Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations

It's exactly because you’re rationally reachable that this matters.

I’m not questioning your beliefs, and I’m not saying you secretly believe in Intelligent Design. The issue is that some of the arguments you’re making didn’t originate organically or scientifically -- they were deliberately promoted through deceptive education policy and textbook standards, especially in large markets like Texas, precisely because that influence scaled nationally. People often absorb them without realizing their origin.

After Intelligent Design spectacularly failed in court, its proponents pivoted to influencing education standards rather than arguing science directly. In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), a U.S. federal district court ruled that Intelligent Design is not science and cannot be taught in public school biology classes because it is religious in nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_Schoo...

>[Creationist defense witness] Fuller memorably called for an "affirmative action" program for intelligent design, which did not win much favor with [Judge] Jones in his final decision.

That was one of the most jaw-dropping moments in the entire Dover trial: an unintentional confession that Intelligent Design cannot meet the standards of science and therefore must be smuggled into classrooms under a quota system. "Teach the Controversy" is affirmative action for bad ideas: a grievance policy masquerading as pedagogy.

>"Witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions," [Judge] Jones wrote. "The inescapable truth is that both [Alan] Bonsell and [William] Buckingham lied at their January 3, 2005 depositions. ... Bonsell repeatedly failed to testify in a truthful manner. ... Defendants have unceasingly attempted in vain to distance themselves from their own actions and statements, which culminated in repetitious, untruthful testimony." An editorial in the York Daily Record described their behavior as both ironic and sinful, saying that the "unintelligent designers of this fiasco should not walk away unscathed." Judge Jones recommended to the US Attorney's office that the school board members be investigated for perjury.

So the bald faced liars and $1,000,011 judgement losers pivoted to "Teach the Controversy", and states like Texas were their key targets, because of their centralized textbook approval process and market size, which historically shaped textbooks used nationwide.

The "Teach the Controversy" framing was designed to insert doubt about evolution without explicitly promoting religion, and its language appeared repeatedly in state curriculum debates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_the_Controversy

As a result, many people encountered these arguments against evolution in school without ever being told where they came from or what they were designed to accomplish -- and repeat them without realizing how the same strategy continues today in much broader political efforts, like Project 2025.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design_in_politics...

I agree, it's much better to name the movement you represent by its original name and don't waste time trying to engage in conversation.

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Fair enough -- then let’s dive into substance.

I’m not objecting because I "don't like" Rogan or Weinstein, and I'm not saying you're religious or wittingly pushing ID. I’m objecting because the specific framing you're repeating is decades old, well studied, and routinely mis-presented in popular media as if it repairs a flaw in evolutionary theory that doesn't actually exist.

The idea that non-coding DNA, developmental constraints, or regulatory structure "reduce the search space" is not controversial, it’s foundational. What is misleading is presenting this as a fix for a "pure random walk" model of evolution. That model was abandoned generations ago and is mainly kept alive in popular discourse by critics of evolution (Creationists, the Discovery Institute, Intelligent Design proponents, Teach the Controversy perpetrators, anti-science podcasters, etc).

Weinstein calling this a "pet theory" is itself revealing. What he’s describing is not a theory in the scientific sense at all, and certainly not his. It’s a loose, personalized retelling of ideas that have been standard in evolutionary biology for decades -- regulatory architectures, developmental constraints, biased variation, and genotype–phenotype structure.

Labeling it a "pet theory" performs two rhetorical tricks at once: it makes old, well-established work sound novel and contrarian, and it subtly implies the field has overlooked something obvious that only an outsider is willing to say. That framing flatters the audience, but it misrepresents the science.

His "pet theory" is a non-refundable Monty Python dead parrot: widely known, long settled in the literature, yet periodically propped up and insisted to be alive as if it just said something profound.

Nothing here is hidden, suppressed, or newly discovered. What is new is the podcast packaging: stripping away the literature, resurrecting a long-abandoned strawman ("pure random walk evolution"), and then presenting the correction as a unique "pet theory" of personal insight rather than as settled biology. That move reliably generates the impression of deep insight without adding any.

If you want solid, non-Rogan, non-Weinstein sources, here are places to start:

Sean B. Carroll -- Endless Forms Most Beautiful: Classic introduction to evo-devo, gene regulatory networks, and why morphology is highly constrained and reusable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endless_Forms_Most_Beautiful_%...

Gerhart & Kirschner -- The Theory of Facilitated Variation: Explicitly addresses how biological systems bias variation toward viable outcomes. This is probably the closest rigorous treatment of what Weinstein gestures at, minus the hype.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_variation

Wagner & Altenberg (1996) -- Complex Adaptations and the Evolution of Evolvability: Shows how genotype–phenotype mappings are structured, non-uniform, and historically constrained.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2410639

Pigliucci & Müller -- Evolution: The Extended Synthesis: Covers developmental bias, constraint, and non-coding DNA without implying evolution was ever a blind bit-flip search.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_evolutionary_synthesi...

Lenski et al. (2003–2015) -- Long-term E. coli evolution experiments: Direct experimental evidence of cumulative selection exploiting structured variation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...

And if you insist on watching dramatic youtube videos about junk DNA instead of reading books:

Exposing Discovery Institute Part 10: Casey Luskin Again (Because He's Such a Loser Fraud)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOnb0SZYZUI

None of this is new, hidden, or suppressed, or invented by Weinstein. It’s in textbooks and review papers.

The reason I push back hard -- and people get downvoted for recommending Rogan/Weinstein (which you already knew, just not why) -- is that their signature move is to strip this literature of context, reintroduce a strawman ("random walk evolution"), present a well-known correction as contrarian revelation, and imply experts missed something obvious.

That pattern reliably manufactures doubt without producing new insight.

So no, my objection is not "don't listen to them".

It's: don't mistake and parrot repackaged, incomplete explanations for novel insight, especially when they're framed as fixing a problem experts allegedly ignored.

If you want to understand this topic deeply, the literature above will take you much farther than a podcast -- or Weinstein’s dead parrot -- ever will.

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