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One final Economic Data point before we start, the beloved independent, deepening your understanding. And politely suggest you buy the book on our event page where the url in the comment threads, but used to specialize in books. Townhall after all hosts those books. Doctor neil shubin is an evolution a biologist and Popular Science writer as well as the distinguished Service Professor at the university of chicago and associate dean of strategy of the University Biological Sciences division. The evolutionary origin, derived from fieldwork, greenland, china, africa and antarctica, discovered some of the earliest mammals, crocodiles and salamanders in the fossil record. In important transitional form between fish and land animals. Be on the research itself he is committed to sharing his work with the public for a variety of means, and active presence on facebook and twitter, the knowledge and cash and terrific books including the bestselling 2008, your interface, a journey into 3. 5 billion history of the human body from 2008 and 2013 the universe within, the history of the human body from 2013. One of these programs brought a visit to townhall in his latest book, some Assembly Required, the voting for billion years of life from fossils to dna, the occasion of tonights virtual return. Please join me in welcoming neil shubin. A delight to be with you to talk about some Assembly Required. I hope i find you and your loved ones well and happy and look forward to the next 34 minutes to talk about the transition. I have been a paleontologist and biologist working on this for three decades. It was stunning when i realized that. I began as an expeditionary paleontologist. Fossils tell us about how did mammals rise from reptiles. One of the first ones i let in the mid 80s. The paleontology thing is great and the graduate student eft on my desk a pile of papers, jeans how they evolved. Unlike okay, i got to learn this molecular biology stuff, like the species i study in the distant past, got to change or go extinct. It is both finding fossils and going to expeditions around the world, but molecular biology. And how did fish evolve to walk, these are the great questions. And and i was reading a biologist biography of lillian hellman. Lillian hellman had a very hard living existence. This woman is a federalist playwright, she drank a smoked, pulled in front of the house unamerican activities committee, Joe Mccarthys committee in the 50s, she was blacklisted from hollywood, from broadway as well. Thinking about her life years later during her autobiography as i was finishing the weird part, she had a quote that captures the spirit of the book in a nutshell. Nothing of course ever begins when you think of this. I remember reading that thinking that is the book in a nutshell, when you look at the history of anatomical features, structures, dna itself, nothing ever begins when you think it does. If you think when animals first evolved walk on land, if you think feathers arose as the ancestors of birds took place you would be in good company but you would be wrong. Weve known much of this for over a century. That is the story in a nutshell, whether it is jeans or anatomical structures, the changes we associate with the great transitions in the history of life rose well before in a different context and so much of evolution is about that. This story gains new meaning as we think about dna and looking at studies of dna, the molecule dna, what we have in dna, the double helix is six feet long, rolled up in on itself, not even inside itself inside the nucleus. Each of your cells has a 6 foot long strand of dna rolled inside itself, if you take all the dna of the body and lay it end to end, each of those from all 4 trillion or so cells in our bodies it would run from here almost to pluto. That is how much genetic material we have inside and we live in an era of genome project and genome technology. It took several decades to get the sequence, we can get a rough copy of the genome sequence for less than 1,000. We now have genomes for creatures as distant from humans to corn to flies to worms to thousands of species. With all that Genetic Information and all that genetic and computational tools we now see dna is a highly active molecule, crumbled inside the nucleus itself but opens and closes as the genes become activated in different ways. It is marvelously complex, the origins of different genes are amazingly wondrous. That we look at other aspects. Let me give you a striking example about the hidden mysteries of dna. It begins with this. Jason shepherd. Doctor shepherd is a professor of neurobiology, interested in the genes the control the formation of memories in humans, we have similar genes in this regard to mice. This particular gene, art is an interesting gene. A mutation is a problem. They can solve them but dont remember the solution the next day. When it is disrupted it disrupts memories that plays a role, they have many cognitive deficits like schizophrenia and other development of disorders. It is an important gene to understand the function. Jason was studying that. Like any biochemist studying a gene he was studying the protein the gene makes. What he did is popped under a microscope. He isolated the protein, jason sent a slide for me to show you and this is what he saw under a slide, under an electron microscope, you see these clumps, these globules fall and you can see them throughout the slide, this is a superhigh magnification, looking at this, thinking i have seen these clumps, these balls before, and you remember his training as a biologist and he pulled out a text