"[T]here is something very significant in this question of the hubris involved in imagining that youre going to improve the discussion by censoring... [T]he majority of concepts at the fringe are nonsense... but the heterodoxy at the fringe, which is indistinguishable at the beginning from the nonsense ideas, is the key to progress. So if you decide... the fringe is 99% garbage, lets just get rid of it. ...Yeah, but that 1% ... is the key. ...Eric makes an excellent point about the distinction between ideas and personal attacks, ... [T]heres no value in allowing people to destroy each others lives, even if theres a technical legal defense for it. Now, how you draw that line, I dont know... Yes, people should be free to traffic in bad ideas, and they should be free to expose that the ideas are bad, and hopefully that process results in better ideas winning out."
Bret Samuel Weinstein is an American podcaster, author, and former professor of evolutionary biology. He served on the faculty of Evergreen State College from 2002 until 2017, when he resigned in the aftermath of a series of campus protests about racial equity at Evergreen, which brought Weinstein to national attention. Like his brother Eric Weinstein, he was named as a member of the intellectual
"[A]ll of our environmental problems look like... somebody making a profit for degrading what belongs to the rest of us. ...[T]his behavior should not be allowed within a marketplace. We are fracturing the world. We are liquidating it, we are draining it, we are denuding it, we are over-exploiting it. It is apparent to anyone... The idea that this should not be allowed is transparent."
Bret Weinstein"[My] work... looked at the fact that shortening was being looked at by two different groups... by people interested in counteracting the aging process, and... in exactly the opposite fashion, by people who were interested in tumorigenesis in cancer. ...Tumors ...always had active, thats the enzyme that lengthens our telomeres. So those folks were interested in bringing about a halt in the lengthening of telomeres... to counteract cancer, and the folks that were studying the process were interested in lengthening telomeres... to generate greater repair capacity. ...[M]y point was evolutionarily speaking this looks like a pleiotropic effect, that the genes which create the tendency of the cells to be limited in their capacity to replace themselves, are providing a benefit in youth... that we are largely free of tumors and cancer at the inevitable late life cost that we grow feeble and inefficient, and eventually die. ...[T]hat matches a very old hypothesis in evolutionary theory by somebody I was fortunate enough to know, George Williams..."
Bret Weinstein"Why is an evolutionary theorist talking about climate change? ...[C]limate change is not really a problem, its more a symptom of a problem... that caused the financial collapse of 2008, that caused the in the Gulf in 2010, and the ongoing Fukushima disaster starting in March of 2011."
Bret Weinstein"The agents in the market are responding to opportunities that we have left open. It makes no more sense to be angry at them... than it does to be angry at the mosquito for sucking your blood. ...[Y]ou have to close down the opportunity."
Bret Weinstein"[C]aptive-rodent breeding protocols, designed to increase reproductive output, simultaneously exert strong selection against reproductive senescence and virtually eliminate selection that would otherwise favor tumor suppression. This appears to have greatly elongated the telomeres of laboratory mice. With their telomeric failsafe effectively disabled, these animals are unreliable models of normal senescence and tumor formation. Safety tests employing these animals likely overestimate cancer risks and underestimate tissue damage and consequent accelerated senescence."
Bret Weinstein"We hypothesize that (1) in vertebrates, a telomeric fail-safe inhibits tumor formation by limiting cellular proliferation. (2) The same system results in the progressive degradation of tissue function with age."
Bret Weinstein