Thank doctor shubin, viewers who want to watch with close captions go to youtube and enable the captions and the video will be able to watch immediately following the broadcast. Afterwards he will take your questions, submit your questions using ask the question on crowd cast and dr. Shubin will take them at the end of the talk. We will try to get them to as many as possible, upcoming programs around science and society continue look at nuclear site, tom carpenter, Anthony Townsend on the future of driverless cars, science theories which features reports from labs like grad students engaged directly in work there. Jillian andrews, katie thats not true, kirk, tomorrows Evening Program with samantha and angela. New events are being released in podcast form like one yesterday and one tomorrow. Many are available in video or podcast. Town hall will provide not only way to stay plugged into the present but many more rabbit holes to climb in. Town halls programs are made possible through your support and sponsors, supported by microsoft, kow, the taxpayers of washington state, most of you know town halls first and foremost would like to thank organization and town hall like other organizations is under significant strain, i hope you consider a gift by becoming member, making donation using one of the urls and the Common Thread of respective feed, one final Economic Data point before we start, beloved independent businesses are feeling the squeeze as well, i certainly hope you are, thats the thing that brought us together here and along the way in supporting entrepreneurs like our wonderful partners, politely suggested to buy the book button on the event page or url rather than turning to local retail bahemoth. Professor at the university of chicago and dean of the universities biological science discussion. Shubin is known for research of evolutionary origin of anatomical of animals. He discovered some of the earliest mammals, crocodiles, frogs and one of the most significant discoveries, dr. Shubin will you help me 375 millionyearold fossil called . Commit today sharing his work through a variety of means, lab maintains active presence on facebook and twitter and considering knowledge and passion in terrific books including the bestselling journey into 3. 5 billion year history of the human body from 2008 and 2013, the universe within, the dope history of the human body from 2013. At least one of those other programs brought us brought a visit to town hall, some required decoding and please join me in welcoming neil shubin. Thank you. Its a delight to be here with you today, tonight and to talk first of all, i hope this finds you and your loved ones well and thriving and i look forward the next 30, 40 minutes to talk about evolution and the great transition of evolution. I have been biologist working for over 3 decades. There you go. And i began as an expeditionary paleontologist, how did mammals evolve and so on. I was on my first expedition, mid80s and i get back from the. Expedition and i thought it was going to be a great and a student left a pile of people showing genes that build bodies and how those genes evolve. Im like okay, i have to learn the molecular biology stuff because the species i study in recent past, i have to change or go extinct. I became a molecular biologist. My laboratory in chicago are finding fossils, going expeditions around the world, antartica but also molecular biology and using dna, ask the question, how do the great transitions and evolution happen, how did fish evolve to walk, how did birds evolve the fly. This captured the imagination of science and public over century. I was thinking the book and i was reading a biography, im going to share my screen. I was reading a biography of lilian make sure the screen here. Lilian had a very hard living existence, as you can see the slide here. This is a woman who is fabulous, she drank, smoked, amazing tales of long life, in front of Joe Mccarthys committee, she was blacklisted from hollywood and broadway as well and thinking about her life years later during her autobiography which i was reading as i was finishing some she had a quote and she had a quote that captures the stories of the book in a nutshell and the book is this, nothing, of course, ever begins when you think it does. I remember reading that quote, wow, thats the book in a nutshell, evolution, you look at the history of anatomical features, of structures, organs, even of dna itself, genes itself, nothing ever begins when you think it does. If you think lungs evolved when animals walked on land and feathers rose as bird took flight, you would be in very god company and also be wrong and we know this for over a century and thats the story in a nutshell, whether its genes or anatomical structures. The changes that we associate with the great transitions of life and so much of evolution is repurposing and the story gains meaning as we think of dna linking studies of dna with study of fossils and its really amazing. We did molecules dna. Look at this here. What we have in dna is a molecule thats in us, famously described. Double helup is 6 feet long, 6foot long strand inside each cell, not only inside each cell but nucleus of the cells. Think about that. Each one of them has a 6long strand of dna rolled up inside itself, inside the cell. If you were to take all of the dna of our body, lay it end to end, each one of those 6foot long strands from all 4 trillion cells in our body it would run from here almost to pluto, thats how much genetic material we have inside and weve lived in an area of Geno Technology and we can get genome sequence, we know genomes from humans to corn, to flies, to warm, to thousands of species, we can do genomes in an afternoon with all of that Genetic Information and tools analyzing, we now see dna as highly active molecule. Its inside the nucleus of each cell, opens and closes as each gene comes activated in different ways. Its marvelously complex and the origins of different genes are amazing wondrous. I will start with one example and look at other aspects. Let me give you one striking example of hidden mysteries in dna, begins with this neuroscience, jason shepherd, dr. Shepherd is a professor at neurobiology at the university of utah and interested in the genes that control the formation of memory in humans and uses