book. Of virology textbook. And this is not a memory gene, and the university of utah, he invited them to the lab and asked them to look at the slide. That is hiv, because it is, jason is like no it is a memory gene. That set off a Chain Reaction of research leading to resources and looked at the sequence of the protein, the people, the signature of a virus of the kind which hiv is as well. When they looked at it they came up with the hypothesis that was originally a virus that invaded the genome of a distant ancestor, entered the genome and then is rented the genome it was repurposed by our distant ancestors instead of infecting and causing distress to function, what these pumps do is interesting. And hiv these clumps protect the genetic material of hiv as it travels from cell to cell to do its work. It is repurposed because this capsule protects the genetic material as it goes from cell to cell and making memories and narrow function as well. It is remarkable how a virus that entered the genome was repurposed for a new use. Heres the origin, a whole new gene that came from a virus, turns out thats not unusual. If you look at the proteins involved in pregnancy, some in the placenta, those were repurposed viruses, the list keeps growing as we understand more about the genome, to the point it can look at our genome, 8 of our genome is derived from ancient viruses, 8 is a derivative from ancient viruses. Only 2 are our own genes, only 2 of our genome in code proteins, we have five times more genetic material inside our genome than our genes that are derived from viruses. It is really remarkable, truly remarkable and serves everything from memories to pregnancy and many other functions as well. This just goes to show the mysteries in our own genome. It is surprising, this is all because new technology allowing us to see evolution in whole new ways. Some of the most important new ways we can look at evolution, the most exciting new ways, this is one of the greatest purposes of biology weve seen, significant progress in the last 30 years, you see a fertilized egg, sperm, egg put together in a single cell, that single cell from that single cell will be derived as it divides over and over, 2481632 and on and on and it will end up as a 4 or so trillion cell body like you and i and everybody in this audience is today with those cells all packed in the right way, differentiated, nerve cells and diverse cells inside of it, we call this going from single celled to a 4 trillion cell body, we call that bodybuilding. If you look at that slide, it catches how do you go from single cell on the left of the creature on the right and in that we have an enormous number of discoveries that have revealed the inner workings of the egg and how dna acts. What weve done is to understand the genetic recipe, the genes that interact to control the number of cells and their differentiation and where they are and so forth. As we begin to understand the process of going from egg to adult and different species, we can begin to understand evolution in a new way because changes in this process like changes in the process of how you build bodies explains a lot of evolution, changes in the process of how to build the body of a fish can produce the body of amphibians and so forth so changes to this development how it go to adults, a big piece of understanding evolution and people in our field have been interested in this for over a century and i want to talk about this historically and go into modern research. People have been interested in embryology, the transition from egg to adult and evolution for well over a century. One of the apocryphal moments in this is the work of bust duma real pictured here who had one of the worlds greatest jobs at the time, we are looking right after darwin published First Edition of origin of species in 1859, this is when the portrait was drawn and he was a lucky man, the keeper of reptiles and amphibians in the museum of Natural History in paris, people were coming back to paris from different parts of the globe with creatures they found and discovered and he got to describe them for the first time, to understand their basic biology. He received a package from people working in mexico, received a package of 6 of these and they were working in mexico and found these salamanders, four inches long, they are fully functioning sexually mature adults but they captured the imagination in the interest of these collectors for a couple reasons. The reasons are look at the gills, external gills, look at the tail, big aquatic tale, here is a creature that seems to be sexually mature and fully on aquatic. They thought darwin just published the origin of species in 1859, maybe he can understand the transition by understanding these creatures. What he did was he kept these salamanders. Little did everybody realize the Indigenous People of mexico knew these salamanders extremely well, so much so they had a soup recipe but they also knew quite a bit about their biology. So he kept these salamanders and put them in his menagerie and let them go and set up a quick aquarium, a terrestrial piece as well and let them be and came back and noticed months later he looked in his enclosure and these are the original he thought the salamanders were with them as well, they appeared out of nowhere. Look at them. They dont have an aquatic tale or external gills, it is like an entire different genus of salamanders, like some but he put chimpanzees in a cage one year and then came back the next here to find gorillas and chimpanzees in having the same cage. This got his attention in a big way, new species generate, a new kind of credit dont appear out of thin