They gave him a red pill, but he only sucked on it a bit and spat it out ;) Self-responsibility doesn't mix well with either determinism or with social engineering. In any case, yes, they did him a big favor in him move on. When you are at the bottom, the only way is up.
exactly right demigodzilla. He talks in his rubin interview about how Evergreen is not a place to build a good CV at. Then he acts as if his lack of job offers is because of his IDW status. Hmm how about showing publications, showing your students going on to write publications or get into highly competitive graduate programs, or showing you can write a heck of a grant and get a bunch of money for your department. Weinstein is not a good scientist, he has no academic rigor in his thinking or actions.
Such a nihilistic view demigodzilla. He didn't seek it, people became interested in HIM, because (like Peterson) he stood up for what he believed was right. It was the SJWs that created him, not the other way around.
Sounds like pure speculation to me. I think he deserves more credit than that. He comes across as an honest and straight-forward individual, and from all reports both he and his wife lost their long-term roles which they loved as a result. I agree, it's not his own research that got him there, but I think that's irrelevant. However, I really would like to see a book from him on some of these subjects.
Production note for Rebel Wisdom - boost your master audio gain on the final render. It's about 25% less volume than your average TH-cam video and requires me to adjust my device volume settings to hear at an acceptable level.
Volume seems to be a problem on a lot of videos. I have to turn my TV up to 11 - then an advert cones crashing in. TH-cam could give an "automatic volume level" option when a video is uploaded.
I literally cannot watch this video due to this problem - I have my laptop closed with an external monitor at the back of my desk, it's not practical to bring it closer or open it and I don't have an external speaker to plug into it. With 99% of TH-cam videos this setup is not a problem.
Mixing vox tracks manually, then adding a compressor to normalize video wide vocal gain and finally a multipressor on the master to maximize total gain would fix this without much coloring or white noise. You don't want full dynamic range on a streaming site where most people are on mobile. More publishers should look at their audio processing chain because I see this problem a lot too.
Octopus On Fire I agree. I think it may have to do with his soft spoken attitude. In today’s age of infotainment, people are raised to think you need to be abrasive to be genuine. That isn’t to say you can’t be. It’s just that Weinstein will likely be remembered as great rather than make current waves. I for one love the guy. His intellect is superb and his ideas are on the frontier. We are lucky.
Octopus On Fire ... nah that’s because you don’t understand the substance of his evolutionary arguments and are easily impressed by superficial appearances
Or, maybe, he is not that brilliant. He seems to overcomplicate some things but does not understand some very simple things. At least that was my impression when watching his "debate" with Dawkins.
Bret W’s ability to articulate information in what I would term ‘the jewel bearing layer’ is amazing. Not too abstract, not too concrete and no sentences stuffed with bla bla words, which is the case with most of us. Even Zizek loves to bable before shooting out intellectual bullets. I am deeply impressed by Bret🙏🏻
@@gunnarmuhlmann Sure, In the conversation with Dawkins did you hear the part about mathematical modeling ? he doesn't trust math because after all asymptotes ! I kid you not. Bret's followers ar victim of what is now as pop pseudo science. He often mangles the science behind what he is talking about. I wonder how Dawson got suckered onto a stage with Bret. Take Covid for instance. Compare what he is saying about covid and the vaccine to what the people that are actually doing the science are saying. Mathematical models are so universally understood and accepted with the understanding of the caveats that using the idea the they can be trusted or useful because of " asymptotes !" Let me just assure you that asymptotes are as much a part of what makes Mathematical modeling and our understanding of biology as they are part of math. . This kind of defense of of his assertion is catastrophic. And Dawson was obliviously perplexed by a lot of what Bret had to say. Any idea that Bret had a good day is bizarre. And Bret has crashed and burned so many times and there are so many objections by the science community that he carrier has come to be centered around deep state conspiracies. That the Science community rejects so much of what he says is the proof of a wider conspiracy again him and the (his) truth... But it his truth is not the science communities. His carrier as a biologist or geneticist is ruined by a series of devastating mistakes that involve him going outside of his wheel house. And I assume that it was happening before he went to Evergreen as evergreen is scientific Siberia.
@@timeWaster76 Thank you for your answer! As far as I can follow it, it gives absolute meaning. I think Bret W. got traumatized by Evergreen State College protests and as a result regressed to some kind of paranoia conspiracy apophenian mode of thinking.
Jung's concept of the shadow that Jordan Peterson emphasizes. "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
@@myothersoul1953 I think you mean it's not directly empirically testable. Jung's conception of the Shadow was argued for with scientific principles. The psyche itself being a relatively closed system governed by the universal laws such as the conservation of energy, homeostasis and cause and effect. Remember that the Shadow is conceived of as an aspect of the human psyche. Depth psychology was always an attempt to study the human soul from the scientific perspective rather than the moral and intuitive. That Jung did his best to integrate both perspectives hardly makes him unscientific.
@@rumination2399 I remember that the concept of the Shadow, or the ego or the id, is not falsifiable. Such concepts don't make predictions that would put them at risk of being wrong. One might even say they are shadow conceptions, they look like something until you shine the light of reason on them then they disappear.
In the beginning, he attacks New Atheism as being against the natural evolutionary process, and religion as being part of the natural evolutionary process, but then at the end say that we need to take our machinery out of the evolutionary game and put it to some better purpose. Isn't this what the New Atheists are arguing?
I don't normally come in with comments such as this, but I'm so, so happy to hear this conversation about how to approach religion. I feel much more open to questions of the Divine, I used to be a Dawkins atheist. These ideas about the IDEAS about God which open us up to better inner and outer lives are having a genuinely beneficial effect on me and (therefore) my marriage and family. I used to be such a tedious atheist.
That's not what Weinstein is saying. He's not suggesting there's any literal truth in religious beliefs. They are silly but may have been useful e.g. by giving a tribe a psychological advantage when they were subduing/annihilating another tribe.
Aside from his updating of Dawkins's idea, his bridging of Harris and Peterson's views are elegant. It seems that this is almost a bottleneck, an 'eye of the needle', through which to travel and hopefully have far better conversations in this arena.
Goshawk, Weinstein is not saying that religion was beneficial because it was like a club for beating the other tribes. He said it could make people more successful in their community because their better behavior (morals) garnered respect. In other words, while God (or gods) may not exist, trying to live up to some religion based guidelines can work because it spawns behavior that moves us along the evolution of human culture. If we zoom out a bit farther, believing in logic and science can be seen as similarly moving us along an evolutionary path, even though many specific scientific concepts have and will continue to fall by thecwayside. In that respect, belief in all widely held scientific concepts would be a kind of religious perspective, and questioning established concepts is heretical. I wish that more materialist reductionist atheists were more aware and critical of the religiosity found throughout the sciences.
@@bitdropout Yeah, but calling them silly also misses his point. The notion of each of us having a 'self' that 'chooses' our behaviors is silly. There's no shred of evidence. Smart people have to make up complex system that redefine "choice" in order to make it 'true." But it isn't silly that many smart people think they have an inner 'chooser' who picks from a selection of actions and feelings and could have chosen otherwise.
Hey if you're open minded, i recommend checking out the blog "History for Atheists" by an atheist with an interest in history, Tim O'Neill (he references up to date scholarly work). It might help people to shed a lot of their anger towards religion (which would be justified if some of the "history" debunked by that blog is true).
Two things - it seems that some of the interactions Bret mentions are NOT in Pangburn's uploaded video, which seems to be missing sections - does anyone have the audio of the event? Also: just uploaded - another interview with Bret Weinstein, 'Jordan Peterson, gender and ideology' - th-cam.com/video/qR5yN2G4h54/w-d-xo.html
Overall I completely agree with Bret's assertion that belief in religion is biologically adaptive and should be studied that way. I even suspect it's not just religion, but ideology; complexes of ideas, values, and statements about the nature of the world. My one issue is this. There are fields of study that essentially derive from changing the resolution at which smaller phenomena are observed. For example, the resolution of biology ranges from the nucleotide pair to ecosystems, but underlying that is the world of atoms and particles, which is often not a helpful one from which to understand cells, let alone animals and ecosystems; we condense the information they provide into new constructs like "nucleotide pair," "DNA strand," "cell," or "animal." These larger concepts serve as shorthand for the activity of the atoms and particles that comprise them. They are not independent of the atoms and particles, but we need not always consider atoms and particles in studying them. Another example is the disciplines of neuropsychology and cognition. We know that cognition corresponds to the activity of neurons, but often refer to "modules" or systems of the mind that govern different adaptive behaviors. These modules are sometimes wholly conceptual; we conceive of them because we know from experience that they exist, as in the case of the "theory of mind" module which allows one to understand the mind state of someone else. Though we can't always map their their neuropsychological underpinnings, it is still often useful to study the mind in terms of these modules. So I don't understand why there must be a debate over extended phenotype versus meme. It seems to me that the "world" of meme can be conceived totally in harmony with that of natural biological selection, but existing at a level of magnification that need not always reference it. We could study memes as if they were their own replicators, understanding their evolution and the traits of the most successful ones, while holding in the back of our minds that they are extended phenotypes that serve the reproductive interests of the organisms that employ them. The major thing I think Dawkins might not like about unifying the ideas in this way is that it threatens to render memes as a nonscientific idea. Instead the study of meme becomes the study of human culture, which exists at a magnification at which evolutionary biology is the cause of everything but too cumbersome to invoke all the time.
Dawkin's is behaving like the priests he's spent his career criticising. Scientists never ask what if I'm right but what if I'm wrong. The idea that there is an end to progress is pessimistic thinking.
I found Dawkins was reluctant to engage in serious dialectic with Brett's ideas on applying Dwarwinism to human evolution. His tone was unenthusiastic from the get go. Obnoxious even.
When Bret brought the idea on applying Darwinism to human evolution, I immediately thought of Hitler... Perhaps that is why Dawkins may be reluctant to pursue this line of thinking.
What really is there to talk about? Dawkins' main point is that you should believe only what is true. Weinstein's main point is that what is not true can still be useful (what he calls "metaphorical truth"). Dawkins' point makes us all atheists, because nobody can know whether there is a god. Weinstein's point does nothing to this argument. Religion surely can be useful to humanity. It can also be (and is) incredibly harmful to humanity. There might even be a philosophy that provides just the usefulness without the harm of religion, but there Bret is, arguing for religion. Just a side node: The Weinstein brothers are pretty desperate for attention lately. I've listened to Eric on Joe Rogan, misrepresenting Dawkins' position in an attempt to make his brother look better. He tried to paint Dawkins' position as fundamentally anti-religious. It's actually a bit sad to see this behavior in them.
dunce funce, everyone uses the word "progress" to mean a positive progression, but demonstrating or even logically making the case for "positive" has never been done to most people's satisfaction, except for widely held ideas about morality that came out of the many world relgins. Because Weinstein is I think a materialist, he needs a secular, scientific ethical system in order to map out a plan for how wrest control of our evolutionary future, but good luck doing that in the absence of spiritual beliefs.
Bret and Jordan need to go a whole lot further with their arguments to overcome the fact that people are obsessively believing in and organizing their lives around a set of extremely violent bronze age stories. If there were a cult around Odysseus's adventures as told in The Odyssey, which is a much less violent story than the one about the volcano god, they would not be held up as reasonable. No one says The Odyssey is "metaphorically true" without justifiably getting laughed at. The old testament is a series of extremely violent, ugly stories, and the new testament, while not as violent, is no less warped and twisted along with being extremely trite. How anyone can call belief in that positive without first having been indoctrinated young is beyond me and needs extraordinary evidence to be convincing.
Couldn't agree more. It's sad how many people willingly buy into their "metaphorical truth" (= useful beliefs which cannot be reliably pinned down) crap.
@@Luftgitarrenprofi if they simply called them what they really are (potentially) useful lies, it would be far easier to get on board. but petersen is obviously a christian and he has called himself "deeply religious". bret is simply a spineless kowtower
You could see the OT in terms of Jews trying to get the people under control by means of reward and punishment. Its ultimate goal to overthrow all that is not Jewish. You could see the NT in terms of Romans trying to get the people under control by telling them that the real kingdom is in heaven, turn the other cheek, give Caesar what belongs to Caesar. Its goal: to get sheepish followers. If you look at how Constantine made Christianity a state religion and what texts he used. It is clear that he wanted servants, slaves really, to do his bidding without too much questioning. Whenever 'religious' ideas are sold as good ideas, you should look at what the 'politicians' want.
@@sarsaparillasunset3873 If it were a general principle or an accepted fact about the world being described to me, then I might agree with you that it's my responsibility to educate myself. However, what Weinstein and Peterson are spouting is opinion and I'm merely saying that they have so far failed to convince me of their view. And apparently I'm not alone in that. Note that if it were a new, previously unknown fact about the world, then it would very definitely be the proponent's responsibility to convince the rest of us. This is a fundamental part of science, and usually done in journals with data. Sam Harris is not an idol of mine, although I'm jealous of the fact that he can get up on stage and be so eloquent and all that crap in front of a large audience. I would bet that the average atheist is not smarter than the average theist, which is why theism surprises me.
Weinstein's adaptation argument (from a non-practitioner of religion) is like saying "It's important to be a great basketball player. In order to be a great basketball player you need to practice. Everyone knows this." but then they themselves never practice basketball. When asked "why not?" they say "if I play it on Playstation (in my head or on a screen) that's close enough." The question is "is it?"
@@RebelWisdom I don't really believe an evolutionary biologist can really comment on the utility of religion. It is interesting to hear his opinion, but I think it is a little out of his depth. I respect Bret tremendously tho.
To run with the basketball analogy, I think what Bret is saying is that from an evolutionary point of view that being a good basketball player isn't the goal, but rather the goal is to win the game of basketball. Practicing basketball and becoming a great player is only one path towards winning the game. Practicing might the most ethical way to win the game, but it certainly isn't the only way to win. You could cheat, or you could even change the rules of the game. I think Bret's hypothesis, as I understand it, is that Religion is one pathway towards winning the game of evolution, but it isn't the only pathway. Religion under some circumstances is the ethical way to play the game, but some times it's used as a way to cheat. If we have a better understanding of what function Religion plays in the game, it will be easier to understanding when it's being used ethically or not.
Thanks for this. I was left confused by the conversation between Bret and Richard. This has helped to clarify his ideas for me. If I didn't mistake him he is saying that cultural artefacts like religion can be understood in both memetic and genetic evolution. Religion (and other cultural artefacts) offer benefit to the species, not just to themselves, thus they are not just a mind virus.
Bret - Publish! So people can cite you and this gets into the profession meme-net. Convincing Dawkins won't work, his legacy is set on not changing his mind. It's just natural.
This is so amazing to listen to. I am from Seattle which is right north of the Evergreen State College where Bret is from. I remember watching the evergreen protests on my local news and being absolutely appalled at what was happening! I was a junior at university and was watching similar events happen at my college, and it was wild. Now, thanks to those protests, I get to watch a brilliant mind-one I was so close to but never would have heard of!-discuss such deep topics with some of the worlds most famous and brilliant people. I guess I owe the social justice bullies a Thanks for making him and Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Haidt and the IDW famous. Cool!
To Whom It May Concern - I have just started watching your TH-cam channel and want to say thanks for your programming. The debate concerning human evolutionary concepts between evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Bret Weinstein has raised an ethical/moral question specific to generic engineering (GE). Allow me to share my thoughts: I am left wondering if GE will become a standard practice amongst the medical and scientific community with the aim of direct human intervention - i.e. by not allowing the randomized freedom of past evolutionary intervention to take its course over time and space - and instead direct the outcome of human genetics for economical, political and supremacy aims. On another matter, will GE be reviewed in the far distant future as the “intelligent design” underpinning human evolution or will Darwinism evolutionary biology still hold true to the human species in the aftermath of genetic engineering. Could both aruments be debated on your channel? Kind regards.
@@MrMadalien that would also describe the Deepak Chopra type of "intelligence" though, right? I don't see much intelligence in mixing up the _is_ question (answered purely by scientific means) and the _ought_ question (answered by political or philosophical arguments, of course with scientific help).
In the pursuit of truth, humanity has had to shed the veil of religious dogma that stood in the way of pursuing truth. This is where Dawkins stopped. But if one truly wants to pursue truth, one also has to go one step further and acknowledge the evolutionary benefits religion has had to humanity.
