Bret Weinstein Quotes

Strategies evolve within markets and their larger regulatory context.

[T]he boundaries of the evolutionary environment do not stop at the market's edge.

Why is an evolutionary theorist talking about climate change? ...[C]limate change is not really a problem, it's more a symptom of a problem... that caused the financial collapse of 2008, that caused the in the Gulf in 2010, and the ongoing Fukushima disaster starting in March of 2011.

[C]aptive-rodent breeding protocols, designed to increase reproductive output, simultaneously exert strong selection against reproductive senescence and virtually eliminate selection that would otherwise favor tumor suppression. This appears to have greatly elongated the telomeres of laboratory mice. With their telomeric failsafe effectively disabled, these animals are unreliable models of normal senescence and tumor formation. Safety tests employing these animals likely overestimate cancer risks and underestimate tissue damage and consequent accelerated senescence.

(6) In iteroparous organisms selection tends to co-ordinate rates of senescence between tissues, such that no one organ generally limits life-span.

(5) In environments where extrinsically induced mortality is frequent, selection against senescence is comparatively weak as few individuals live long enough to suffer a substantial phenotypic decline. The weaker the selection against senescence, the further the optimal balance point moves toward shorter telomeres and increased tumor suppression. The stronger the selection against senescence, the farther the optimal balance point moves toward longer telomeres, increasing the capacity for tissue repair, slowing senescence and elevating tumor risks.

(4) With that trade-off as a fundamental constraint, selection adjusts telomere lengths—longer telomeres increasing the capacity for repair, shorter telomeres increasing tumor resistance.

(3) These patterns are manifestations of an evolved antagonistic pleiotropy in which extrinsic causes of mortality favor a species-optimal balance between tumor suppression and tissue repair.

We hypothesize that (1) in vertebrates, a telomeric fail-safe inhibits tumor formation by limiting cellular proliferation. (2) The same system results in the progressive degradation of tissue function with age.

Antagonistic pleiotropy, the evolutionary theory of senescence, posits that age related somatic decline is the inevitable late-life by-product of adaptations that increase fitness in early life. That... provides the foundation for an integrative theory of vertebrate that reconciles aspects of the 'accumulated damage' 'metabolic rate', and 'oxidative stress' models.

I believe we have a very broken relationship, at least in the US but probably across the West, where we ask candidates for office about policies that they are going to enact. And it's like a reflex where we want them to tell us 'I'm going to do this this that you want' so they promise us stuff, it doesn't work, they don't have the power to enact it when they get in office or they never meant it in the first place. And we would be much better off, counterintuitive as this sounds, if we assessed their character and their patriotism instead of their policy proposals. My feelin is: I actually don't care what you think of policy. If you impress me, that you're a patriot, that you love the country that I'm a part of, that you want to see it improved, and that your values align with mine so that improved to you also means improved to me, then all I want to know is that you're good at evaluating what policies might get us there.

There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles... and a group encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is... crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.