Never Alone: The 223rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

In this 223rd in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.

In this episode, we discuss science and religion, materialism and other ways of understanding our world. Can analysis and quantification explain everything? Can narrative, intuition, and creativity? All are or should be part of the scientific process; science is incomplete with only one mode. We also discuss models, how they fail, how difficult they are to assess, and what one recent climate model has to say about the role of air pollution in Earth’s temperature. Enlightenment values require that we use our freedom to inquire about all things that we are curious about. Also: happy Beltane!

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Timestamps:
(00:00) Welcome and Bret's trip to the UK
(10:25) Sponsors
(18:12) Third man syndrome
(27:50) Metaphorically true?
(35:10) Rejection of Darwinism
(47:25) Complexity in science
(54:00) Models and replication
(01:08:15) New climate model
(01:14:50) Climate change activists' mental health
(01:22:25) The Trojan Horse
(01:34:55) Beltane Festival

[lisastarr]

Beautiful writing Heather...I appreciate you both and the work you are doing. ❤

[stephendesjardins]

I love the dance that Bret is doing on the head of the cosmic pin. This is why I don't, can't, miss hearing Bret speak.

[snv]

Wish you had addressed NDE, have Fr Robert Spitzer on to talk about how in 80% of blind from birth people who experience NDE, they are sighted during their experience. A blind man survives his NDE and asks the nurse to fetch his dentures which were removed by another nurse in the ER, he explained that the nurse who removed them in the ER placed them in a drawer and to check the drawer that was the same color as the nurses hair(red). Red drawer opened, dentures found.

[nhinja]

"The more you know, the more you realize you do not know."

[StanGraham]

Bret and Heather, you are the most well adjusted & balanced couple I have ever seen: the only drawback is it makes it somewhat challenging for me to focus on your topics! But don’t change whatever you do.

[martinjohnson]

I am so old that when I took Stat 101-102 we actually calculated multiple regression on sample datasets by hand. This was just before handheld calculators, even.

[stephenfox]

1:31:00

Heather, we appreciate you!

Thank you so much for your on going pursuit to help educate.

As a teacher, I strive to be like you and Bret.

That was fantastically written, and much needed for me on the eve of the AP Chem exam.

Thanks!

[Mabaker-bd]

Miraculous healings happen and I myself have only 2 weeks ago had a heart condition healed for which I provide evidence of Drs notes saying this. I’m still in shock and awe at being told I no longer have a heart condition and no longer have to take the heart meds or blood thinners my cardiologist was amazed when he saw the results of my echocardiogram and ecg my cardiologist has discharged me from clinic. I owe my healing to Jesus Christ only. I’m still trying take it in that I’m no longer sick only God could have done this there is no other explanation. Please don’t anyone shout at me as I love you both very much and just wanted to share this with you both.

[mayorofthenonsense]

Interesting metaphor with the (apparent, but not actual) complexity of the modern car: we just had a rental van break down on us due to a minor fault. Now 20 years ago, it would have been possible to at least diagnose the most probable cause of such a minor fault and attempt to remedy it, but being a late model van, the computer is running the show for you, and so it simply flipped the thing into safe mode, gave us a generic warning light, and left us in a situation where even a well equipped veteran roadside mechanic couldn’t figure out what the actual problem was.

Suffice it to say, the layman has been taken out of the equation, so that he can’t make any sense of things, nor himself remedy anything without the intervention of a minority of experts.

[huskypup]

It's great to hear these two call out climate hysteria and the climate grift. Many of us, including Rush Limbaugh, were calling BS on climate hysteria from the get-go back in the 90s.

[gclepine]

I love seeing your dog sleeping in the corner!

[LoganDunbar]

I appreciate the recognition that experiments in a reductionist setting can in fact be counterproductive because it strips away or "controls" the complexity, and thereby any synthesis or emergent properties. I was told over and over to do my work on the simplest most pared down problems and then to transfer them to the more complex setting, which I have done with a nearly 0% success rate, meaning that I got something working beautifully in the simple setting which fails miserably in the actual setting I cared about, and then provides 0 information because the simple example is working. The most important progress I have always made is when dealing with the full problem in all its complexity and being forced to deal with all the interactions that are normally controlled away. This is even more relevant with Curse of Dimensionality problems where just the simple expansion of the state space often makes the entire approach fall over.

[mayorofthenonsense]

We are at the end of an age here. Contemporary belief systems are being questioned and pushed into flux, as people return to the past in their search for meaning and answers.

[frankiesomeone]

Unsolicited advice, but - consider writing the topic of the episode as the first thing in the video's description, so it's directly visible in the subscriptions feed

[ComicComedyClub]

love these guys, watch everyshow, thank you for making me smarter everyday and making me not feel less crazy when I look at the majority of the way people think these days

[OlympiaCHUD]

I remember in the 2000s when all my friends started caring about their personal carbon footprint in weird ways. Lots of mason jars being carried around in that era. I never bought into it. They never seems to understand anything beyond what they personally saw and touched. Sadly, many of them don’t scratch below the surface and I doubt many have had a major update to their thinking in the last 20 years.

Sometimes I argue with people about regenerative agriculture using cattle as a way to sequester more carbon than planting trees and I do this for fun knowing that I’m not likely to change any minds. Although one time on discord I was able to get through to a couple of people and they seemed to change their opinions.


This is a rare treat, but most of the time it’s endless appeals to authority. They throw in a few other fallacies and rhetorical devices to mix things up, but ultimately it’s a bunch of people telling me that the experts say this or the experts say that and that’s all they can ever do.

[christophermarcone]

I have always subscribed to the "both/and" hypothesis . Also find positive results when applying a comprehensive principal/philosophy when analyzing complex systems. great conversation once again! thanks Brett Heather

[...]

A secular religion where Aithesm, Darwinism and Liberalism is it's trinity.

[ofiasdfnosdf]

You will know Him one way or the other.

[hivernante]

Thank you for this conversation! My master's thesis in Theological Studies in 2018 was on the ontology of Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I posit that his evolutionary perspective on the Incarnate in Ignatian spirituality provides a framework for a unifying spiritual practice in our time. Religion and science both explore reality! Teilhard's extraordinary life and exile in China; his service as stretcher bearer in WWI; his work on the sinanthropus project; his exposure to French proponent of the élan vital in evoltuion, Henri Bergson--all influenced his belief in the confluence of the evolution of human consciousness and his understanding of the Universal Christ. If consciousness is prioritized--can it be that matter is subject to entropy, but spirit is not? (As Bret says here, we live in memories). As an evolutionary Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard saw science as a metaphor for religion--our developing complexity through the countless eons of the process of particles' Too much to share here; I am so excited by your presentation and your analysis of the 3rd man concept. Thanks for inspiring me through the Covid years and into our building of resilience for this time of challenge. Teilhard felt that the human task was to love life, to love the universe and to love the 'not-yet'--on the way to the Omega point. Ilia Delio is a great resource : The Not-Yet God