You might want to weigh that "benefit" against religion's drawbacks, before you try to argue that religion has a (net) positive evolutionary effect. I'm not even sure why you would. We do lots of stuff to our gene pool that has a detrimental effect, like giving sick people antibiotics. If you are all in favor of evolution, we should let the weak die off, to make room for the strong.
@@yourinternetfriend6778 If it is in the context of the human species and the definition of "truth" you are referring to is "a transcendent fundamental or spiritual reality" then it can be.
86% of the world's population is religious of some variety. It continues to exist for a reason and those 5.8B religious humans survived for a reason. Religion is so ubiquitous that it had to have played a survival role. I'm an atheist / agnostic but I can understand how and why religion arose and persisted for all of human civilization. I also hope we'll eventually move beyond it for at this point, it and the imperatives it give us may be maladaptive given the reality we face of our population growth, resource use and the threat from climate change.
@@susanl3510 I think the reason it's continued to survive is due to human mental weakness. Now, you can argue that mental weakness has evolutionary benefits, and perhaps it does. But I think if religion has played any role at all, it's been a detrimental one, and your point about ubiquity is simply a logical fallacy. Vestigial tails are even more ubiquitous in humans and serve no function whatever as far as we know.
Religion must have aided survival at one point in our evolution for it to have survived until today. It may already be like a vestigial tail simply because it no longer benefits our survival -- in fact, I would suggest it is a hindrance to our survival due to the way it justifies continued exploitation of resources and high reproduction when those threaten our survival. Tails in our evolutionary ancestors did benefit them, but when they no longer did, they lost function and now are only visible in us via an x-ray or in the embryo. One day, religion will be vestigial. Modern civilization with science as an explanatory tool has only been present for a couple of hundred years. Not enough time on the evolutionary scale to jettison religion completely, even given how fast social evolution is, but it's happening slowly as religions like Christianity become secularized and lose utility. It's happening to Islam today, but this has been even more recent so there is a lot of pushback. As long as religion still provides some utility for humans, it will persist. It clearly does, given that 84% of humans still adhere to a religion.
The birthrates are much higher, community and family cohesion and trust are stronger if society shares a common morality. It also orients everyone in a similar direction and there are less petty disagreements over what is right and wrong which makes relationships more functional. But as we all know evolutionary fitness comes down largely to birthrates and the most religious have about 80% more kids than the least religious. That is kinda Brett's point, culture/religion have big implications for our current evolutionary fitness.
"New Atheism" is not a label that public figures like the late Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and others call themselves. It is more a caricature that other parties have used to describe this particular movement of writers and intellectuals who have become prominent in the last fifteen, twenty years. There is nothing essentially "new" about "new atheism" other than that it is recent.
The claims of religion being refereed to as untrue but useful are spurious and not at all demonstrable. Its amazing how easily we dismiss things like miracles and Revelation as simply metaphorical. I deeply appreciate Brets work here on many levels but he and all who hold his position are absolutely missing the lions share of the wisdom religion brings... that there is God, there is soul and there is a much larger picture and context with which to evaluate our lives.
To my understanding Dawkins objects to the evolutionary natural fallacy, " _because it comes from nature it is good_ ", and in particular to the weak version of it, " _because it comes from nature (has evolved) it is unavoidable_ ". That was IMHO the reason for Dawkins' hesitation to use evolution in political debates. I don't think for a second he objects to search for (scientific) truth. Yeah, nowadays one has to qualify the word truth, right?
In this same video Bret is stressing the difference between "is, should be, and can be". He says people usually misinterpret evolutionary psychology as a "if it IS, then it SHOULD be" argument.
He's not saying it's "good" because it's natural. He's arguing that it "worked." It achieved greater survivability. It's an "is" not an "ought" argument. There may have been other paths evolution could have taken but for humans in that environment at that point in time, religion enabled the lineages to survive more effectively. Hence, they and it was preserved over time.
@@susanl3510 Whether religion achieved greater survivability is an unanswered scientific question and I don't see its relevance in a political debate about religion even if it were answered. Given that it is unanswered, it really should not be used at all in political or policy debates. We can (and possibly should) study the psychological effects of religion and cults on humans, which may be relevant in policy discussions. For this we do not even need having answered the question of ancient survivability.
I believe there is some evidence that people with religious affiliation attempt / commit suicide less frequently than those who are unaffiliated. Also some research that those with religious affiliation less likely to engage in criminal behavior. Within developed nations, those reporting a religious affiliation were healthier and had slightly increased longevity. What that suggests about the evolution of religion, I don't know but there appear to be some benefits to membership in a religion today.
@@susanl3510 And there is some research that prison inmates are much more likely to be religious than non-criminals (in the US). And people in non-religious countries have (much) higher standards of living and are happier than in religious countries (the US is somewhat an outlier). And... In all cases, correlation does not equal causation. All this makes my point though. We do not know and it is entirely irrelevant whether religion has a lineage survivability value. We do know that a sense of community is good for humans and religion can serve to have one (which can explain the effects you have mentioned). We do know that religion has very recently infected hundreds of thousands of children with AIDS. Even that could have a positive effect on lineage survivability, so it may be in support of Weinsteins hypothesis and it doesn't make a difference either way: infecting children with AIDS is a terrible deed.
Curious how many people are coming to what is essentially the same conclusion about where mankind is headed and how we might take control of that future, but they're doing so through such different places and perspectives.
@Morgan Allen - Yes, much of evolutionary fitness comes down to birthrates and quite obviously atheist don't have as many kids. So in that sense it creates unfitness in society. Most atheist adopt a revised protestant morality, where people have rights and are to be treated justly- that is basically humanism. It is protestantism without God and with loosened sexual restrictions. Of course, these are all formerly Christian countries, so it is merely a continuation of that culture, except it is less fit in an evolutionary sense. There are other issues with atheism. It is not just a lack of kids, but it makes life purposeless and meaningless, so that can't be helpful from a fitness perspective. It also decreases time preferences, whereas Christianity pushes time preferences out as far as possible. I think the time preference issue creates a lot of unfitness as well. It also creates a lot of division and disunity between the remaining Christians and the new atheists, because they have different standards concerning sex and marriage. You also get lower quality breeding and child rearing, and you lower productivity and work ethic. That's a lot of negatives.
@Morgan Allen It was Bret's contention during the Dawkins debate that the fitness problem pertaining to celibacy would be resolved if one viewed the issue through the lens of lineage selection. I'm not entirely sure how compelling I find this argument, but I don't know enough about lineage selection nor have I thought about the problem very deeply. Regarding religion as promoting social behavior, it seems analogous to tribalism or even a sort of tribalism, although clearly it can cause tribal infighting. Of course, will there is clearly a reciprocal relationship between tribe members, there is also competition within tribes for mating rights. It may not be easy for certain individuals to compete in terms of physical fitness or ability to procure material wealth directly; yet, if those individuals are able to game a social/ideological system to gain status, suddenly their odds of passing on their genes has risen drastically. One modern-day example of this is men and women going to church to meet prospective romantic partners. If there are potential mates looking for someone who shares the same values and traditions, then there is an obvious incentive to join that tradition and imbibe those values; both families will adhere to the same values and traditions, and such cohesion is advantageous both for the couple and their future offspring.
@Morgan Allen - I would say that, these days, the more intelligent you are the more time you are likely to spend in education and the more you will be socialized into the atheistic/pure materialists worldview. So ironically, we have a system where we take are most intelligent people and socialize them into a new worldview and culture that makes it very unlikely that they will have children. So atheism is actually giving us less children and making us less intelligent at the same time because it is working the hardest at removing the genes for intelligence from our population. As you probably know intelligence is close to 80% genetically determined in adults, and most of the other 20% is basic nutrition and absence of disease. So you may think that all religious claims are false, and I would disagree with you on that. What is true however, is that atheism makes both groups and individuals less fit by making them less likely to have offspring and in a host of other ways, and that is what Bret Weinstein is on about. The irony is that in the sense of evolutionary fitness, Christianity is the most successful worldview we have seen and it is also humane at the same time. That by itself is an amazing thing. Hopefully you have read Jonathan Haidt book "The Righteous Mind," which is amazing and also touches on this subject. A lot of people are figuring out that we have lost something pretty essential to human group function and fitness. Jordan Peterson touches on this in a weird Jungian way as well and several others too.
@Morgan Allen - Well Mr Allen, the reason I mentioned that adult intelligence is about 80% genetically influenced was to make the point that the atheistic worldview makes us dumber as our smartest women are in University and high-end careers during the best childbearing years of their life and consequently have either very few kids or none at all. So you might also know that intelligence has a significant x-linked component, which is why the mother's intelligence is more determinative of the child's intelligence and especially so in the case of a male child. This is also the main reason that the IQ bell curves are so different for men and women, with the men's curve being boarder and flatter and the female curve being concentrated in the middle. Women get two X-chromosomes and the intelligence component of that averages itself out between the two copies (one from dad and one from mom.) However, for us poor men, it is much easier to hit a homerun and to strike out because we only have one copy and there is nothing to average. That is part of the reason why male geniuses have a 4 to 1 or greater advantage over women and we have a similar advantage with imbeciles. Yes, I agree that muslims certainly have the evolutionary edge in childbearing and that is one reason why England must either re-Christianize or become Islamic. You'll have to compete with them or disappear as is the ethic of natural selection. You probably also know that Islam has some rather serious issues as well. First, cousin marriage suppresses the IQ around 8-10 points, so you have a less mentally capable population and they also have serious birth defects at a 10x or higher rate. They are less open which makes them less creative and inventive, and they tend to create very ridge, unstable, and authoritarian societies, which sap innovation, are more corrupt and decrease cooperation. There are other issues as well, the polygamy creates a horde of restless young men without a stake in society and cousin marriage creates additional complex social issues related to families becoming perhaps all important to the point where nepotism becomes the norm. So on the group level, Muslim societies are nowhere near as competitive as Christian ones. The problem is the Christian ones have become less Christian and therefore less fit, so yes Islam is now winning the fitness game. We have really only been discussing the evolutionary fitness of religion and not ultimately whether a God does exist or the material world is all there is. That was the scope of video above more or less. But yes I do think God exists and I see a lot of evidence for the supernatural in general. So I find the atheistic and purely materialistic worldview lacking. To me the fitness of Christianity and it's moral code is evidence of it's truth. That is what C.S Lewis found as well. I stole that from him.
If you are talking about "New Atheism" you are incorrect. The current state of New Atheism is the result of its take over by Social Justice, which is the real mind virus that makes us unfit. However, Dawkins had no part in that. Furthermore, what Social Justice did to New Atheism was not notable or special; it was just another example of what Social Justice had done many times before, and has done many times since.
I'm curious why religions that are thousands of years old hold so much weight when our evolution has been going on for so much longer. 4000 years is a little blip in our history.
The book "Sapient" gives the most convincing explanation for religion to date. The main value of religion was an ability to unite huge amounts of people and make them consider each other their own.
Dawkins is at his best in the written medium, while he has a charasmatic stage presence it's not an arena in which he is particularly open to challenge and critique. I'd really like to see some sort of collaborative text discissing the ideas from this talk in more detail, either as as a series of back-and-forth emails or perhaps something more definitive. It seems Brett W has a lot to contribute to further developing the ideas laid out in Dawkins' classic work and a mainstream print publication would really be the best outlet. These public discussions are great but (especially considering the poor recording) i doubt they will stand the test of time or reach the sort of audience that the ideas Brett has been developing deserve.
I watched this again the other day and I thought Dawkins was completely dismissing what Bret was saying with his own well thought out arguments. Bret just thinks he's right. All the time.
I find it very difficult to listen to Bret, I just zone out from his low energy, deep, monotonous delivery. Ears pricked up around 16:10 - 19:15 when he started talking about "evolution's purpose". What does he mean by purpose? Purpose isn't required to explain anything. But maybe he explained this and I wasn't concentrating.
@@fealdorf wow this was a blast from the past! I've since listened to Brett discuss free will with Sam Harris - the man appears to be a confused mess! I'm not so generous about his use of "purpose" - it's deliberate. He clearly has some beliefs that are getting in the way of his science.
Thank you for this. I've been struggling with how to reconcile religion and evolution, and Bret Weinstein has really helped. Yes, it is factually wrong but metaphorically true (in the sense that there is wisdom in those stories) and has been evolutionarily adaptive. Forests and trees is the right explanation for the problems with new atheism and its inability to understand religion's place in human evolution. I'm an atheist / agnostic but not someone who denies the utility of religion for human civilization as a whole, and for individuals in particular. That said, it also provides justification for the most horrific behavior. BUT: if religion didn't offer some kind of evolutionary benefit, it wouldn't have been reproduced over the long term and be so ubiquitous. I don't find solace in religion, but I understand how it provides not only solace for beings aware of their own mortality, but it also provides rules and incentive for humans to treat each other in a way that allows us to live in larger and larger groups. However I do think religion will be and needs to be surpassed by some kind of ethical system / morality that doesn't rely on the supernatural to justify or explain but is informed by science and morality. This will free us from the grind of evolution's more simplistic drives for mere survival and allow us to make use of our amazing brain for more than just ways to outcompete each other. I do agree that we need to surpass religion because we have reached a point where our evolutionary inheritance has created a world that is a threat to our long-term survival. Plus, as Bret said, we truly are the most complex and amazing beings in the known universe and are made for more than what our biological inheritance has bequeathed us up till now. So much goodness in one short video...
Nice post. I think finding a new system is going to be incredibly hard to even BEGIN let alone complete. Just look at the works, can you really see a group of advanced minds coming together to give it ago? Unless you usual get together like Peterson, pinker, Harris, Weinstein brothers, and few more but I don’t see it happening. We will only wake up (on mass) once it’s too late. It’s like the damn matrix movie right at the end neo being told by the head dude that he’s seen many Neos. As to try say, it’s always the same cycle.
Human minds are built to adopt belief systems. We are made to “believe” and to “share beliefs” groups who have the same belief system work more harmoniously within that group system. Conflict arises when there is divergence of thought/belief. That is why freedom of speech and scientific inquiry is so important - to challenge the tyrannical orthodoxy of the day.
I find it dishonest on the part of atheists to point the finger at religion for causing horrible occurrences in history, when most dictatorships of the 20th century which claimed literally 100ths of million's of lives were by nature not religious. Evil lies in human nature. If anything religion provides a framework from which a stable society can be built. All systems deteriorate and get corrupt over time, religions are no exception from that. Pointing out corruption in religion is a truism and doesn't negate the value of it.
That is in fact the hypothesis for how religion began. To assist growing population from small hunter gathers of maybe a dozen people who practiced rough forms of animism, to large tribes more or less stationary. This is where we find proto-religious development, worship of ancestral spirits. When larger groups of people started grouping together, natural rules if engagement suffered due to a disconnect with responsibility, a previous reliance of small group members who needed to consider each other for survival... But with large groups this gets lost, you can take advantage now of a member and not suffer the consequences as one would in small groups who depended deeply on this reciprocity. proto-religions seemed to develop from a need to establish a larger notion of guidance to the group that added coherence. Respecting great powerful ancestors was their solution.
@@34672rr next time you want to say that people who have religious ideas or beliefs are insane, just say so. Stop tap dancing around your own biases. It makes you look intellectually dishonest.
What an amazing thinker Bret is. “Our Concious minds need to re author our unconscious purpose” I appreciate his outlook with regard to this. No one has proposed yet how we are to do this exactly but I agree that this is the next step for us.
Read on Gurdjeff, he is all about becoming aware of your automatisms, and re author them. There's also Jungian psychology, that is the exploration of the Shadow part of yourself.
Meditation. That is what path to "enlightenment" actually means. It's exactly what Buddism was all about but then they realized that ultimate purpose is freedom from all that. So there is some value in some religions after all. The problem is when religion looses it's leader things go directly south.
Yes. For instance, it's interesting, the level they're on, talking about how we need to reign in our instinctive desires and consciously act in the world. This is The Chariot, or Chet, and it's only the end of the first row of the Tarot. There are two more. And FYI, to anyone who is like "what does psychology of religion have to do with tarot": it's all the same thing, folks... Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, it's all the same psychology.
Having watched full debate, I too was surprised by Dawkins' reluctance to discuss certain topics- especially given his enthusiasm in ridiculing religious beliefs (BTW I share Peterson's view that Dawkins does not understand religion at all.) and because as I would dare to say "bad Darwinism" of e.g. genocide is somehow akin to "bad Darwinism" of eliminating religious beliefs in favor of "atheism". It is understandable why Bret didn't push Dawkins any further on the topi, but it would be really interesting to dig into it
I'd be careful with citing Peterson on who does and doesn't understand religion. According to him, he also doesn't understand religion, because it's all so damn complicated (not really).