mice as a model to study them because we have very similar gones genes in this regard with mice. They dont remember the solution the next day. Humans have mutations and also have many cognitive deficits as well as schizophrenia or mental disorder. So jason is studying and good biochemist studied the protein. He popped it under the microscope. A slide for me to show you and this is what he saw under the slide. He looked at this under electron microscope and what he noticed, when you see the clumps, you can see them throughout the slide. This is a super high magnet occasion. He was looking at this and thinking i have seen these balls before, they are identical to Something Else ive seen before and remembered in training as biologist and pulled out textbook, biology textbook and you can see with what they pointed, to they are very similar to those of arc. This is not a memory gene arc, these are clumps for hiv, the virus that causes aids. So jason decided to do is im going to get only extras here and asked them to look at his slide and he did not tell them what was on the slide, what do you see here . Oh, thats hiv and causes aids, nope, its a memory gene arc for humans. Okay, that set off a Chain Reaction of research with team and they looked at the gene of arc, the memory gene in mice and people is a repurpose virus, it has the signature of a virus of the kind which hiv is as well and when they looked at comparatively that the arc was virus that invaded the genome and entered the genome and as it was entered it was repurposed by distant ancestors instead of infecting and causing distress and it was repurpose to function in memory. What these clumps do in hiv is interesting. In hiv these clumps protect the genetic material of hiv as it travels from cell to cell to do its work, to do its evil business. In arc its repurposed. The capsule protects genetic material and making memories and serving in neurofunction as well. So its really remarkable how a virus that was entered the genome was do domesticated or repurposed for a new use. A genome that came from the virus. If you look at the ones in placenta, the list keeps on growing awe understand more about the genome to the point that if you look 8 of our genome is derived from ancient viruses, 8 of genetic material is derivative for ancient viruses. Only 2 are our own genes. Only 2 is protein. 4 times more genetic material inside our genome than our own genes that derived from virus. Its remarkable and serves from memory, pregnancy and many other functions as well. This goes to show you the mysteries inside our own genome, its truly remarkable and surprising and all because of new technology allowing us to see evolution in whole new ways. In fact, some of the most important new ways that we can look at evolution, most exciting new ways, we like to puzzle, one of the greatest puzzles of biology and we have seen significant progress in the last 30 years. What you see is a fertilized egg, sperm, egg come together and that single cell, from that single cell would be derived as it divides over again, 2, to 4, to 16, to 31 and on and on and on. Its going to eventually end up as 4 or so trillion cell body like you and i and everybody in this audience is today. We are 4 trillion cells, with those cells packed in the right way, they are differentiated from a single cell to become muscle cells, bone cells, skin cells all of the cells, we call this process of going from single cell to 4 trillion cell cell, we call that body building. If you look at the slide captures one of the greatest puzzles of biology. How do you go from single cell on the left to creature on the right. In there what we have enormous number of discoveries that have revealed the inner workings to build bodies. What we have done begun to understand the genetic recipe, the genes that interact, control the number of cells and to control the differentiation and where they are and so forth, its really remarkable thing and as we begin to understand this process of going from egg to adult in different species, we can begin to understand evolution in a whole new way because changes in the process, changes in the process of how you build body explains a lot of evolution, changes in the process of how you build the body of a fish can produce the body of amphibian and so forth. Changes to the development, eggs to adult is a big piece of understanding of evolution and people in our field have been interested in this in over a century. When i talk about this historically a little bit and then we will go to history. People understanding transition from egg to adult and evolution for, you know, over well a century and one of the powerful moments in this is the work of auguste dumeril. Dumeril had one of the greatest jobs at the time. First edition of origin of species in 1859, when the portrait of dumeril was drawn. He was the keeper of reptiles and amphibians at the museum of National History in paris. Great job at the time because people were coming back to paris, you know, from different parts of the globe with creatures that they found. Creatures that they discovered and he got to study them for the first time to describe the species and understand their basic biology. One day he received a package from people who were working in mexico. He received a package of 6 of these and they were working in mexico and found the salamanders , 4 to 6inches long. Fully functioning sexually matured adults, salamanders but they captured the imagination and the interest of the collectors for a couple of reasons. The reasons are look at gils, look at the tail, big aquatic tail. They thought, well, he publishes in 60s, maybe dumeril can understand from life and water to life on land by understanding the creatures and will agree and what he did he kept the salamanders. Little did everybody realize that the Indigenous People of mexico actually knew salamanders extremely well so much so that they had a soup recipe of the things and they knew quite a bit about biology because of their local knowledge. Anyway,dumeril let them go, they are easy to care for, set up aquarium and piece there and he came back and he noticed about 6 months later hes in for a surprise. 