Your body is designed to fail. It's literally encoded in your genes by evolution itself. My guest today is Dr. Brett Weinstein, evolutionary biologist and co host of the Dark Horse podcast. And he's going to explain why aging isn't some disease that we can cure. It's the price we pay for being the most complex organism in the known universe. But here's the thing nobody tells you. Your genome is under constant attack, constant pressure to stay small, which forces your genes to multitask.

The same gene that makes you strong at 20 years old actively degrades you.

At 60 years old.

Evolution doesn't care about your golden years. It cares about reproduction, transporting your genetic code into the future. And once you've passed your genes forward, you're maybe obsolete. But this conversation goes way beyond aging.

And we have touched the foothill of a peak that we can't see. The nature of our species is to climb that peak, which we are doing at an incredibly high rate. And the consequences will simply be what they are. We can talk about protecting ourselves, regulating. None of it matters. We opened Pandora's box, and we will discover what happens when you do that.

We're talking about AI accelerating evolution into what Brett calls hypernov, environmental change so rapid that human biology can't keep up. We're discussing solar superstorms that could damage DNA and civilization overnight. While everyone obsesses over climate change, we're also exploring why the scientific method itself might have to bend. When you move from the physics lab to the complexity of a tropical rainforest.

What does it mean to infer things evolutionarily? Is this part of a new type of scientific method, or is this just the scientific method applied specifically in the incarnation of evolutionary frameworks?

Well, it's really both. The fact is, the sciences are grouped by the method we use to make inferences, but the types of inferences that we make in biology are fundamentally different because of the degree of true complexity and therefore emergence. So what. What I mean by this is the scientific method, we observe a pattern, we hypothesize a cause, we find predictions that follow from that hypothesis, and then we run a test to see if the predictions are manifest. That method is no different if you're running it in a chemistry lab versus in a tropical forest. But the type of inference is altered by the complexity of the forest relative to the lab bench. So, for example, if you say, well, you know, a single. A single observation that runs against the hypothesis falsifies it.

Well, that may be true in a chemistry lab or a physics lab where you can limit all of the inputs to the system. But if you make a prediction in a tropical forest, you're bound to see many things that go in the other direction, even if the hypothesis is true just by virtue of the huge number of influences on the system. And so we have to relax the rules of falsification, not because they're any less true in biology, but just because of the amount of noise. And we have to use unfortunate tools like statistics. You know, a single observation of gravitational lensing is enough to prove Einstein. But in, in biology, we might need to look at, you know, 10,000 examples of something in order to see whether the pattern we expect to see is present. So I, I do think people should understand that in one way, biology is actually closer to engineering and economics than it is to chemistry and physics. And it, and once you see that, it causes you to think about it differently.

So let me ask you this question. If there are universal principles applicable to evolution, then they should be understandable, at least by any general purpose intelligence. And we'll get to artificial intelligence soon. But, but I want to ask you, you know, if I scooped up some of this material down at the beach in San Diego here, and I just presented it hyper intelligent alien, you know, benevolent, of course, or to a artificial intelligence that had some, you know, ability to manipulate and, and to do all sorts of, you know, whatever you guys do in the biology lab. I don't know, Brett, when I dissected a frog in high school, it, it didn't die. It was, it was gruesome. But it seems to me that they should be able to understand and make predictions about stuff that we, that we experience. For example, if I gave this material to the hyper intelligent hypothetical alien, could it tell us that we would age? Could it make a prediction just on these molecules of DNA, of rna, et cetera, that we would experience aging, which you've done a lot of work on.