@@yourinternetfriend6778 Then he knows his limitations. Do you prefer a person who simplifies everything down to a mind virus when that's not an appropriate description or someone who says they don't understand it fully?
Peterson talks about the new invented religion that I call "Petersonism." Dawkins understands common, mainstream real religion very well, and better than most.
This interview is another great example of how intelligent and articulate both the Weinstein brothers are. Anyone that has the balls and the ammunition to come onto a stage with Dawkins and nail him to the cross of contradiction of his own making, is someone to be respected...and maybe even a little feared. In 200 years im sure that many of the IDW will be seen in the same light as Kant, Jung, Nietzsche, and Einstein - Revolutionary minds all.
Does Brett pretend to not acknowledge how virus have existed for thousands of years, and this doesn't mean they must have a necessary utility for humans to benefit from. Then why does he force this onto memes?
Biological viruses do not exist based on utility to man. They exist to spread their own genes. And they do, and it works, so they stay as long as they can.
It’s a good point, but Weinstein would probably say if nearly all humans had a virus, then it’d be likely that the virus has some positive effect. Especially if this virus regularly caused the humans to expend a bunch of energy. He basically says if something regularly causes an organism to use energy, and the organism’s family tree shows no attempt to evolve an immunity to it and ditch it all together, the thing probably has a positive effect.
Speaking of "going back down the branch" I think it would be of great interest to all to have a Rebel Wisdom exploration of Dawkin's and Weinstein's key assertion that the vast assortment of complex living organisms as we know them here on Earth appeared out of dead, inorganic matter aided only by time and random chemical and physical mutations.
Bret wants to assert that religion is an adaptation, but Dawkins’ concept of memes is a hindrance to this - he therefore needs to try and trash the idea of memes propagating/evolving independently from genes. Unfortunately his reasoning doesn’t work and just comes across as a lame attempt to try and make the facts fit his pet theory.
Right. I'm surprised and somewhat dismayed that more people can't see this for what it is. I like Bret, but he is making such a fundamental error it's kind of baffling. I enjoy watching everything IDW because it is a group of likable people discussing interesting ideas (sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes completely nonsensical) , but the political nature of the groups inception, and the inevitable tribalism of its followers, leaves me feeling like the truth is less of a goal here than the construction of yet another echo-chamber. People are just eating this up. Dawkins apparently got OWNED. And Dawkins needed this apparently because of his strident anti-Brexit position. The politicization of biology isn't just happening from the Left it seems...
Well put! I quite like Bret, though I’m more impressed by his brother. Interesting to get AIUs take on Bret, it’s hilarious and mercilessly critical, and it gives a different take on his character, which is insightful I think. I’m not quite sure what you meant about Dawkins ‘needing it’? Yes it seems he has an anti Brexit and anti Trump leaning for sure
@@paddydiddles4415 I'll check out AIU's take, should be entertaining. Eric definitely has some strong ideas,, really interesting guy for sure. About the 'needing it' comment, I was just referring to a few comments I've seen on other videos - the usual partisan nonsense, not worth going into really.
He seems like an apologist to me. Ofcourse Dawkins is against Brexit, because it was an idea sold through lies, and the gullible believed it. Likewise, I also think, he is anti-Trump and for the same reason that Trump is build up by lies. I fear that Brets line of reasoning will in fact bring about the exact thing he claims he wants to prevent.
Gonzo the great ... Bret seems to think that if the whole world educates itself in the nuances of evolution theory then this could be a central strategy for stopping conflict/genocide? Firstly that doesn’t seem likely and secondly even if people were more educated; they wouldn’t adopt his thesis because it doesn’t ring true ie mimetic theory is real and group selection theory is full of holes. As far as your comments regarding Trump and Brexit - not really. There are in fact genuine and extensive reasons for supporting Brexit and also Trump
Bret, In the original discussion with Dawkins, there's a part missing where you explain senescence. Would you mind repeating this point or going into it in more on your channel ? Also, can you explain explain lineage selection ( you brought it up during the talk with Dawkins ).
Bret gets stuck in a dead end, very revealingly, at around 15:00 when he begins talking about some kind of "noble" purpose that we must strive towards by recognizing the "negative" evolutionary forces tugging on us (this is all paraphrased). Is this the way an evolutionary biologist speaks? What's all this talk of good and wholesome goals for humanity? Bret, I believe, is an atheist, so where did this eschatology come from? Watch him fumbling when he begins that line of thought. But wait - maybe he is developing some kind of religious sensibility. The fallacy of Bret's proposed program to interfere in our cultural evolution, is that there is no way to execute such a program that doesn't fall afoul of an elitist / fascist assault on our civilization. This business is way too ethereal and complex for the man in the street to sign on to. How then to make an intervention - and who will make the intervention? None of these questions are addressed by Bret - and hence, I see his self-confidence in this matter as being arrogant and ill-conceived. Forgive my clumsy prose, dear reader - I just wanted to get this out as soon as I listened to the interview.
Yeah, I got that same sense of elitism that has so often been used to crush the will of the many with the notion of "don't worry, we know what's good for you".
I don't really agree. I can't speak to Bret's supposed motives here but as you pointed out at 15:00 when he discusses cultural evolution.. the point is that we *already* have so much in our society that pulls us against our own base instincts which we can attribute to memes & extended phenotypes. We already do this and will continue to do this, somewhat at random, depending on the usefulness of a behavior. I don't see how it is a religious argument to suggest that we look for the mechanisms wherein we might discover important memetic systems that could be considered evolutionarily relevant in regards to (group) behavioral patterns and have repeated all throughout human history. He's not saying "this is true, therefore we ought to.." he's *asking* , as all science does, "this is potentially the road left unexplored, therefore we ought to research it one way or another and at least see if it's wrong or not" Why is that so controversial? It sounds like atheist fragility when people misconstrue someone's general hypothesis about the emergence of religion being particularly useful to humanity in biological terms as arrogance. If it's so egregious a claim, why can't we prove it wrong? It would only benefit you to discover Bret Weinstein to be a failed theorist at best if you're that suspicious of him.
I had kind of the same feeling about his argument. But, you don't need to get too angry about it, ideas spread and evolve step by step, and even if I don't totally agree with Bret's argument I do can see nevertheless the opening of new directions and ideas, and I think that's the important part (you can't dismiss, say Copernicus, for not having produced a complete Newtonian explanation of the universe). I feel Bret's idea is more interesting and takes into account a more complete (or wide) range of complex variables that the ideas of Dawkins, and that, I think, is in fact a step forward.
Brett, younare right, population level dynamics contributes to gene survival. This is not the same as survival of the species, it also does not mean that the population is a unit of selection.’it just means that the kinselection paradigm Needs to be expanded so that actual sameness is used in stead of degree of kinship. As an evolutionary theoretician I have published about this kind of dynamics and showed how altruïstic traits can evolve this way.
He doesn’t own a relevant and original thought. He spits out the ideas of others. You’re following a regurgitation. He has not contributed to science except to teach what was already known.
@@UnknownUnknown-bx2lc Ok. Well, it's good for people to learn stuff, so that's not exactly "no contribution." I hear you though - I haven't really studied his career in any way, so I'll have to take your word for it. I have heard him talk about his background some, though, and it sounds like it was quite a struggle for him, so I guess he's doing well to be getting by at all.
@@KipIngram You don't need him to learn. That's my point. He may help you learn what other people came up with, but those things are learnable without him. He is unnecessary scientifically. He's a really good learner and regurgitator. That's all. Its nice, and all. but nothing he says, came from his own brain. His opinion is useless. Trust perhaps in those things that he references, but trusting anything else that comes out of his mouth is asinine, he's been proven wrong CONSTANTLY when using his own intuitions, he's only ever correct when he quotes other people. He's not an original. He's unecessary. Cut out the middle... He's a speedbump in your quest for knowledge, because his interpretations of actual science are oft incorrect even when he quotes them directly. He still doesn't even understand covid testing and vaccines at even a basic level, while still spouting on about them as if he's an expert. Any expert will tell you that he's clearly not, just by listening to him for 30 seconds. He's a moron. He's fauci. He's been smart enough to learn 1% more than most, and that keeps them rioting for his attention, like everyone here. it's pathetic, go above him to actual experts, he's a flawed proxy for actual science.
@@UnknownUnknown-bx2lc No, of course I don't. Learning comes easily to me. One of my blessings in life, and I'm grateful for it. But it's not easy for everyone, and I regard helping others toward knowledge as a worthy pursuit. Anyway, I guess I just don't have the chip on my shoulder for him that you seem to have. I don't particularly feel like startinng a fan club for him either - I'm basically neutral. It's all ok - you don't like him, and that's fine - your reasons are your own. No one's liked by everyone. Take care and stay safe, man.
Not literal? I know a woman who cut her childs image out of her family photos because he was gay and therefore sinful. Cutting your child out of your family photos and disowning him for being gay is pretty damn literal.
Metaphorical truth isn't even a sensible combination of words. It's like "hallucinated reality". Metaphorical truth the way Bret and Peterson use it just means "useful beliefs", which still is just potential and not necessarily the case. There is no consistent mechanism to determine whether they're even useful before the fact. This whole concept is just silly to me, because neither of them can reliably pinpoint any "metaphorical truths". They can only point to arbitrary examples that prove nothing, because their effects are always correlated to the individual, exactly like any silly supernatural belief, which is why every religious Person invents their own religion to an extent. Everytime they point to a positive outcome, I can point to multiple negative ones or a really big negative one. Pseudoscience babble. I like Bret, but jumping on the metaphorical truth bandwagon made me lose respect for him.
Your definition isn't quite accurate. A metaphoric truth is something that isn't true, but believing it provides a beneficial utility. It's a useful term because it separates the utility of unsubstantiated beliefs from the utility of scientific knowledge.
@@pauldaigle9167 That's why I called it useful beliefs. I do acknowledge that for example checking whether or not a gun is loaded multiple times is useful, but I disagree that it's irrational in principle and I also disagree that metaphorical truth is the right term to use on this (I don't think it's a useful term at all) as it causes more confusion than is warranted. And I even disagree with Sam Harris there who's one of my long-term intellectual heroes. It is indeed rational, because if you're aware of how fallible and easily distracted the human mind is (which can be determined by statistics), it's entirely reasonable to put yourself in "absolute safety mode" in order to shift the focus to the situation as much as possible when it comes to gun safety. This is not a metaphorical truth or a useful belief or lie, it's simply the most rational response given the facts about our own behaviour. That makes it irrational if viewed from an individuals perspective or from the human perspective in general even (and from there calling it metaphorical truth or beliefs with utility or useful beliefs makes sense), but it makes it entirely rational if viewed objectively from outside that framework which is what we should always aim for when it comes to finding the most rational explanation. Sure, this might be semantics to an extent, but I'm one of the proponents of always discussing semantics first, because otherwise the conversation most likely isn't going to be fruitful. Metaphorical truth simply means that, being unaware of the factual truth, you went for the correct decision based on a lie or an irrational belief at that moment. So you chose the best answer available for the wrong reason. The problem with that is that when you discuss a topic that is all-encompassing (like religion in the 11th century), you have nobody left to figure out whether or not this is actually the case. And that means that you have no way to determine whether or not this process even took place _until_ someone comes along with an explanation that is based on evidence when looking into answers that we don't yet have an answer for right now, like how to handle AI and it's infinite potential. What Bret is essentially advocating here is to leave the people who are wrong with their stupid beliefs so long as they're not harmful (which they already are) and provide utility _from an outside perspective._ If you don't have that outside perspective, then what do you do? You have no methodology without rationality if you simply stick to those beliefs and as soon as you figure out the correct answer through rational methods, you can no longer seriously believe in the useful lie anyway, because you know the actual answer (nobody choses their beliefs). All you can do is leave the stupid people with their stupid answers and chose not tell them about the rational path to get there, which is a mode of mind that will keep them gullible in other parts of their life by default. This cannot be the answer even Peterson is looking for, because it drives people further away from finding the best pathway to truth and basically puts them back into dark ages mode. Metaphorical truths can only work somewhat reliably if there's someone aware of them and supervising the situation or when analyzing history. When looking into the future, they're completely useless because there's no reliable way to determine this without the use of rationality in the first place.
This discussion isn't just about whether or not the fact that religious impulse is an evolutionary adaptation or not. What individuals like Weinstein and Peterson are doing is saying, "Religion is an evolutionary adaptation, therefor Christianity should be maintained", which is a non sequitur.
The issue we're having, particularly with these 'intellectuals', is that all the debates are framed from a materialism world view. Dawkins makes a move away from materialism with his idea of memes but doesn't take that on. In Hermeticism the first principle is the Principle of Mentalism: 'The All is Mind, the universe is mental.' If we viewed evolution from this point of view we would realise that while our animal natures are still in a Darwinian type of evolution (i.e. Natural Selection) our higher natures are evolving in consciousness and through the mind. The mystery schools of old taught that we had two natures, the lower and higher, and this was acted out through the dramas and stories that were told. So, for example, the story of Theseus slaying the Minotaur. In that story the Minotaur represents the lower animal nature of man (or lower self), and Theseus represents the Higher nature of man (or Higher Self). Theseus has to travel through the labyrinth (the mind) to slay his inner beast. Some of these science types seem defeatist on the idea of the transcendent. They are either in the camp that we are doomed to follow our lower mind's beast-like desires, or we have to control people for their own good. They don't put their trust in the individual man or woman to be able to slay their inner beast and transcend their lower nature. This is a big mistake, and very dangerous. People have been transcending for as long as we have any recorded history and have produced some of the most incredible art and music and literature, amongst other things, due to the fact that they were given the freedom to express themselves. Removing people's freedom for the 'greater good' will only lead to stagnation, and suppression of human expression.
I appreciate Brett’s measured, careful explanations. My argument, however, with his early comment re religion is this: Jesus Christ is the most studied historical, literal figure. He is not an idea.
11:15 "Cultural traits are obligated to severe genetic interests" How does that gel with the Aztec culture's preoccupation with human sacrifice on an epic scale? Other meso-American cultures shared this to varying degrees.
Two kinds of people were sacrificed: -Slaves captured from other tribes -Willful "heroes" (like the team who wins at that sport they had) In their minds, those people's sacrifices were responsible to appeasing the gods, therefore reducing the levels of anxiety of the whole population, and mantaining their psychological structure of handling the world. It was amoral, but it was good for the lineage.
@@ultimatedream42 That's not falsifiable (and it's so broadly applicable to cultural traits as to render the original proposition meaningless), but in social sciences and history, we're stuck with the first limitation, as a minimum... so in that context, your reply seems to me not only thoughtful, but plausible. I guess the Aztecs, who arguably fell for the proposition "if a little bit of something is good, then a whole lot must be REALLY good", might have been en route to self-extinction in the absence of impending colonisation, so their existence cannot be taken to imply that epic human sacrifice was necessarily a sustainable stratagem. Slaves are a hard-won and valuable resource, as are heroes, and squandering resources generally puts one culture at a competitive disadvantage with neighbours less wasteful. (As the US might be in the throes of discovering)
They really aren't. A meme that castrates everyone it infects can still proliferate just fine. It doesn't need to gonads of the host, just the brain and voice.
Big Dawkins fan here. However, I like what BW says here about religion as an adaptation. But I think he doesn't explain it very well in that he seemed to focus on modern western religion and not the true beginnings of religion -- which I think is what he really wants to focus on. I believe what BW is trying to say is this: Religion is an behavioral adaptation (much in the same way that wolves have a behavioral adaptation that drives them to hunt in packs). Religion is an behavioral adaptation of socializing and storytelling which promotes safety of a group of homo-sapiens (or possibly as far back as homo-erectus?) Long before there was writing, long before there was even any religion, humans (again, maybe even stretching back to homo-erectus) sat around a fire to cook meat and eat while they discussed, even in a primitive language, the best ways to avoid being killed by predators or each other. Stories were created because they are easier to share with subsequent generations than actual rules of how to live. In time these stories became part of a set of religious beliefs. To believe in these religious stories was beneficial to group behavior. Those who excepted storytelling and religious ideals gained social acceptance and thus had better chance of a mate and living longer. It wasn't necessary for a god to be created out of religion....but it happened. Humans wanted there to be a god because it helped to easily explain complex situations regarding the world and human behavior.
