Discovery Institute ♥ Joe Rogan & Bret Weinstein

The Discovery Institute is thrilled by Rogan and Weinstein, entirely because these conspiracy theorists criticize “Darwinism”. It’s laughable. Rogan is an ignorant meathead, and Weinstein is a weird outsider who profits from babbling nonsense about science. It’s no surprise that the garbage out crowd is in alignment with religious propagandists.

Here’s the bit the DI adores:

Weinstein says he is “sympathetic” to ID but rejects it, which we knew. He says the current version of Darwinism, however, is “broken” and the evolutionary mainstream “lies” to itself, and to us. He alludes to another Darwinian mechanism operating on top of the standard one of random mutation and natural selection:

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. [I believe] that 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. [Emphasis added.]

In another words, I think he’s saying, the other information is in a “meta” relationship to the familiar material genome, the genetic information instantiated in DNA and other known physical epigenetic features in the cell.

Dr. Weinstein is a deep thinker, and I hope I’m not misrepresenting him. But this other information, in his view, is also material in nature, not spiritual — which might be the difference between Weinstein’s thinking and, say, that of Platonist ID scientists like Richard Sternberg and Günter Bechly who posit an “immaterial genome,” occupying that meta role.

Weinstein is not a deep thinker. He’s a disgraced ex-biologist and intellectual charlatan who now pals around with Douglas Murray and Andy Ngo and various other far right wing creeps, promoting ridiculous ideas about vaccines, race, and is an AIDS denialist, while promoting ivermectin during the COVID epidemic. He’s a fringe kook, but the DI is so stupid they can’t tell.

I have no idea what this “kind of information stored in genomes that is not in triplet codon form” that he is referring to is, and I don’t think he knows either. He’s making up strings of words. The DI is right about one thing: it is on a par with “immaterial genome”. It’s all nonspecific nonsense that dumb ol’ Joe Rogan will nod along to.

Weinstein has another tell that exposes his irrelevance.

[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. … There are several different things that are wrong with [Darwinism]. 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. … I am sympathetic to the intelligent design folks, though I do not believe they’re on the right track. I’m open to a universe with intelligence behind it, but I’ve seen no evidence of that universe myself. I’m open to it. If it happens, I will look at it.

Darwinism. Darwinism, Darwinism, Darwinism. Yes, there are things wrong with Darwinism: it’s a 19th century hypothesis composed by a guy who knew nothing about DNA, genes, molecules, or mutation. Show me anyone who proudly announces that he has discovered problems with Darwinism, and I’ll show you a popinjay whose understanding of science ended in 1900.

What is the story we tell about how mutation results in morphological change? I would love to hear it.

And then…

You’ve had Stephen Meyer on. He’s a scientist who’s quite good, and he’s spotted that the mechanism in question [the standard Darwinian one] isn’t powerful enough to explain the phenomena that we swear it explains. And so he’s catching up, but that’s really on the Darwinists for not admitting what they can’t yet explain and pursuing it, which is what they should be doing.

Holy crap. Stephen Meyer is not a scientist. He got an undergrad degree in physics and earth science, decided he knew everything there is to know about biology, and went on to get a master’s and Ph.D. in philosophy. He held jobs in a couple of private Christian colleges before becoming a professional propagandist at the Discovery Institute. And now Weinstein thinks he’s a “quite good” scientist? That tells you all you need to know about Weinstein.

Well, that and vague, handwavey glop about mysterious sources of genetic information, vaccine quackery, racist apologetics, and ill-informed complaints about “Darwinism”. This is a guy whose whole career now is bent on getting on the Joe Rogan show to foment non-controversies.