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.