Can't even stand listening to this guy. You can't cram everything into evolutionary theory, just because you can find/claim some analogous aspects does not mean you can add it to the existing theory without demonstrating any actual truth to your claims. Look at the countless religions that have gone extinct, and the fact that religions have had to mutate to continue in the face of better religious or secular philosophy, how the most successful and best societies are the least religious, how religious beliefs underpin or facilitate virtually every war in human existence, the fact that there is no religious gene identified that has been strengthened and spread from religious belief, all point to the absolute bullshit of the position Bret is self righteously preaching.
Just because you can find/claim some analogous aspects does not mean you can add it to the existing theory without demonstrating any actually truth to your claims. Just saying ;) I hope you get it.
I think you just described how religion is adaptive in a Darwinian sense and then used that description as an argument against it being adaptive in a Darwinian sense. Odd...
" how the most successful and best societies are the least religious" You made a big leap here, from what Bret was actually talking about. He was only ever discussing religion being a good self-replicator. You're talking about morality. "the fact that there is no religious gene identified that has been strengthened and spread from religious belief" So first of all... genes don't really work like that. There isn't just a "religious gene". We won't find one because there almost certainly isn't one. More like, the phenotype cocktail from many genes all combine into the kind of mind that is highly conforming to tribal superstition in some form. The fact that this exists is proven by the history of theism, deism and any kind of superstition or belief in higher power, which is extremely pre-historic. It's all over the damn place.
I love Brett and I think he's genuinely one of the nicest guys that I see on TH-cam. In addition his wife is an absolute Rockstar and probably the better half of that couple. Having said that every time I listen to him and he gets a little bit closer to what he really wants to say I am absolutely terrified not only for him and for America but for all of humanity...the hubris exhibited by academics and scholars like him over the centuries as led to nothing but chaos destruction and death and to assume that we can monkey around with a mechanism as complex as natural selection speaks to me only of disaster...
Monkeying around with natural selection has given the us the cute furry little man's best friend shown in your profile picture out of the man-eating force of nature that was once the wolf.
@@keithbarnett3055 you win ...bring on crisper and the eugenics program...we're way smarter than those scientists in the miniseries Firefly from back in the 80s we won't create any "Reavers" because we know all of the unintended consequences that might happen... because we're so smart... Not like those ignorant fools in are barbaric past... LOL
LOL....yes indeed, Snoopy does bear a striking resemblance to a Reaver..... because (of course) the hubris of men like Weinstein has never lead to anything but chaos, destruction and death. Poor Snoopy, I never realized he was the harbinger the end times.
@@keithbarnett3055 lol... What's the old saying the breeders best friend is the drowning sac ... Better start working on those cute floppy ears or you won't be allowed to procreate in Brett's world...
@@daneracamosa He is not talking about eugenics. Very good analogy used in the debate is how tribal aggression has been pretty well decoupled in sports. It proves it can be done and we do not need eugenics to achieve it.
I like Brett, but he essentially justifying dogmatism. Also, he is arguing that not much progress has been made since the selfish gene. So what is stopping him from writing such a book that attains such a goal?
I suspect he will eventually. He just needs to stress test his ideas. Doing it publicly is like a baptism by fire. He could easily come out the other end with the right answer.
Are you familiar with the old adage that "a judgement made is an indictment of the judge, and not the object of judgement."? In other words, your attribution of the effect this interview is having, says more about your thoughts than it does Brett's? I take it that you dont like religious dogma and you feel any justification for religious ideas must therefore be an endorsement of the dogma that often comes with it? Maybe he wasn't trying to do that at all? Maybe you infered a pattern of motive on someone because youve encountered people in the past attempting to do that? Psychology really is the greatest science for a reason. Food for thought.
@@WillCarter1976 It's Bret's most important job as a public speaker to make sure that exactly this doesn't happen. If you can with all intellectual honesty say "maybe he means something else", he didn't do his job properly. It's up to the speaker to make the clearest possible distinctions, not the listener to interpret them because their statements are so open for interpretation. This is where Peterson fails as well and much worse than Bret at that.
@@Luftgitarrenprofi It would be wonderful if that is how our brains worked, but sadly that isn't reality. If you ever played the telephone game as a child you'd know that not only does the brain not acurately recall speech, but it's much worse than that. The human brain actually records what it receives and then interprets that information by pattern sorting it against information already possessed. In other words, your brain basically doesnt do a very good job of processing anything it hears as "new" information once out of adolescence. Just like with Jordans Cathy Newman video, some folks just cant hear what is being said, because their brains are litterally too busy trying to dismiss what he's saying as "so what you really mean is". It's nigh impossible for a person of rationality to change their minds on issues of fundamental importance especially when a person has psychologically speaking, tied themselves to an idea. It's not that the speaker isn't being clear. It's often than the listener is doing a poor job of listening and being able to interpret new information on its merits, and not dismissing and filing new data under "sounds like the same crap i've heard before." Many smart people have often said, you can lead a person to new data, but you can't force them to incorporate it with a few clever sentences. Or put another way, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink.
"A significant moment in evolutionary biology"! Delusions of grandeur or what. Science doesn't progress by two tadgers chatting on a stage about a theory that has already, especially as Dawkins understands it, seen better days. Have a word.
Great interview and remarkable insight ! A problem here appears to be a misunderstanding, when Bret talks about the term « mind virus » used by Dawkins to explain how he sees religion. He forgot to understand the way Dawkins thinks the world, with a much more materialist aspect. Where everything is made of matter and interaction which can be predict,measured and proved through the spectrum of science and its rigour. He never claimed that religion didn’t brought positive things in the past (in fact he often talked about some of the best things brought by it AND the possible evolutionary benefit that explains their longevity and recurrence in our societies). He may have not been the most dedicated in studying religion through evolutionary spectrum but none the less, it’s still a valid point to think of religion as an obstacle to TRUTH. So therefore him claiming religion to be a «mind virus» in regards of reality is comprehensive. That said, theology should be studied as a anthropological branch, im sure we can find fascinating data that can provide answers in a lot of different disciplines in regards to history,science (of psychology,evolution…),philosophy etc. But we surely know that morality isn’t born of revelation, its man made wisdom expressed in manner to convince a large group to follow a certain set of rules/beliefs/codes. Whether fear or necessity where implied to it. This ability of religions for control may have been its greatest trick we created but as also lead the terrible effects we know. A necessary evil ? Perhaps… Please let’s keep that in mind to make sure present societies doesn’t get obscure as they where in the past. As for the point of Mr.Weinstein about the need to «commander our own machinery» (great way to put it btw) i couldn’t agree more as sure Mr Dawkins or any sensible person would. Thanks for the upload really enjoyed this video.
For once I disagree with Brett, when he describes new atheism I don't recognize it at all. I mean maybe it fits some you tubers like the amazing atheist, but really not harris, Dawkins, hitch or dillahunty.
There's a shared beief held by most of the New Atheists that it would be better if religions not exist. This belief puts them at odds with people like Johnathan Haidt, David Sloan Wilson, and Bret weinstein who all agree that God doesn't exist, but that religion serves a beneficial function to society.
Did you guys watch the recent Pangburn event with Harris, Dawkins and Dillahunty? I was excited for it but found it quite boring. The New atheists are not developing their discussions in any way so it seems somewhat unsophisticated. Leaving no opening for learning; I struggle that Harris didn't feel the need to adjust anything after the Peterson debates.
@@quad9363 Sam Harris believes in the utility of fictions. He said it multiple times during his debates with JBP. His problem is when we forget that these fictions are just fictions and embrace them as dogma.
There is something contradictory in Weinstein’s argument in this conversation with Dawkins... saying we should understand that we are programmed to do things that are appalling due to the evolutionary dynamic in order to make sure it doesn’t manifest, is in itself a kind of social idea, a meme. But on the other hand, Weinstein see memes as part of the extended phenotype, which makes them byproducts of the evolutionary dynamic we should go against... so basically, he his saying that we have evolved to go against evolution itself, which is a kind of syllogistic fallacy... I’m not saying he’s wrong, but his argument seems poorly formulated from a rhetorical point of view...
No, you are right. And it is not a problem with his formulation. Bret is essentially correct in his critique, but contradicts himself with gibberish. Memes are part of the extended phenotype, so what he argues for is a dead end. I think he construed this to be able to rationalize the true meaning of this 'discovery'.
The only intellectually honest position to hold in terms of religion or atheism is agnosticism. This merely means "I don't know as I can't prove anything" in relation to the existence of god. I've read all the great atheist texts and they are merely a rejection of organized religions. None of them can or do speak to consciousness or empirical spiritual experiences.
You seem to confuse two positions: Theism is about what you (claim to) believe. Gnosticism is about what you (claim to) know. Dawkins is an agnostic atheist. He doesn't believe in any god and he doesn't claim to know whether gods exist. Atheism is the scientific position to take. There is no evidence that gods exist. You should only believe in what is true. Therefore you should not believe in gods. Pretty easy, isn't it? Weinstein's argument is that you should also believe in things that are useful. He even calls them "(metaphorically) true". It's a largely unscientific philosophical position.
Your Internet Friend Goodness me, no. Weinstein's position is that we better understand what's happening with the religious instinct, rather than simply shouting down the whole thing and then playing whack-a-mole as it sprouts out in less controlled directions.
@@yourinternetfriend6778 I agree with you till the "unscientific philosophical position"... Philosophical position does not have to be scientific as you imply(if you imply that). Science is merely a tool for describing (making models)reality as best as we can, it makes no claims other than that(about nature of those). Just wanted to clear that up.
If you don't know whether God exists, do you believe or not believe? It's binary. There is no choice between believing and not. Agnostic = you don't actually believe in God. That's the definition of an atheist.
I liked Bret advocating for rising above our biological urges by understanding them, and choosing to instead follow objectives which are meaningful for us today. You can apply this to his view that religion provides useful heuristics and is therefore ubiquitous and still persisting. You can say that the value of religion was a lot more useful back then but it's declining now since we can get the goods of religion without subscribing to it. Dawkins wrote in the God Delusion that "religious behaviour may be a misfiring, an unfortunate by-product of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful." So religion isn't necessarily a useful tool now just because it's so prevalent. It can be regarded as satisfying a primal evolutionary urge like spreading our own genes at the expense of all others, and like Bret said, we can and should challenge these biological impulses built into us.
I believe Bret is wrong that Dawkins or others do not see the value. 'Not seeing the forest for the trees'. The issue that Dawkins or others have is that religious folks OFTEN take these teachings as literal and they also affect politics.
Bret could be on the cusp of supplanting Dawkins as the pre-eminent Evolutionary Biologist. I tend to agree with Bret on this issue. Dawkins may have to accept and evolution of his ideas - which he may or may not be willing to do. One cannot deny the irony that new-atheism is a very poor survival strategy - in fact it is suicidal.
Brett def deserves it. And he's asking important questions and trying to venture into politically incorrect discussions, and Dawkins on the other hand was avoiding or dismissing it. Maybe he is scared of the leftist mob. Brett on the other hand overcame the mob and came out on the other side victorious!
Please consider this more before jumping on the bandwagon. This is complex stuff and it seems to me that Bret is seriously oversimplifying with his position. He is reducing culture down to an extended phenotype and completely dismissing the role of memes. This appears to me as it did to Dawkins: foolish, simple-minded, and counter-productive. This isn't a disagreement over politics either, its about being precise about the nature of human culture. If one champions Bret because of his honorable defense against the attacks of the Inter-sectional goons, I will join in applause. But a man can be both a hero and a fool. Because he is right about the political question doesn't mean he should be applauded in the realm of Evolutionary Biology, and one should be especially skeptical of a desire in one-self to do just that.
"venere" or "to come from" in Latin is the idea that everything we have comes from something more fundamental. When you are seeing absurdities or dead ends in your structure, you don't modify the structure... You throw it out and get one more subvenient. The fewer assumptions and brute facts in the subvening theory, the better.
![ลองสุ่มไอโฟน 990 โกงมั้ย? [ โกงมั้ยครับ ep.101 ] | DOM](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/bfsWe0j492k/mqdefault.jpg)
Bret is amazing. Those kooks at Evergreen may have unwittingly done the world a gigantic favor.
They gave him a red pill, but he only sucked on it a bit and spat it out ;) Self-responsibility doesn't mix well with either determinism or with social engineering. In any case, yes, they did him a big favor in him move on. When you are at the bottom, the only way is up.
exactly right demigodzilla. He talks in his rubin interview about how Evergreen is not a place to build a good CV at. Then he acts as if his lack of job offers is because of his IDW status. Hmm how about showing publications, showing your students going on to write publications or get into highly competitive graduate programs, or showing you can write a heck of a grant and get a bunch of money for your department. Weinstein is not a good scientist, he has no academic rigor in his thinking or actions.
Such a nihilistic view demigodzilla. He didn't seek it, people became interested in HIM, because (like Peterson) he stood up for what he believed was right. It was the SJWs that created him, not the other way around.
Sounds like pure speculation to me. I think he deserves more credit than that. He comes across as an honest and straight-forward individual, and from all reports both he and his wife lost their long-term roles which they loved as a result.
I agree, it's not his own research that got him there, but I think that's irrelevant. However, I really would like to see a book from him on some of these subjects.
It must be fairly dark viewing the world through only a cynical lens, with no actual positivity able to show itself naturally...
Production note for Rebel Wisdom - boost your master audio gain on the final render. It's about 25% less volume than your average TH-cam video and requires me to adjust my device volume settings to hear at an acceptable level.
One thing you could do is have the peak volume be closer to -6 decibels.
Volume seems to be a problem on a lot of videos. I have to turn my TV up to 11 - then an advert cones crashing in. TH-cam could give an "automatic volume level" option when a video is uploaded.
Production note for pangburn philosophy: don't accidentally not record half of the interview
I literally cannot watch this video due to this problem - I have my laptop closed with an external monitor at the back of my desk, it's not practical to bring it closer or open it and I don't have an external speaker to plug into it. With 99% of TH-cam videos this setup is not a problem.
Mixing vox tracks manually, then adding a compressor to normalize video wide vocal gain and finally a multipressor on the master to maximize total gain would fix this without much coloring or white noise. You don't want full dynamic range on a streaming site where most people are on mobile. More publishers should look at their audio processing chain because I see this problem a lot too.
I think Brett Weinstein may be the most underrated/ignored brilliant mind from the IDW.
Octopus On Fire I agree. I think it may have to do with his soft spoken attitude. In today’s age of infotainment, people are raised to think you need to be abrasive to be genuine. That isn’t to say you can’t be. It’s just that Weinstein will likely be remembered as great rather than make current waves. I for one love the guy. His intellect is superb and his ideas are on the frontier. We are lucky.
No. The most ignored is his brother.
Octopus On Fire Ho Ho, ha ha. Really?
Octopus On Fire ... nah that’s because you don’t understand the substance of his evolutionary arguments and are easily impressed by superficial appearances
Or, maybe, he is not that brilliant. He seems to overcomplicate some things but does not understand some very simple things.
At least that was my impression when watching his "debate" with Dawkins.
Bret W’s ability to articulate information in what I would term ‘the jewel bearing layer’ is amazing. Not too abstract, not too concrete and no sentences stuffed with bla bla words, which is the case with most of us. Even Zizek loves to bable before shooting out intellectual bullets. I am deeply impressed by Bret🙏🏻
You have to be kidding Bret is confused by asymptotic behavior.
@@timeWaster76 could you eleborate🙏🏻🤠
@@gunnarmuhlmann Sure, In the conversation with Dawkins did you hear the part about mathematical modeling ? he doesn't trust math because after all asymptotes ! I kid you not. Bret's followers ar victim of what is now as pop pseudo science. He often mangles the science behind what he is talking about. I wonder how Dawson got suckered onto a stage with Bret.
Take Covid for instance. Compare what he is saying about covid and the vaccine to what the people that are actually doing the science are saying.
Mathematical models are so universally understood and accepted with the understanding of the caveats that using the idea the they can be trusted or useful because of " asymptotes !" Let me just assure you that asymptotes are as much a part of what makes Mathematical modeling and our understanding of biology as they are part of math. .
This kind of defense of of his assertion is catastrophic. And Dawson was obliviously perplexed by a lot of what Bret had to say.
Any idea that Bret had a good day is bizarre.
And Bret has crashed and burned so many times and there are so many objections by the science community that he carrier has come to be centered around deep state conspiracies. That the Science community rejects so much of what he says is the proof of a wider conspiracy again him and the (his) truth... But it his truth is not the science communities.
