think that Raup’s view is still current, at least in the world of paleontology. I don’t think that I’m misrepresenting him in what I say above, but it’s been a while since I read the book, and what I wrote is from memory alone.
*I’m neither defending or criticizing this theory, but it is widely accepted.
Events external to Earth that affect the path of evolution have long been of popular interest. The latest (to me) is evidence that Earth went through a dense interstellar cloud about 2-3 million years ago.
The evidence suggests that the Sun’s protective heliosphere was pushed back by the cloud then, exposing Earth to a much larger flux of cosmic rays, hydrogen atoms, and radioactive particles, an event that may have contributed to the recent cycle of ice ages and the evolutionary adaptations of creatures living through them.
Introduction:
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/the-solar-system-may-have-passed-through-interstellar-clouds/
Original article in Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02279-8
I mean, he’s mentioned on this website?
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2015/07/16/david-m-raup-1933-2015/
No one should mourn Bret Weinstein’s intellectual self-immolation. The excessive heat turned him into a crackpot and his attempts to monetize his conspiracy hypotheses are pathetic because they were debunked so thoroughly, so long ago. Eric Weinstein has dough so baby brother Brett won’t starve.
To paraphrase WaPo: The intellectual dark web dies in darkness (and from incontinence). And BW should ride his Dark Horse podcast across the dark web to some sunless, intellectually bankrupt destination of the discredited who are unworthy of others’ attention.
Does anybody know if they even tried to get comparable faculty positions after the dust had settled over at Evergreen? Not every campus is full of Wokery.
That’s a good question. I always thought their initial excitement at becoming celebrities led them to believe they’d have careers in social media. A mere faculty position looks pretty old-fashioned when you can move on to become an “Influencer”.
Thing is their positions at evergreen were just teaching positions. Neither of them did research so they wouldn’t even be candidates for faculty positions at most universities. They were basically just full-time adjuncts.
Bret Weinstein has disappointed me greatly. It seems to me that, after losing his job, he sold out himself to make a living. I wonder, couldn’t he become a K-12 science teacher instead.
I wonder if he’s auditioning for Templeton funding.