air. What he decided to do a study their biology, how they go from egg to adult and found something remarkable. He found like any good salamander they start at egg and hatch and have larvae, you can see at the top, the larvae have external gills and a big fleshy aquatic tale and the larvae in the water like little tadpoles and they swim around and get bigger and bigger and bigger but then there comes a point there are two possible states here. He noticed salamanders that at the fully aquatic ones get bigger and bigger and bigger and become sexually mature with all those aquatic features but then there is another way they can develop, they can undergo metamorphosis through an external environmental trigger, a hormone is released and they lose the gills, change the shape and change shape of the tail and become holy terrestrial. Heres one developing the program depending on the environment, two different states, two different kind of salamander can come from the same program. What is important to realize is a simple shift of development brings changes across the entire body. A simple shift in whether you metamorphose or not or there are hormones secreted can produce changes to tail, head, limbs which i didnt talk about, gills and so forth so this is a critical discovery igniting peoples interest in studying embryos and there is a whole tradition of people studying embryos and evolution in this way to see how small changes and development to bring about big changes in evolution in the adults. Now we can relate this to our own bodies. If you look at people, these creatures, human beings, as human beings we share a number of characteristics with other creatures which we are vertebrates, we have backbones, skulls, we share these features with fish and birds, mammals and reptiles, these make us vertebrates. There are other features we share, we have a spinal cord, gil arches and gill slits that form in development. Those are not in the skeleton but clearly in our developing of biology. For a long time people have asked what are the closest invertebrate relatives to vertebrates, what are the close relatives of squishy things with, claims, worms, you name it, what are they . People studying dna have come to the conclusion, well supported hypothesis that are closest invertebrate relatives are, get ready, these. Look at them. Compare the creatures on the left of the creatures on the right. You will not see a ton of similarities. The creature on the right is a sessile that sticks to the rocks, pumps water through in current siphon index current siphon, there is no spinal cord, no gill slits, no apparent body, some get even weirder. What do you do . Youve got to study the development, how they go from egg to adult, this is where it gets really interesting, one is through the lame of these things, this is the larvae, the closest squishy relatives. It hatches from the ag and has live a, head and tail. If you look at the head what does it have . Gill slits. If you look the rest of the body it has nerve cord which becomes a spinal cord and another structure, part a shared history. Are closest relative, there adults dont look like is that there embryos sure do. If you look at the history of these things they hatch from the egg, begin as a tadpole and have a nerve cord and gill slits and they swim around and eventually attached to rocks and if they attach to the rock they lose everything they share with us, they lose the tail, the nerve cord, the gill slits until they become that sessile . The way evolution worked is it stopped early. Our ancestors ray version of the sea squirt tadpole that kept the larval stage, didnt undergo the lower stuff but the larval stage and it became an adult for our ancestors. We are very similar to the larvae of the sea squirt. If you keep the juvenile stage and make that bigger, like an enormous amount of changes in surprising ones from looking at development. We now have tools to look at this through dna. He began to study them are a lot of reasons. They are tiny creatures. My kids call them jump these. You can see them. Look at all of them. They have lots of different kinds of legs. The front legs are sort of like lobster claws that your legs behind in the face to the back and you have legs behind those that face the forward and other wispy legs further back. He thought this was a natural creature to understand how legs for form and how genes control, what oregon is where in the body. When he noticed is theres a genetic which organ forms where in the body. Here we have three genes. There are different regions of the body that have activities of those genes. Lets look at the front part which is great where you had the legs the phase backwards. In that section which is shaded gray, you have legs that pace backwards. In that part of the body you have one gene of those genes expressed you be asked. Ubx. Theres a genetic address for each segment where you have ubx although, backward facing lake. He thought what if i use this genome editing technique to manipulate these addresses. Can i control what legs form which parts of the body . The answer is yes. He made an embryo that doesnt have abda. It only has ubx. He is one whole region which is just ubx activity and only end up is with backward facing lakes. He controlling the genetic address by getting rid of a gene and changing the organ. He can do that almost at will. Its just a remarkable set of experiment. The story gets deeper. As it turns out that flies have these genes, too. What you have in these colorcoded areas is the information, a genetic address for whether a leg forms in a ina particular area, a particular kind of wing, or what have you. It turns