His carrier as a biologist or geneticist is ruined by a series of devastating mistakes that involve him going outside of his wheel house. And I assume that it was happening before he went to Evergreen as evergreen is scientific Siberia.
@@gunnarmuhlmann Consider Bret take on lab leak...
th-cam.com/video/hxd6cvvcuOM/w-d-xo.html
SPIKES .. YIKES
th-cam.com/video/wqgFKRxedPg/w-d-xo.html
@@timeWaster76 Thank you for your answer! As far as I can follow it, it gives absolute meaning. I think Bret W. got traumatized by Evergreen State College protests and as a result regressed to some kind of paranoia conspiracy apophenian mode of thinking.
Jung's concept of the shadow that Jordan Peterson emphasizes. "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
It is interesting also to read Gurdjeff on his opinion on automatisms.
Jung's concept of the shadow is fun to think about but it's not science.
@@user-ez9is7lb9p Unreliable subjective experience the Dunning Kruger effect.
@@myothersoul1953 I think you mean it's not directly empirically testable. Jung's conception of the Shadow was argued for with scientific principles. The psyche itself being a relatively closed system governed by the universal laws such as the conservation of energy, homeostasis and cause and effect. Remember that the Shadow is conceived of as an aspect of the human psyche. Depth psychology was always an attempt to study the human soul from the scientific perspective rather than the moral and intuitive. That Jung did his best to integrate both perspectives hardly makes him unscientific.
@@rumination2399 I remember that the concept of the Shadow, or the ego or the id, is not falsifiable. Such concepts don't make predictions that would put them at risk of being wrong. One might even say they are shadow conceptions, they look like something until you shine the light of reason on them then they disappear.
In the beginning, he attacks New Atheism as being against the natural evolutionary process, and religion as being part of the natural evolutionary process, but then at the end say that we need to take our machinery out of the evolutionary game and put it to some better purpose. Isn't this what the New Atheists are arguing?
Thank you for this
..... I didn't know they had debated. Excited to watch it now
I don't normally come in with comments such as this, but I'm so, so happy to hear this conversation about how to approach religion. I feel much more open to questions of the Divine, I used to be a Dawkins atheist. These ideas about the IDEAS about God which open us up to better inner and outer lives are having a genuinely beneficial effect on me and (therefore) my marriage and family. I used to be such a tedious atheist.
That's not what Weinstein is saying. He's not suggesting there's any literal truth in religious beliefs. They are silly but may have been useful e.g. by giving a tribe a psychological advantage when they were subduing/annihilating another tribe.
Aside from his updating of Dawkins's idea, his bridging of Harris and Peterson's views are elegant. It seems that this is almost a bottleneck, an 'eye of the needle', through which to travel and hopefully have far better conversations in this arena.
Goshawk, Weinstein is not saying that religion was beneficial because it was like a club for beating the other tribes. He said it could make people more successful in their community because their better behavior (morals) garnered respect. In other words, while God (or gods) may not exist, trying to live up to some religion based guidelines can work because it spawns behavior that moves us along the evolution of human culture. If we zoom out a bit farther, believing in logic and science can be seen as similarly moving us along an evolutionary path, even though many specific scientific concepts have and will continue to fall by thecwayside. In that respect, belief in all widely held scientific concepts would be a kind of religious perspective, and questioning established concepts is heretical. I wish that more materialist reductionist atheists were more aware and critical of the religiosity found throughout the sciences.
@@bitdropout Yeah, but calling them silly also misses his point. The notion of each of us having a 'self' that 'chooses' our behaviors is silly. There's no shred of evidence. Smart people have to make up complex system that redefine "choice" in order to make it 'true." But it isn't silly that many smart people think they have an inner 'chooser' who picks from a selection of actions and feelings and could have chosen otherwise.
Hey if you're open minded, i recommend checking out the blog "History for Atheists" by an atheist with an interest in history, Tim O'Neill (he references up to date scholarly work). It might help people to shed a lot of their anger towards religion (which would be justified if some of the "history" debunked by that blog is true).
Thanks for moving the conversation forward Rebel Wisdom!
ALright, fine. You suckered me into raising my patreon amount. Good job.
Thank you - and thanks for letting us know, we'll check out why the link isn't working
Thank you Rebel Wisdom. Thank You Bret.
Two things - it seems that some of the interactions Bret mentions are NOT in Pangburn's uploaded video, which seems to be missing sections - does anyone have the audio of the event? Also: just uploaded - another interview with Bret Weinstein, 'Jordan Peterson, gender and ideology' - th-cam.com/video/qR5yN2G4h54/w-d-xo.html
never work with them. idiots.
I would be inclined to say Bret it hallucinating
Overall I completely agree with Bret's assertion that belief in religion is biologically adaptive and should be studied that way. I even suspect it's not just religion, but ideology; complexes of ideas, values, and statements about the nature of the world.
My one issue is this. There are fields of study that essentially derive from changing the resolution at which smaller phenomena are observed. For example, the resolution of biology ranges from the nucleotide pair to ecosystems, but underlying that is the world of atoms and particles, which is often not a helpful one from which to understand cells, let alone animals and ecosystems; we condense the information they provide into new constructs like "nucleotide pair," "DNA strand," "cell," or "animal." These larger concepts serve as shorthand for the activity of the atoms and particles that comprise them. They are not independent of the atoms and particles, but we need not always consider atoms and particles in studying them. Another example is the disciplines of neuropsychology and cognition. We know that cognition corresponds to the activity of neurons, but often refer to "modules" or systems of the mind that govern different adaptive behaviors. These modules are sometimes wholly conceptual; we conceive of them because we know from experience that they exist, as in the case of the "theory of mind" module which allows one to understand the mind state of someone else. Though we can't always map their their neuropsychological underpinnings, it is still often useful to study the mind in terms of these modules.
So I don't understand why there must be a debate over extended phenotype versus meme. It seems to me that the "world" of meme can be conceived totally in harmony with that of natural biological selection, but existing at a level of magnification that need not always reference it. We could study memes as if they were their own replicators, understanding their evolution and the traits of the most successful ones, while holding in the back of our minds that they are extended phenotypes that serve the reproductive interests of the organisms that employ them.
The major thing I think Dawkins might not like about unifying the ideas in this way is that it threatens to render memes as a nonscientific idea. Instead the study of meme becomes the study of human culture, which exists at a magnification at which evolutionary biology is the cause of everything but too cumbersome to invoke all the time.
Dawkin's is behaving like the priests he's spent his career criticising. Scientists never ask what if I'm right but what if I'm wrong. The idea that there is an end to progress is pessimistic thinking.
Absolutely 100% agree!
Fame. It is what happens when we make scientists/physicists into rock stars. Fame & celebrity are intoxicating.
I find him extremely condescending
I would love to see Bret write a book reconciling everything worthwhile from The Selfish Gene with his “religion as an adaptation” argument
I'd love to see Shakira's vulva.
Really love Bret's point around 12:00 about how to react to a field appearing to be "stuck". Relevant to my own work.
I found Dawkins was reluctant to engage in serious dialectic with Brett's ideas on applying Dwarwinism to human evolution. His tone was unenthusiastic from the get go. Obnoxious even.
I find that quite often with Dawkins... Could you recommend an interview he excelled in?
Not an interview, but clearly something he is (or was as it's an older video) quite passionate about. th-cam.com/video/Nwew5gHoh3E/w-d-xo.html
I liked Brett's come back. "I don't understand english well enough to understand the insult you just gave me."
When Bret brought the idea on applying Darwinism to human evolution, I immediately thought of Hitler... Perhaps that is why Dawkins may be reluctant to pursue this line of thinking.
What really is there to talk about? Dawkins' main point is that you should believe only what is true. Weinstein's main point is that what is not true can still be useful (what he calls "metaphorical truth"). Dawkins' point makes us all atheists, because nobody can know whether there is a god. Weinstein's point does nothing to this argument. Religion surely can be useful to humanity. It can also be (and is) incredibly harmful to humanity. There might even be a philosophy that provides just the usefulness without the harm of religion, but there Bret is, arguing for religion.
Just a side node: The Weinstein brothers are pretty desperate for attention lately. I've listened to Eric on Joe Rogan, misrepresenting Dawkins' position in an attempt to make his brother look better. He tried to paint Dawkins' position as fundamentally anti-religious. It's actually a bit sad to see this behavior in them.
Love the channel and the content. Keep it coming guys!
We all pay lip service to the idea that progress is good. Who's we, and am I being too pedantic in asking?
Progress is inevitable. The tools we fashion will fashion us.
@@bodbn yeah. We ain't all for that, though. Doesn't matter, irrelevant nit-picking on my part, probably
Our progress as a species is certainly not for the good of other species.
dunce funce, everyone uses the word "progress" to mean a positive progression, but demonstrating or even logically making the case for "positive" has never been done to most people's satisfaction, except for widely held ideas about morality that came out of the many world relgins. Because Weinstein is I think a materialist, he needs a secular, scientific ethical system in order to map out a plan for how wrest control of our evolutionary future, but good luck doing that in the absence of spiritual beliefs.
Bret and Jordan need to go a whole lot further with their arguments to overcome the fact that people are obsessively believing in and organizing their lives around a set of extremely violent bronze age stories. If there were a cult around Odysseus's adventures as told in The Odyssey, which is a much less violent story than the one about the volcano god, they would not be held up as reasonable. No one says The Odyssey is "metaphorically true" without justifiably getting laughed at. The old testament is a series of extremely violent, ugly stories, and the new testament, while not as violent, is no less warped and twisted along with being extremely trite. How anyone can call belief in that positive without first having been indoctrinated young is beyond me and needs extraordinary evidence to be convincing.
the weakness of jordan's character, and the spineless prostration of bret. and the money and fame grubbing of both
Couldn't agree more. It's sad how many people willingly buy into their "metaphorical truth" (= useful beliefs which cannot be reliably pinned down) crap.
@@Luftgitarrenprofi if they simply called them what they really are (potentially) useful lies, it would be far easier to get on board. but petersen is obviously a christian and he has called himself "deeply religious". bret is simply a spineless kowtower
You could see the OT in terms of Jews trying to get the people under control by means of reward and punishment. Its ultimate goal to overthrow all that is not Jewish.
You could see the NT in terms of Romans trying to get the people under control by telling them that the real kingdom is in heaven, turn the other cheek, give Caesar what belongs to Caesar. Its goal: to get sheepish followers.
If you look at how Constantine made Christianity a state religion and what texts he used. It is clear that he wanted servants, slaves really, to do his bidding without too much questioning.
Whenever 'religious' ideas are sold as good ideas, you should look at what the 'politicians' want.
@@sarsaparillasunset3873 If it were a general principle or an accepted fact about the world being described to me, then I might agree with you that it's my responsibility to educate myself. However, what Weinstein and Peterson are spouting is opinion and I'm merely saying that they have so far failed to convince me of their view. And apparently I'm not alone in that. Note that if it were a new, previously unknown fact about the world, then it would very definitely be the proponent's responsibility to convince the rest of us. This is a fundamental part of science, and usually done in journals with data.
Sam Harris is not an idol of mine, although I'm jealous of the fact that he can get up on stage and be so eloquent and all that crap in front of a large audience.
I would bet that the average atheist is not smarter than the average theist, which is why theism surprises me.
Weinstein's adaptation argument (from a non-practitioner of religion) is like saying "It's important to be a great basketball player. In order to be a great basketball player you need to practice. Everyone knows this." but then they themselves never practice basketball. When asked "why not?" they say "if I play it on Playstation (in my head or on a screen) that's close enough." The question is "is it?"
You're gonna have to unpack that, Paul... ;)
I'll make a video. :)
@@PaulVanderKlay we would expect nothing less ;)
@@RebelWisdom I don't really believe an evolutionary biologist can really comment on the utility of religion. It is interesting to hear his opinion, but I think it is a little out of his depth. I respect Bret tremendously tho.
To run with the basketball analogy, I think what Bret is saying is that from an evolutionary point of view that being a good basketball player isn't the goal, but rather the goal is to win the game of basketball. Practicing basketball and becoming a great player is only one path towards winning the game. Practicing might the most ethical way to win the game, but it certainly isn't the only way to win. You could cheat, or you could even change the rules of the game. I think Bret's hypothesis, as I understand it, is that Religion is one pathway towards winning the game of evolution, but it isn't the only pathway. Religion under some circumstances is the ethical way to play the game, but some times it's used as a way to cheat. If we have a better understanding of what function Religion plays in the game, it will be easier to understanding when it's being used ethically or not.
Thanks for this. I was left confused by the conversation between Bret and Richard. This has helped to clarify his ideas for me. If I didn't mistake him he is saying that cultural artefacts like religion can be understood in both memetic and genetic evolution. Religion (and other cultural artefacts) offer benefit to the species, not just to themselves, thus they are not just a mind virus.
Bret - Publish!
So people can cite you and this gets into the profession meme-net.
Convincing Dawkins won't work, his legacy is set on not changing his mind. It's just natural.
This is so amazing to listen to. I am from Seattle which is right north of the Evergreen State College where Bret is from. I remember watching the evergreen protests on my local news and being absolutely appalled at what was happening! I was a junior at university and was watching similar events happen at my college, and it was wild. Now, thanks to those protests, I get to watch a brilliant mind-one I was so close to but never would have heard of!-discuss such deep topics with some of the worlds most famous and brilliant people. I guess I owe the social justice bullies a Thanks for making him and Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Haidt and the IDW famous. Cool!
the pseudointellectual dork web has aged like yogurt in a hot dumpster. get a grip man.
He almost said what Peterson said, "I live my life as though God exists." At least saying that living in such a way bestows a benefit on the linage.
But what's implied in that statement is that mankind itself isn't worthy of reciprocal good deeds and behavior. Which is a sad conclusion..
I noticed that as well!
To Whom It May Concern - I have just started watching your TH-cam channel and want to say thanks for your programming. The debate concerning human evolutionary concepts between evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Bret Weinstein has raised an ethical/moral question specific to generic engineering (GE). Allow me to share my thoughts: I am left wondering if GE will become a standard practice amongst the medical and scientific community with the aim of direct human intervention - i.e. by not allowing the randomized freedom of past evolutionary intervention to take its course over time and space - and instead direct the outcome of human genetics for economical, political and supremacy aims. On another matter, will GE be reviewed in the far distant future as the “intelligent design” underpinning human evolution or will Darwinism evolutionary biology still hold true to the human species in the aftermath of genetic engineering. Could both aruments be debated on your channel? Kind regards.
Somehow telling that Weinstein is mixing up scientific and political questions so easily.
Yup 😀
A mark of creative intelligence is the linking of fields that normally would not be linked.
@@MrMadalien that would also describe the Deepak Chopra type of "intelligence" though, right? I don't see much intelligence in mixing up the _is_ question (answered purely by scientific means) and the _ought_ question (answered by political or philosophical arguments, of course with scientific help).
@@careneh33 Exactly. It's a mark of sloppy thinking. And other sloppy thinkers will view it as "creative intelligence" or somesuch.
Caren Ami you think Weinstein is doing that?
LOVE your work. I’m going to have to Patreonise you
In the pursuit of truth, humanity has had to shed the veil of religious dogma that stood in the way of pursuing truth. This is where Dawkins stopped. But if one truly wants to pursue truth, one also has to go one step further and acknowledge the evolutionary benefits religion has had to humanity.
Good stuff!
You might want to weigh that "benefit" against religion's drawbacks, before you try to argue that religion has a (net) positive evolutionary effect. I'm not even sure why you would. We do lots of stuff to our gene pool that has a detrimental effect, like giving sick people antibiotics. If you are all in favor of evolution, we should let the weak die off, to make room for the strong.
@@yourinternetfriend6778 Is being "in favor" of evolution the same as being "in favor" of gravity?
@@josephmorneau4339
Is arguing for usefulness the same as arguing for truth?
@@yourinternetfriend6778 If it is in the context of the human species and the definition of "truth" you are referring to is "a transcendent fundamental or spiritual reality" then it can be.
Most religions, especially Abrahamic religions, do not necessarily guide towards a moral behavior. That's the whole point.
Well the pathological nature of religion seems pretty obvious to me.
86% of the world's population is religious of some variety. It continues to exist for a reason and those 5.8B religious humans survived for a reason. Religion is so ubiquitous that it had to have played a survival role. I'm an atheist / agnostic but I can understand how and why religion arose and persisted for all of human civilization. I also hope we'll eventually move beyond it for at this point, it and the imperatives it give us may be maladaptive given the reality we face of our population growth, resource use and the threat from climate change.