6 months later he looked in enclosure, original diagrams, these salamanders disappeared out of no subpoena where, head is entirely different, very different shape, its like an entire different genist, its like somebody put chimpanzees, the new species, whole new kind of critter, the larvae has external gill and the larvae lives in water and they swim around and they get bigger and bigger but then there comes a point where there are two possible states here. He notice that the salamanders that are the big fully aquatic ones, they just get bigger and bigger and bigger and become sexually mature as creatures and another way they can develop they can go gogo through metamorphosis. Here is one Developmental Program that depending on the environment two different state, two different kinds of salamander can come about from the same Developmental Program. Whats important here to realize is that the simple shift of development to bring changes across the entire body, think about that. A simple shift whether theres hormones secreted or not can produce changes to the tail, head, limbs which i didnt talk about and the gills and so forth. This is really a critical discovery and igniting peoples interesting in embryos and evolution and whole tradition of people studying embryos studying in this way and small changes in development can bring about big changes in evolution in the adults. Now, we have we can relate this to our own bodies. If you look at people, these creatures here are human beings. We see they are and as human being, we have backbones, we share features with fish, birds and mammals and reptiles, this is what makes us vertebrae, perform and development and those are not in the sellon but skeleton, what are the closest and closest relative clams, you name it. People studying dna have come to the conclusion, well recorded hypothesis that our closest relatives are, these, look at them. Compare the creatures on the left to the features on the right, you will not see a whole ton of similarities. The creature on the left is in rocks, pumps water, theres no apparent spinal chord and no body, you know, and some get weirder, what do you do . You have to study the development, how do they go from egg to adult and this is where it gets really, really interesting. You want to see the larvae and if you look inside the tail, gill slips just like our embryos, if you look at the rest of the body it becomes a nerve cord just like us. So our closest relatives, adults dont look like us but embryos sure do. If you look at the history, they become as tadpole, tadpole as you can see here and they have the nerve core and eventually they lose everything they share was, they lose the tail, the nerve cord, the gill slips and the reevolution worked here just like as salamanders. We are basically, our ancestors basically were tadpole that kept the larvae stage. So essentially we are very similar to the larvae of the sea squirt. Again, enormous amount of changes and surprising ones from looking at development. Now we now have tools to look at this through dna, we can manipulate dna using techniques which im sure you read about to begin to see how the dna control control how dna controls development and performs bodies and how it can evolve. One of the Great Stories of this is a creature called anthropod, he began to study them for a lot of reasons and they are tinny creatures, my kids call them jumpies and they live in the sand and hop around, you can see them here. The head is on the left and the tail on the right. Front legs there, they are like lobster claws and the legs behind them that face to the back and legs behind those that face toward and other whiskey legs as you go further back. He thought this was natural sort of creature to understand and how legs form and genes control, what organ is where in the body and how the organs developed and what he noticed is that theres a genetic address to which organ forms where in the body. This is complicated but let me work it through. Here we have a 3g ubx, region drinks of the bodies that have activity, lets just look at the front part of the body, gray, legs that face backward n. That section of the body which is colored and shaded gray here, you have legs that face backwards n. That part of the body you only have one gene of those genes expressed and when you have ubx turned on you have a backward facing leg where the red arrow is, where the blue arrow is you have forward facing legs and thats the part of the body where the two genes are turned on, ubx and abda. We have ubx and abda in forward facing leg. And when you have abda and abd, what if i use the genome editing technique, can i perform what legs perform in each part of the body and the answer is yes. He made an embryo that doesnt have adbda all it has ubdx. He got rid of the hatched portion. Now getting rid of abda, he has only ubx activity and all you end up with backward facing leg. Hes controlling the genetic address by getting rid of gene and changing the forms there and you can do that almost every single one of those appendages by changing the genetic address. The story gets deeper, flies have the genes too, you see a fly embryo there, color coded, im not labeling there but color coded, when you have color coded areas, information, genetic address for whether a leg forms in a particular area, particular kind a wing, mandible or what have you. It turns out that we have the genes too. They are active in the formation of our own body plant and what are they doing, they are active in a lot of different organs but one in particular place in in te vertebral column. What if we do the same with mammals. What happens to f you change genetic addresses, do you change the kind of vertebrae that develops in different kinds of body. Here is a mouse, house there. We will zoom in, if you will at the column. Thats what we are honing in on. Okay, if you look at the normal development of a house, theres a get genetic address for each kind of embryo. You can see two genes that we are showing you. One called hox10, you get a different name in mice and people. You see another hox11. Theres a region where both hox 11 and hox 10 activity. Turns we have joint address of hox10 and hox11. What if you get rid of hox11 and only have hox10. What kind of vertebrae . You only end up with hox10, boom, you get lumbar vertebrae. You can change the address at different parts of the body and change tons of different structures. So really the genes that form much of our b