@@susanl3510 I think the reason it's continued to survive is due to human mental weakness. Now, you can argue that mental weakness has evolutionary benefits, and perhaps it does. But I think if religion has played any role at all, it's been a detrimental one, and your point about ubiquity is simply a logical fallacy. Vestigial tails are even more ubiquitous in humans and serve no function whatever as far as we know.
Religion must have aided survival at one point in our evolution for it to have survived until today. It may already be like a vestigial tail simply because it no longer benefits our survival -- in fact, I would suggest it is a hindrance to our survival due to the way it justifies continued exploitation of resources and high reproduction when those threaten our survival. Tails in our evolutionary ancestors did benefit them, but when they no longer did, they lost function and now are only visible in us via an x-ray or in the embryo. One day, religion will be vestigial. Modern civilization with science as an explanatory tool has only been present for a couple of hundred years. Not enough time on the evolutionary scale to jettison religion completely, even given how fast social evolution is, but it's happening slowly as religions like Christianity become secularized and lose utility. It's happening to Islam today, but this has been even more recent so there is a lot of pushback. As long as religion still provides some utility for humans, it will persist. It clearly does, given that 84% of humans still adhere to a religion.
@@susanl3510 Why 'must' it have aided survival? Where's the evidence of any such causal link?
The birthrates are much higher, community and family cohesion and trust are stronger if society shares a common morality. It also orients everyone in a similar direction and there are less petty disagreements over what is right and wrong which makes relationships more functional. But as we all know evolutionary fitness comes down largely to birthrates and the most religious have about 80% more kids than the least religious. That is kinda Brett's point, culture/religion have big implications for our current evolutionary fitness.
"New Atheism" is not a label that public figures like the late Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and others call themselves. It is more a caricature that other parties have used to describe this particular movement of writers and intellectuals who have become prominent in the last fifteen, twenty years. There is nothing essentially "new" about "new atheism" other than that it is recent.
It's time for Bret to take his place in scientific history
Not with fuckin carol greider around
for what contribution exactly?
The claims of religion being refereed to as untrue but useful are spurious and not at all demonstrable. Its amazing how easily we dismiss things like miracles and Revelation as simply metaphorical. I deeply appreciate Brets work here on many levels but he and all who hold his position are absolutely missing the lions share of the wisdom religion brings... that there is God, there is soul and there is a much larger picture and context with which to evaluate our lives.
To my understanding Dawkins objects to the evolutionary natural fallacy, " _because it comes from nature it is good_ ", and in particular to the weak version of it, " _because it comes from nature (has evolved) it is unavoidable_ ". That was IMHO the reason for Dawkins' hesitation to use evolution in political debates. I don't think for a second he objects to search for (scientific) truth. Yeah, nowadays one has to qualify the word truth, right?
In this same video Bret is stressing the difference between "is, should be, and can be". He says people usually misinterpret evolutionary psychology as a "if it IS, then it SHOULD be" argument.
He's not saying it's "good" because it's natural. He's arguing that it "worked." It achieved greater survivability. It's an "is" not an "ought" argument. There may have been other paths evolution could have taken but for humans in that environment at that point in time, religion enabled the lineages to survive more effectively. Hence, they and it was preserved over time.
@@susanl3510 Whether religion achieved greater survivability is an unanswered scientific question and I don't see its relevance in a political debate about religion even if it were answered. Given that it is unanswered, it really should not be used at all in political or policy debates. We can (and possibly should) study the psychological effects of religion and cults on humans, which may be relevant in policy discussions. For this we do not even need having answered the question of ancient survivability.
I believe there is some evidence that people with religious affiliation attempt / commit suicide less frequently than those who are unaffiliated. Also some research that those with religious affiliation less likely to engage in criminal behavior. Within developed nations, those reporting a religious affiliation were healthier and had slightly increased longevity. What that suggests about the evolution of religion, I don't know but there appear to be some benefits to membership in a religion today.
@@susanl3510 And there is some research that prison inmates are much more likely to be religious than non-criminals (in the US). And people in non-religious countries have (much) higher standards of living and are happier than in religious countries (the US is somewhat an outlier). And... In all cases, correlation does not equal causation. All this makes my point though. We do not know and it is entirely irrelevant whether religion has a lineage survivability value. We do know that a sense of community is good for humans and religion can serve to have one (which can explain the effects you have mentioned). We do know that religion has very recently infected hundreds of thousands of children with AIDS. Even that could have a positive effect on lineage survivability, so it may be in support of Weinsteins hypothesis and it doesn't make a difference either way: infecting children with AIDS is a terrible deed.
Curious how many people are coming to what is essentially the same conclusion about where mankind is headed and how we might take control of that future, but they're doing so through such different places and perspectives.
Ha ha, Dawkins introduced and promoted a mind virus that has made us evolutionarily unfit. Both hilarious and true. Great interview!
@Morgan Allen - Yes, much of evolutionary fitness comes down to birthrates and quite obviously atheist don't have as many kids. So in that sense it creates unfitness in society. Most atheist adopt a revised protestant morality, where people have rights and are to be treated justly- that is basically humanism. It is protestantism without God and with loosened sexual restrictions. Of course, these are all formerly Christian countries, so it is merely a continuation of that culture, except it is less fit in an evolutionary sense.
There are other issues with atheism. It is not just a lack of kids, but it makes life purposeless and meaningless, so that can't be helpful from a fitness perspective. It also decreases time preferences, whereas Christianity pushes time preferences out as far as possible. I think the time preference issue creates a lot of unfitness as well. It also creates a lot of division and disunity between the remaining Christians and the new atheists, because they have different standards concerning sex and marriage. You also get lower quality breeding and child rearing, and you lower productivity and work ethic. That's a lot of negatives.
@Morgan Allen It was Bret's contention during the Dawkins debate that the fitness problem pertaining to celibacy would be resolved if one viewed the issue through the lens of lineage selection. I'm not entirely sure how compelling I find this argument, but I don't know enough about lineage selection nor have I thought about the problem very deeply.
Regarding religion as promoting social behavior, it seems analogous to tribalism or even a sort of tribalism, although clearly it can cause tribal infighting. Of course, will there is clearly a reciprocal relationship between tribe members, there is also competition within tribes for mating rights. It may not be easy for certain individuals to compete in terms of physical fitness or ability to procure material wealth directly; yet, if those individuals are able to game a social/ideological system to gain status, suddenly their odds of passing on their genes has risen drastically.
One modern-day example of this is men and women going to church to meet prospective romantic partners. If there are potential mates looking for someone who shares the same values and traditions, then there is an obvious incentive to join that tradition and imbibe those values; both families will adhere to the same values and traditions, and such cohesion is advantageous both for the couple and their future offspring.
@Morgan Allen - I would say that, these days, the more intelligent you are the more time you are likely to spend in education and the more you will be socialized into the atheistic/pure materialists worldview. So ironically, we have a system where we take are most intelligent people and socialize them into a new worldview and culture that makes it very unlikely that they will have children. So atheism is actually giving us less children and making us less intelligent at the same time because it is working the hardest at removing the genes for intelligence from our population. As you probably know intelligence is close to 80% genetically determined in adults, and most of the other 20% is basic nutrition and absence of disease.
So you may think that all religious claims are false, and I would disagree with you on that. What is true however, is that atheism makes both groups and individuals less fit by making them less likely to have offspring and in a host of other ways, and that is what Bret Weinstein is on about. The irony is that in the sense of evolutionary fitness, Christianity is the most successful worldview we have seen and it is also humane at the same time. That by itself is an amazing thing.
Hopefully you have read Jonathan Haidt book "The Righteous Mind," which is amazing and also touches on this subject. A lot of people are figuring out that we have lost something pretty essential to human group function and fitness. Jordan Peterson touches on this in a weird Jungian way as well and several others too.
@Morgan Allen - Well Mr Allen, the reason I mentioned that adult intelligence is about 80% genetically influenced was to make the point that the atheistic worldview makes us dumber as our smartest women are in University and high-end careers during the best childbearing years of their life and consequently have either very few kids or none at all. So you might also know that intelligence has a significant x-linked component, which is why the mother's intelligence is more determinative of the child's intelligence and especially so in the case of a male child. This is also the main reason that the IQ bell curves are so different for men and women, with the men's curve being boarder and flatter and the female curve being concentrated in the middle. Women get two X-chromosomes and the intelligence component of that averages itself out between the two copies (one from dad and one from mom.) However, for us poor men, it is much easier to hit a homerun and to strike out because we only have one copy and there is nothing to average. That is part of the reason why male geniuses have a 4 to 1 or greater advantage over women and we have a similar advantage with imbeciles.
Yes, I agree that muslims certainly have the evolutionary edge in childbearing and that is one reason why England must either re-Christianize or become Islamic. You'll have to compete with them or disappear as is the ethic of natural selection. You probably also know that Islam has some rather serious issues as well. First, cousin marriage suppresses the IQ around 8-10 points, so you have a less mentally capable population and they also have serious birth defects at a 10x or higher rate. They are less open which makes them less creative and inventive, and they tend to create very ridge, unstable, and authoritarian societies, which sap innovation, are more corrupt and decrease cooperation. There are other issues as well, the polygamy creates a horde of restless young men without a stake in society and cousin marriage creates additional complex social issues related to families becoming perhaps all important to the point where nepotism becomes the norm. So on the group level, Muslim societies are nowhere near as competitive as Christian ones. The problem is the Christian ones have become less Christian and therefore less fit, so yes Islam is now winning the fitness game.
We have really only been discussing the evolutionary fitness of religion and not ultimately whether a God does exist or the material world is all there is. That was the scope of video above more or less. But yes I do think God exists and I see a lot of evidence for the supernatural in general. So I find the atheistic and purely materialistic worldview lacking. To me the fitness of Christianity and it's moral code is evidence of it's truth. That is what C.S Lewis found as well. I stole that from him.
If you are talking about "New Atheism" you are incorrect. The current state of New Atheism is the result of its take over by Social Justice, which is the real mind virus that makes us unfit. However, Dawkins had no part in that. Furthermore, what Social Justice did to New Atheism was not notable or special; it was just another example of what Social Justice had done many times before, and has done many times since.
I'm curious why religions that are thousands of years old hold so much weight when our evolution has been going on for so much longer. 4000 years is a little blip in our history.
one of the best interviews. bret is too good and we need many more thinkers like him
The book "Sapient" gives the most convincing explanation for religion to date. The main value of religion was an ability to unite huge amounts of people and make them consider each other their own.
Dawkins is at his best in the written medium, while he has a charasmatic stage presence it's not an arena in which he is particularly open to challenge and critique. I'd really like to see some sort of collaborative text discissing the ideas from this talk in more detail, either as as a series of back-and-forth emails or perhaps something more definitive. It seems Brett W has a lot to contribute to further developing the ideas laid out in Dawkins' classic work and a mainstream print publication would really be the best outlet.
These public discussions are great but (especially considering the poor recording) i doubt they will stand the test of time or reach the sort of audience that the ideas Brett has been developing deserve.
I watched this again the other day and I thought Dawkins was completely dismissing what Bret was saying with his own well thought out arguments. Bret just thinks he's right. All the time.
Nah
@@WBKimmons glad you proved me wrong. How's ivermectin working out for you?
@@Theactivepsychos Dawkins didn’t have well thought out arguments
@@WBKimmons again. Just an assertion without detail. No point in even commenting.
I find it very difficult to listen to Bret, I just zone out from his low energy, deep, monotonous delivery. Ears pricked up around 16:10 - 19:15 when he started talking about "evolution's purpose". What does he mean by purpose? Purpose isn't required to explain anything. But maybe he explained this and I wasn't concentrating.
As in what evolution does, when evolution occurs what changes take place?
Work on your listening skills then maybe you'd have the answer you want.
@@fealdorf wow this was a blast from the past! I've since listened to Brett discuss free will with Sam Harris - the man appears to be a confused mess! I'm not so generous about his use of "purpose" - it's deliberate. He clearly has some beliefs that are getting in the way of his science.
I am glad that somebody exists who makes Dawkins to fight with his own arguments.
Jorg Gurt Steve Meyer can give Dawkins a run for his money
your name is pure Vonnegut
Thank you for this. I've been struggling with how to reconcile religion and evolution, and Bret Weinstein has really helped. Yes, it is factually wrong but metaphorically true (in the sense that there is wisdom in those stories) and has been evolutionarily adaptive.
Forests and trees is the right explanation for the problems with new atheism and its inability to understand religion's place in human evolution. I'm an atheist / agnostic but not someone who denies the utility of religion for human civilization as a whole, and for individuals in particular. That said, it also provides justification for the most horrific behavior. BUT: if religion didn't offer some kind of evolutionary benefit, it wouldn't have been reproduced over the long term and be so ubiquitous.
I don't find solace in religion, but I understand how it provides not only solace for beings aware of their own mortality, but it also provides rules and incentive for humans to treat each other in a way that allows us to live in larger and larger groups.
However I do think religion will be and needs to be surpassed by some kind of ethical system / morality that doesn't rely on the supernatural to justify or explain but is informed by science and morality. This will free us from the grind of evolution's more simplistic drives for mere survival and allow us to make use of our amazing brain for more than just ways to outcompete each other. I do agree that we need to surpass religion because we have reached a point where our evolutionary inheritance has created a world that is a threat to our long-term survival.
Plus, as Bret said, we truly are the most complex and amazing beings in the known universe and are made for more than what our biological inheritance has bequeathed us up till now. So much goodness in one short video...
Nice post. I think finding a new system is going to be incredibly hard to even BEGIN let alone complete. Just look at the works, can you really see a group of advanced minds coming together to give it ago? Unless you usual get together like Peterson, pinker, Harris, Weinstein brothers, and few more but I don’t see it happening. We will only wake up (on mass) once it’s too late. It’s like the damn matrix movie right at the end neo being told by the head dude that he’s seen many Neos. As to try say, it’s always the same cycle.
Human minds are built to adopt belief systems. We are made to “believe” and to “share beliefs” groups who have the same belief system work more harmoniously within that group system. Conflict arises when there is divergence of thought/belief. That is why freedom of speech and scientific inquiry is so important - to challenge the tyrannical orthodoxy of the day.
Lovely post.
I find it dishonest on the part of atheists to point the finger at religion for causing horrible occurrences in history, when most dictatorships of the 20th century which claimed literally 100ths of million's of lives were by nature not religious. Evil lies in human nature. If anything religion provides a framework from which a stable society can be built. All systems deteriorate and get corrupt over time, religions are no exception from that. Pointing out corruption in religion is a truism and doesn't negate the value of it.
Can't religion be considered in the sense of an imaginary reality that helps humans organize and coordinate group activities beyond the Dunbar number.
as can marxism and nazism. thankfully we have secular govt now and law to do that, rather than ancient myth.
That is in fact the hypothesis for how religion began.
To assist growing population from small hunter gathers of maybe a dozen people who practiced rough forms of animism, to large tribes more or less stationary. This is where we find proto-religious development, worship of ancestral spirits.
When larger groups of people started grouping together, natural rules if engagement suffered due to a disconnect with responsibility, a previous reliance of small group members who needed to consider each other for survival... But with large groups this gets lost, you can take advantage now of a member and not suffer the consequences as one would in small groups who depended deeply on this reciprocity.
proto-religions seemed to develop from a need to establish a larger notion of guidance to the group that added coherence. Respecting great powerful ancestors was their solution.
If religious thought is in fact based on a persons implicit axioms and is acted out, the Religion is more reality, than reality.
@@WillCarter1976 sure, as are any insane person's whims
@@34672rr next time you want to say that people who have religious ideas or beliefs are insane, just say so. Stop tap dancing around your own biases. It makes you look intellectually dishonest.
What an amazing thinker Bret is. “Our Concious minds need to re author our unconscious purpose”
I appreciate his outlook with regard to this. No one has proposed yet how we are to do this exactly but I agree that this is the next step for us.
Read on Gurdjeff, he is all about becoming aware of your automatisms, and re author them. There's also Jungian psychology, that is the exploration of the Shadow part of yourself.
Meditation. That is what path to "enlightenment" actually means. It's exactly what Buddism was all about but then they realized that ultimate purpose is freedom from all that. So there is some value in some religions after all. The problem is when religion looses it's leader things go directly south.
Bret is wrong here. India hasn't adopted an Abrahamic religion AND IT'S GOOD!
This is kind of just scratching the surface. The psychology of religion gets way way deeper.
Yes. For instance, it's interesting, the level they're on, talking about how we need to reign in our instinctive desires and consciously act in the world. This is The Chariot, or Chet, and it's only the end of the first row of the Tarot. There are two more. And FYI, to anyone who is like "what does psychology of religion have to do with tarot": it's all the same thing, folks... Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, it's all the same psychology.
Great to see David Sloan Wilson mentioned. Look forward to these guys getting deep into it
Having watched full debate, I too was surprised by Dawkins' reluctance to discuss certain topics- especially given his enthusiasm in ridiculing religious beliefs (BTW I share Peterson's view that Dawkins does not understand religion at all.) and because as I would dare to say "bad Darwinism" of e.g. genocide is somehow akin to "bad Darwinism" of eliminating religious beliefs in favor of "atheism".
It is understandable why Bret didn't push Dawkins any further on the topi, but it would be really interesting to dig into it
Not the full debate, unfortunately. But I agree with your overall point.
I'd be careful with citing Peterson on who does and doesn't understand religion. According to him, he also doesn't understand religion, because it's all so damn complicated (not really).
@@yourinternetfriend6778 Then he knows his limitations. Do you prefer a person who simplifies everything down to a mind virus when that's not an appropriate description or someone who says they don't understand it fully?
@@Etazoz Peterson lecturing others on something one doesn't understand is symptomatic of a mental virus.
Peterson talks about the new invented religion that I call "Petersonism." Dawkins understands common, mainstream real religion very well, and better than most.
Great stuff!!..keep it coming!!
This interview is another great example of how intelligent and articulate both the Weinstein brothers are. Anyone that has the balls and the ammunition to come onto a stage with Dawkins and nail him to the cross of contradiction of his own making, is someone to be respected...and maybe even a little feared. In 200 years im sure that many of the IDW will be seen in the same light as Kant, Jung, Nietzsche, and Einstein - Revolutionary minds all.
Thank you for this. Really interesting.
Does Brett pretend to not acknowledge how virus have existed for thousands of years, and this doesn't mean they must have a necessary utility for humans to benefit from. Then why does he force this onto memes?
Biological viruses do not exist based on utility to man. They exist to spread their own genes. And they do, and it works, so they stay as long as they can.
It’s a good point, but
Weinstein would probably say if nearly all humans had a virus, then it’d be likely that the virus has some positive effect.
Especially if this virus regularly caused the humans to expend a bunch of energy.
He basically says if something regularly causes an organism to use energy, and the organism’s family tree shows no attempt to evolve an immunity to it and ditch it all together, the thing probably has a positive effect.
Speaking of "going back down the branch" I think it would be of great interest to all to have a Rebel Wisdom exploration of Dawkin's and Weinstein's key assertion that the vast assortment of complex living organisms as we know them here on Earth appeared out of dead, inorganic matter aided only by time and random chemical and physical mutations.
Bret wants to assert that religion is an adaptation, but Dawkins’ concept of memes is a hindrance to this - he therefore needs to try and trash the idea of memes propagating/evolving independently from genes. Unfortunately his reasoning doesn’t work and just comes across as a lame attempt to try and make the facts fit his pet theory.
Right. I'm surprised and somewhat dismayed that more people can't see this for what it is. I like Bret, but he is making such a fundamental error it's kind of baffling. I enjoy watching everything IDW because it is a group of likable people discussing interesting ideas (sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes completely nonsensical) , but the political nature of the groups inception, and the inevitable tribalism of its followers, leaves me feeling like the truth is less of a goal here than the construction of yet another echo-chamber. People are just eating this up. Dawkins apparently got OWNED. And Dawkins needed this apparently because of his strident anti-Brexit position. The politicization of biology isn't just happening from the Left it seems...
Well put! I quite like Bret, though I’m more impressed by his brother. Interesting to get AIUs take on Bret, it’s hilarious and mercilessly critical, and it gives a different take on his character, which is insightful I think.
I’m not quite sure what you meant about Dawkins ‘needing it’? Yes it seems he has an anti Brexit and anti Trump leaning for sure
@@paddydiddles4415 I'll check out AIU's take, should be entertaining. Eric definitely has some strong ideas,, really interesting guy for sure. About the 'needing it' comment, I was just referring to a few comments I've seen on other videos - the usual partisan nonsense, not worth going into really.
He seems like an apologist to me. Ofcourse Dawkins is against Brexit, because it was an idea sold through lies, and the gullible believed it. Likewise, I also think, he is anti-Trump and for the same reason that Trump is build up by lies.
I fear that Brets line of reasoning will in fact bring about the exact thing he claims he wants to prevent.
Gonzo the great ... Bret seems to think that if the whole world educates itself in the nuances of evolution theory then this could be a central strategy for stopping conflict/genocide? Firstly that doesn’t seem likely and secondly even if people were more educated; they wouldn’t adopt his thesis because it doesn’t ring true ie mimetic theory is real and group selection theory is full of holes.
As far as your comments regarding Trump and Brexit - not really. There are in fact genuine and extensive reasons for supporting Brexit and also Trump
Bret,
In the original discussion with Dawkins, there's a part missing where you explain senescence. Would you mind repeating this point or going into it in more on your channel ?
Also, can you explain explain lineage selection ( you brought it up during the talk with Dawkins ).
Purpose and evolution don’t belong in the same sentence.
You put them in the same sentence yourself.
What is the purpose of evolution?
There I put them both in the same sentence.
What is the evolution of purpose?
I can see the influence of Jordan Peterson in this new scientific formulation of religion. It certainly changed my outlook on religion.
To borrow a turn of phrase attributed to Quine: Bret Weinstein "thinks with a broad brush."
he paints with a thin thinker
Much of religious text should be classified as Factually inaccurate, but true nonetheless.
Like what? Really?
@@mrkv4k Like the Bible or Torah or Koran
Bret gets stuck in a dead end, very revealingly, at around 15:00 when he begins talking about some kind of "noble" purpose that we must strive towards by recognizing the "negative" evolutionary forces tugging on us (this is all paraphrased). Is this the way an evolutionary biologist speaks? What's all this talk of good and wholesome goals for humanity? Bret, I believe, is an atheist, so where did this eschatology come from? Watch him fumbling when he begins that line of thought. But wait - maybe he is developing some kind of religious sensibility. The fallacy of Bret's proposed program to interfere in our cultural evolution, is that there is no way to execute such a program that doesn't fall afoul of an elitist / fascist assault on our civilization. This business is way too ethereal and complex for the man in the street to sign on to. How then to make an intervention - and who will make the intervention? None of these questions are addressed by Bret - and hence, I see his self-confidence in this matter as being arrogant and ill-conceived. Forgive my clumsy prose, dear reader - I just wanted to get this out as soon as I listened to the interview.
Yes it's a bit vague and lofty isn't it
What do you expect from a narcissistic IDW darling with little to no accomplishments or contributions to his field?
Yeah, I got that same sense of elitism that has so often been used to crush the will of the many with the notion of "don't worry, we know what's good for you".
I don't really agree. I can't speak to Bret's supposed motives here but as you pointed out at 15:00 when he discusses cultural evolution.. the point is that we *already* have so much in our society that pulls us against our own base instincts which we can attribute to memes & extended phenotypes. We already do this and will continue to do this, somewhat at random, depending on the usefulness of a behavior. I don't see how it is a religious argument to suggest that we look for the mechanisms wherein we might discover important memetic systems that could be considered evolutionarily relevant in regards to (group) behavioral patterns and have repeated all throughout human history. He's not saying "this is true, therefore we ought to.." he's *asking* , as all science does, "this is potentially the road left unexplored, therefore we ought to research it one way or another and at least see if it's wrong or not" Why is that so controversial? It sounds like atheist fragility when people misconstrue someone's general hypothesis about the emergence of religion being particularly useful to humanity in biological terms as arrogance. If it's so egregious a claim, why can't we prove it wrong? It would only benefit you to discover Bret Weinstein to be a failed theorist at best if you're that suspicious of him.
I had kind of the same feeling about his argument. But, you don't need to get too angry about it, ideas spread and evolve step by step, and even if I don't totally agree with Bret's argument I do can see nevertheless the opening of new directions and ideas, and I think that's the important part (you can't dismiss, say Copernicus, for not having produced a complete Newtonian explanation of the universe). I feel Bret's idea is more interesting and takes into account a more complete (or wide) range of complex variables that the ideas of Dawkins, and that, I think, is in fact a step forward.
Brett, younare right, population level dynamics contributes to gene survival. This is not the same as survival of the species, it also does not mean that the population is a unit of selection.’it just means that the kinselection paradigm
Needs to be expanded so that actual sameness is used in stead of degree of kinship. As an evolutionary theoretician I have published about this kind of dynamics and showed how altruïstic traits can evolve this way.
doesn't hamilton's rule sort of account for this already?
This was simply amazing. Bret Weinstein is one of my favorite new thinkers.
Mine also.
He doesn’t own a relevant and original thought.
He spits out the ideas of others.
You’re following a regurgitation.
He has not contributed to science except to teach what was already known.
@@UnknownUnknown-bx2lc Ok. Well, it's good for people to learn stuff, so that's not exactly "no contribution." I hear you though - I haven't really studied his career in any way, so I'll have to take your word for it. I have heard him talk about his background some, though, and it sounds like it was quite a struggle for him, so I guess he's doing well to be getting by at all.
@@KipIngram You don't need him to learn. That's my point. He may help you learn what other people came up with, but those things are learnable without him. He is unnecessary scientifically. He's a really good learner and regurgitator. That's all. Its nice, and all. but nothing he says, came from his own brain. His opinion is useless.
Trust perhaps in those things that he references, but trusting anything else that comes out of his mouth is asinine, he's been proven wrong CONSTANTLY when using his own intuitions, he's only ever correct when he quotes other people.
He's not an original.
He's unecessary.
Cut out the middle... He's a speedbump in your quest for knowledge, because his interpretations of actual science are oft incorrect even when he quotes them directly.
He still doesn't even understand covid testing and vaccines at even a basic level, while still spouting on about them as if he's an expert.
Any expert will tell you that he's clearly not, just by listening to him for 30 seconds.
He's a moron. He's fauci. He's been smart enough to learn 1% more than most, and that keeps them rioting for his attention, like everyone here. it's pathetic, go above him to actual experts, he's a flawed proxy for actual science.
@@UnknownUnknown-bx2lc No, of course I don't. Learning comes easily to me. One of my blessings in life, and I'm grateful for it. But it's not easy for everyone, and I regard helping others toward knowledge as a worthy pursuit. Anyway, I guess I just don't have the chip on my shoulder for him that you seem to have. I don't particularly feel like startinng a fan club for him either - I'm basically neutral. It's all ok - you don't like him, and that's fine - your reasons are your own. No one's liked by everyone.
Take care and stay safe, man.
Some who "realize" they are monsters go on to act out their role, BELIEVING they "realized" they are monsters.
I'm with Dawkins on this one 100%
Not literal? I know a woman who cut her childs image out of her family photos because he was gay and therefore sinful. Cutting your child out of your family photos and disowning him for being gay is pretty damn literal.
Metaphorical truth isn't even a sensible combination of words. It's like "hallucinated reality".
Metaphorical truth the way Bret and Peterson use it just means "useful beliefs", which still is just potential and not necessarily the case. There is no consistent mechanism to determine whether they're even useful before the fact. This whole concept is just silly to me, because neither of them can reliably pinpoint any "metaphorical truths". They can only point to arbitrary examples that prove nothing, because their effects are always correlated to the individual, exactly like any silly supernatural belief, which is why every religious Person invents their own religion to an extent. Everytime they point to a positive outcome, I can point to multiple negative ones or a really big negative one.
Pseudoscience babble. I like Bret, but jumping on the metaphorical truth bandwagon made me lose respect for him.
It's just postmodernism in a different coat
Your definition isn't quite accurate. A metaphoric truth is something that isn't true, but believing it provides a beneficial utility. It's a useful term because it separates the utility of unsubstantiated beliefs from the utility of scientific knowledge.
@@pauldaigle9167 That's why I called it useful beliefs. I do acknowledge that for example checking whether or not a gun is loaded multiple times is useful, but I disagree that it's irrational in principle and I also disagree that metaphorical truth is the right term to use on this (I don't think it's a useful term at all) as it causes more confusion than is warranted. And I even disagree with Sam Harris there who's one of my long-term intellectual heroes. It is indeed rational, because if you're aware of how fallible and easily distracted the human mind is (which can be determined by statistics), it's entirely reasonable to put yourself in "absolute safety mode" in order to shift the focus to the situation as much as possible when it comes to gun safety.
This is not a metaphorical truth or a useful belief or lie, it's simply the most rational response given the facts about our own behaviour. That makes it irrational if viewed from an individuals perspective or from the human perspective in general even (and from there calling it metaphorical truth or beliefs with utility or useful beliefs makes sense), but it makes it entirely rational if viewed objectively from outside that framework which is what we should always aim for when it comes to finding the most rational explanation.
Sure, this might be semantics to an extent, but I'm one of the proponents of always discussing semantics first, because otherwise the conversation most likely isn't going to be fruitful.
Metaphorical truth simply means that, being unaware of the factual truth, you went for the correct decision based on a lie or an irrational belief at that moment. So you chose the best answer available for the wrong reason. The problem with that is that when you discuss a topic that is all-encompassing (like religion in the 11th century), you have nobody left to figure out whether or not this is actually the case. And that means that you have no way to determine whether or not this process even took place _until_ someone comes along with an explanation that is based on evidence when looking into answers that we don't yet have an answer for right now, like how to handle AI and it's infinite potential.
What Bret is essentially advocating here is to leave the people who are wrong with their stupid beliefs so long as they're not harmful (which they already are) and provide utility _from an outside perspective._
If you don't have that outside perspective, then what do you do? You have no methodology without rationality if you simply stick to those beliefs and as soon as you figure out the correct answer through rational methods, you can no longer seriously believe in the useful lie anyway, because you know the actual answer (nobody choses their beliefs). All you can do is leave the stupid people with their stupid answers and chose not tell them about the rational path to get there, which is a mode of mind that will keep them gullible in other parts of their life by default.
This cannot be the answer even Peterson is looking for, because it drives people further away from finding the best pathway to truth and basically puts them back into dark ages mode.
Metaphorical truths can only work somewhat reliably if there's someone aware of them and supervising the situation or when analyzing history. When looking into the future, they're completely useless because there's no reliable way to determine this without the use of rationality in the first place.
This discussion isn't just about whether or not the fact that religious impulse is an evolutionary adaptation or not. What individuals like Weinstein and Peterson are doing is saying, "Religion is an evolutionary adaptation, therefor Christianity should be maintained", which is a non sequitur.
The issue we're having, particularly with these 'intellectuals', is that all the debates are framed from a materialism world view. Dawkins makes a move away from materialism with his idea of memes but doesn't take that on. In Hermeticism the first principle is the Principle of Mentalism: 'The All is Mind, the universe is mental.' If we viewed evolution from this point of view we would realise that while our animal natures are still in a Darwinian type of evolution (i.e. Natural Selection) our higher natures are evolving in consciousness and through the mind.
The mystery schools of old taught that we had two natures, the lower and higher, and this was acted out through the dramas and stories that were told. So, for example, the story of Theseus slaying the Minotaur. In that story the Minotaur represents the lower animal nature of man (or lower self), and Theseus represents the Higher nature of man (or Higher Self). Theseus has to travel through the labyrinth (the mind) to slay his inner beast.
Some of these science types seem defeatist on the idea of the transcendent. They are either in the camp that we are doomed to follow our lower mind's beast-like desires, or we have to control people for their own good. They don't put their trust in the individual man or woman to be able to slay their inner beast and transcend their lower nature. This is a big mistake, and very dangerous. People have been transcending for as long as we have any recorded history and have produced some of the most incredible art and music and literature, amongst other things, due to the fact that they were given the freedom to express themselves. Removing people's freedom for the 'greater good' will only lead to stagnation, and suppression of human expression.
Well said!
Next up: Here is why astrology is true. Do people still buy this transcendence bullshit?
Your Internet Friend So you don't have anything like a shadow that you have to acknowledge and integrate (and thereby transcend)?
Someone else gets it. Thank you!
Biology has no answer for consciousness, no matter what lies the fundamentalist materialists try to tell you.
@@tbayley6
You are talking gibberish.
Sounds like religion hurt that Dawkins fella
And he may not at that time had the strength to fight back, poor lad
I appreciate Brett’s measured, careful explanations. My argument, however, with his early comment re religion is this: Jesus Christ is the most studied historical, literal figure. He is not an idea.
11:15 "Cultural traits are obligated to severe genetic interests"
How does that gel with the Aztec culture's preoccupation with human sacrifice on an epic scale?
Other meso-American cultures shared this to varying degrees.
Two kinds of people were sacrificed:
-Slaves captured from other tribes
-Willful "heroes" (like the team who wins at that sport they had)
In their minds, those people's sacrifices were responsible to appeasing the gods, therefore reducing the levels of anxiety of the whole population, and mantaining their psychological structure of handling the world.
It was amoral, but it was good for the lineage.
@@ultimatedream42 That's not falsifiable (and it's so broadly applicable to cultural traits as to render the original proposition meaningless), but in social sciences and history, we're stuck with the first limitation, as a minimum... so in that context, your reply seems to me not only thoughtful, but plausible. I guess the Aztecs, who arguably fell for the proposition "if a little bit of something is good, then a whole lot must be REALLY good", might have been en route to self-extinction in the absence of impending colonisation, so their existence cannot be taken to imply that epic human sacrifice was necessarily a sustainable stratagem. Slaves are a hard-won and valuable resource, as are heroes, and squandering resources generally puts one culture at a competitive disadvantage with neighbours less wasteful. (As the US might be in the throes of discovering)
ultimatedream42 the Aztec and other cultures also practiced child sacrifice
They really aren't. A meme that castrates everyone it infects can still proliferate just fine. It doesn't need to gonads of the host, just the brain and voice.
That wasn’t a debate. Brett was the host of Dawkins appearance. He just looked like a fool bringing that nonsense up. I was embarrassed for him
As happens each time the IDW interacts with intelligent, and better educated people, they always seem like idiots when they leave their safe spaces.
Big Dawkins fan here. However, I like what BW says here about religion as an adaptation. But I think he doesn't explain it very well in that he seemed to focus on modern western religion and not the true beginnings of religion -- which I think is what he really wants to focus on. I believe what BW is trying to say is this:
Religion is an behavioral adaptation (much in the same way that wolves have a behavioral adaptation that drives them to hunt in packs). Religion is an behavioral adaptation of socializing and storytelling which promotes safety of a group of homo-sapiens (or possibly as far back as homo-erectus?)
Long before there was writing, long before there was even any religion, humans (again, maybe even stretching back to homo-erectus) sat around a fire to cook meat and eat while they discussed, even in a primitive language, the best ways to avoid being killed by predators or each other. Stories were created because they are easier to share with subsequent generations than actual rules of how to live. In time these stories became part of a set of religious beliefs. To believe in these religious stories was beneficial to group behavior. Those who excepted storytelling and religious ideals gained social acceptance and thus had better chance of a mate and living longer.
It wasn't necessary for a god to be created out of religion....but it happened. Humans wanted there to be a god because it helped to easily explain complex situations regarding the world and human behavior.
Dawkins was not frightened, he was careful. Weinstein should be too, more than he claims to be.
Keep up the great work!!!
Can't even stand listening to this guy. You can't cram everything into evolutionary theory, just because you can find/claim some analogous aspects does not mean you can add it to the existing theory without demonstrating any actual truth to your claims. Look at the countless religions that have gone extinct, and the fact that religions have had to mutate to continue in the face of better religious or secular philosophy, how the most successful and best societies are the least religious, how religious beliefs underpin or facilitate virtually every war in human existence, the fact that there is no religious gene identified that has been strengthened and spread from religious belief, all point to the absolute bullshit of the position Bret is self righteously preaching.
Exactly right, he is full of shit. Bothers me that a substantial amount of people seem to think he was going over Dawkins head.
Just because you can find/claim some analogous aspects does not mean you can add it to the existing theory without demonstrating any actually truth to your claims.
Just saying ;) I hope you get it.
I think you just described how religion is adaptive in a Darwinian sense and then used that description as an argument against it being adaptive in a Darwinian sense. Odd...
" how the most successful and best societies are the least religious"
You made a big leap here, from what Bret was actually talking about. He was only ever discussing religion being a good self-replicator. You're talking about morality.
"the fact that there is no religious gene identified that has been strengthened and spread from religious belief"
So first of all... genes don't really work like that. There isn't just a "religious gene". We won't find one because there almost certainly isn't one. More like, the phenotype cocktail from many genes all combine into the kind of mind that is highly conforming to tribal superstition in some form. The fact that this exists is proven by the history of theism, deism and any kind of superstition or belief in higher power, which is extremely pre-historic. It's all over the damn place.
Aw, someone's having their worldview shit own and doesnt like the taste.
What about a guy who behaves in such a way to go to heaven and blows himself and a couple hundreds people up to reach his goal?
That's called islam
I love Brett and I think he's genuinely one of the nicest guys that I see on TH-cam. In addition his wife is an absolute Rockstar and probably the better half of that couple. Having said that every time I listen to him and he gets a little bit closer to what he really wants to say I am absolutely terrified not only for him and for America but for all of humanity...the hubris exhibited by academics and scholars like him over the centuries as led to nothing but chaos destruction and death and to assume that we can monkey around with a mechanism as complex as natural selection speaks to me only of disaster...
Monkeying around with natural selection has given the us the cute furry little man's best friend shown in your profile picture out of the man-eating force of nature that was once the wolf.
@@keithbarnett3055 you win ...bring on crisper and the eugenics program...we're way smarter than those scientists in the miniseries Firefly from back in the 80s we won't create any "Reavers" because we know all of the unintended consequences that might happen... because we're so smart... Not like those ignorant fools in are barbaric past... LOL
LOL....yes indeed, Snoopy does bear a striking resemblance to a Reaver..... because (of course) the hubris of men like Weinstein has never lead to anything but chaos, destruction and death. Poor Snoopy, I never realized he was the harbinger the end times.
@@keithbarnett3055 lol... What's the old saying the breeders best friend is the drowning sac ... Better start working on those cute floppy ears or you won't be allowed to procreate in Brett's world...
@@daneracamosa He is not talking about eugenics. Very good analogy used in the debate is how tribal aggression has been pretty well decoupled in sports. It proves it can be done and we do not need eugenics to achieve it.
The debate was a great conversation about why we haven’t been progressing more about evolution theory. Also religion as an evolutionary adaptation.
I like Brett, but he essentially justifying dogmatism. Also, he is arguing that not much progress has been made since the selfish gene. So what is stopping him from writing such a book that attains such a goal?
he is too busy minding his twitter feed and trying to get petersen's followers
I suspect he will eventually. He just needs to stress test his ideas. Doing it publicly is like a baptism by fire. He could easily come out the other end with the right answer.
Are you familiar with the old adage that "a judgement made is an indictment of the judge, and not the object of judgement."? In other words, your attribution of the effect this interview is having, says more about your thoughts than it does Brett's? I take it that you dont like religious dogma and you feel any justification for religious ideas must therefore be an endorsement of the dogma that often comes with it? Maybe he wasn't trying to do that at all? Maybe you infered a pattern of motive on someone because youve encountered people in the past attempting to do that?
Psychology really is the greatest science for a reason. Food for thought.
@@WillCarter1976 It's Bret's most important job as a public speaker to make sure that exactly this doesn't happen. If you can with all intellectual honesty say "maybe he means something else", he didn't do his job properly. It's up to the speaker to make the clearest possible distinctions, not the listener to interpret them because their statements are so open for interpretation. This is where Peterson fails as well and much worse than Bret at that.
@@Luftgitarrenprofi It would be wonderful if that is how our brains worked, but sadly that isn't reality. If you ever played the telephone game as a child you'd know that not only does the brain not acurately recall speech, but it's much worse than that. The human brain actually records what it receives and then interprets that information by pattern sorting it against information already possessed. In other words, your brain basically doesnt do a very good job of processing anything it hears as "new" information once out of adolescence. Just like with Jordans Cathy Newman video, some folks just cant hear what is being said, because their brains are litterally too busy trying to dismiss what he's saying as "so what you really mean is".
It's nigh impossible for a person of rationality to change their minds on issues of fundamental importance especially when a person has psychologically speaking, tied themselves to an idea. It's not that the speaker isn't being clear. It's often than the listener is doing a poor job of listening and being able to interpret new information on its merits, and not dismissing and filing new data under "sounds like the same crap i've heard before."
Many smart people have often said, you can lead a person to new data, but you can't force them to incorporate it with a few clever sentences. Or put another way, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink.
Nice follow up interview to the discussion I just watched, subscribed.
"A significant moment in evolutionary biology"! Delusions of grandeur or what. Science doesn't progress by two tadgers chatting on a stage about a theory that has already, especially as Dawkins understands it, seen better days. Have a word.
Great interview and remarkable insight !
A problem here appears to be a misunderstanding, when Bret talks about the term « mind virus » used by Dawkins to explain how he sees religion.
He forgot to understand the way Dawkins thinks the world, with a much more materialist aspect. Where everything is made of matter and interaction which can be predict,measured and proved through the spectrum of science and its rigour.
He never claimed that religion didn’t brought positive things in the past (in fact he often talked about some of the best things brought by it AND the possible evolutionary benefit that explains their longevity and recurrence in our societies). He may have not been the most dedicated in studying religion through evolutionary spectrum but none the less, it’s still a valid point to think of religion as an obstacle to TRUTH. So therefore him claiming religion to be a «mind virus» in regards of reality is comprehensive.
That said, theology should be studied as a anthropological branch, im sure we can find fascinating data that can provide answers in a lot of different disciplines in regards to history,science (of psychology,evolution…),philosophy etc.
But we surely know that morality isn’t born of revelation, its man made wisdom expressed in manner to convince a large group to follow a certain set of rules/beliefs/codes. Whether fear or necessity where implied to it. This ability of religions for control may have been its greatest trick we created but as also lead the terrible effects we know. A necessary evil ? Perhaps…
Please let’s keep that in mind to make sure present societies doesn’t get obscure as they where in the past. As for the point of Mr.Weinstein about the need to «commander our own machinery» (great way to put it btw) i couldn’t agree more as sure Mr Dawkins or any sensible person would. Thanks for the upload really enjoyed this video.
For once I disagree with Brett, when he describes new atheism I don't recognize it at all. I mean maybe it fits some you tubers like the amazing atheist, but really not harris, Dawkins, hitch or dillahunty.
Timmay- your atheist mind virus makes us unfit and is destroying civilization. Time to bury the fedora.
There's a shared beief held by most of the New Atheists that it would be better if religions not exist. This belief puts them at odds with people like Johnathan Haidt, David Sloan Wilson, and Bret weinstein who all agree that God doesn't exist, but that religion serves a beneficial function to society.
Did you guys watch the recent Pangburn event with Harris, Dawkins and Dillahunty? I was excited for it but found it quite boring. The New atheists are not developing their discussions in any way so it seems somewhat unsophisticated. Leaving no opening for learning; I struggle that Harris didn't feel the need to adjust anything after the Peterson debates.
Of course, considering that New Atheism is the ideological belief you subscribe to. You must defend your identity at all costs.
@@quad9363 Sam Harris believes in the utility of fictions. He said it multiple times during his debates with JBP. His problem is when we forget that these fictions are just fictions and embrace them as dogma.
Great work! Thank you, very much!
There is something contradictory in Weinstein’s argument in this conversation with Dawkins... saying we should understand that we are programmed to do things that are appalling due to the evolutionary dynamic in order to make sure it doesn’t manifest, is in itself a kind of social idea, a meme. But on the other hand, Weinstein see memes as part of the extended phenotype, which makes them byproducts of the evolutionary dynamic we should go against... so basically, he his saying that we have evolved to go against evolution itself, which is a kind of syllogistic fallacy... I’m not saying he’s wrong, but his argument seems poorly formulated from a rhetorical point of view...
No, you are right. And it is not a problem with his formulation. Bret is essentially correct in his critique, but contradicts himself with gibberish. Memes are part of the extended phenotype, so what he argues for is a dead end. I think he construed this to be able to rationalize the true meaning of this 'discovery'.
Wheres the link to Brett's channel?
The only intellectually honest position to hold in terms of religion or atheism is agnosticism. This merely means "I don't know as I can't prove anything" in relation to the existence of god.
I've read all the great atheist texts and they are merely a rejection of organized religions. None of them can or do speak to consciousness or empirical spiritual experiences.
You seem to confuse two positions: Theism is about what you (claim to) believe. Gnosticism is about what you (claim to) know. Dawkins is an agnostic atheist. He doesn't believe in any god and he doesn't claim to know whether gods exist. Atheism is the scientific position to take. There is no evidence that gods exist. You should only believe in what is true. Therefore you should not believe in gods. Pretty easy, isn't it?
Weinstein's argument is that you should also believe in things that are useful. He even calls them "(metaphorically) true". It's a largely unscientific philosophical position.
Your Internet Friend Goodness me, no. Weinstein's position is that we better understand what's happening with the religious instinct, rather than simply shouting down the whole thing and then playing whack-a-mole as it sprouts out in less controlled directions.
@@yourinternetfriend6778
I agree with you till the "unscientific philosophical position"...
Philosophical position does not have to be scientific as you imply(if you imply that). Science is merely a tool for describing (making models)reality as best as we can, it makes no claims other than that(about nature of those).
Just wanted to clear that up.
@@bozoc2572
> Philosophical position does not have to be scientific
Didn't try to imply that.
If you don't know whether God exists, do you believe or not believe? It's binary. There is no choice between believing and not.
Agnostic = you don't actually believe in God. That's the definition of an atheist.
I liked Bret advocating for rising above our biological urges by understanding them, and choosing to instead follow objectives which are meaningful for us today. You can apply this to his view that religion provides useful heuristics and is therefore ubiquitous and still persisting. You can say that the value of religion was a lot more useful back then but it's declining now since we can get the goods of religion without subscribing to it. Dawkins wrote in the God Delusion that "religious behaviour may be a misfiring, an unfortunate by-product of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful." So religion isn't necessarily a useful tool now just because it's so prevalent. It can be regarded as satisfying a primal evolutionary urge like spreading our own genes at the expense of all others, and like Bret said, we can and should challenge these biological impulses built into us.
Weinstein is way over simplifying Dawkins position. Dawkins has taken into account the adaptation issue.
I believe Bret is wrong that Dawkins or others do not see the value. 'Not seeing the forest for the trees'. The issue that Dawkins or others have is that religious folks OFTEN take these teachings as literal and they also affect politics.
Bret could be on the cusp of supplanting Dawkins as the pre-eminent Evolutionary Biologist. I tend to agree with Bret on this issue. Dawkins may have to accept and evolution of his ideas - which he may or may not be willing to do. One cannot deny the irony that new-atheism is a very poor survival strategy - in fact it is suicidal.
Brett def deserves it. And he's asking important questions and trying to venture into politically incorrect discussions, and Dawkins on the other hand was avoiding or dismissing it. Maybe he is scared of the leftist mob. Brett on the other hand overcame the mob and came out on the other side victorious!
Please consider this more before jumping on the bandwagon. This is complex stuff and it seems to me that Bret is seriously oversimplifying with his position. He is reducing culture down to an extended phenotype and completely dismissing the role of memes. This appears to me as it did to Dawkins: foolish, simple-minded, and counter-productive. This isn't a disagreement over politics either, its about being precise about the nature of human culture. If one champions Bret because of his honorable defense against the attacks of the Inter-sectional goons, I will join in applause. But a man can be both a hero and a fool. Because he is right about the political question doesn't mean he should be applauded in the realm of Evolutionary Biology, and one should be especially skeptical of a desire in one-self to do just that.
"venere" or "to come from" in Latin is the idea that everything we have comes from something more fundamental. When you are seeing absurdities or dead ends in your structure, you don't modify the structure... You throw it out and get one more subvenient. The fewer assumptions and brute facts in the subvening theory, the better.
This guy is reaching lol. Good scientists know when they are stepping out of their field 🙄
He is an evolutionary biologist.. What exactly was he reaching for?
Did he really just call it "Jordan Peterson's concept of the Shadow?" That's JUNG'S idea, and Peterson would certainly admit it as such.
Wow. He's a jewish supremacist. All philosophy is a confession, Bret. I'm glad you're out in the open.
Damn this channel is blowing up...
Not literally
@@RebelWisdom few that's good... 😉 When is the Ken Wilber one coming up?