[MUSIC] So much of the conversation that you hear on the street or with friends, or colleagues, or wherever you are within our society is focused on has evolution occurred? Is it actually a process that happened? Is it something that we understand scientifically? And I hope that if nothing else during the Emergence of Life course that we've done together is that you now fundamentally understand that yes, evolution is a mechanism that as Is and will continue to happen. And the work of Carl Woese here at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is paramount to that, because it's given us the quantitative ability to say, this is how evolution works. This is how things have changed and these are how everything that's living is related to each other and as a result of that has given us the fundamental tool we need to start the discussion, which is the tree of life. And not only has it established the archaebacteria and eubacteria as the three branches, but it's also brought into question what is the root and the root is not a cell as we know it now. The root is a progenote, an early protocell that was very different from cells as we know them. And in fact, once cells as we know them on the modern Earth evolved, the game was over almost in terms of the progenote going to the base of the tree of life. And once that tree of life started, cells were locked in and there's a lot less variability. There's a lot less room to experiment and have freedom to try new things in the context of evolutionary experiments. So the course has brought us to the most important and exciting element, which is now we can talk about evolution and we can have evolution be something that is a real, dynamic, useful entity in very aspect of our lives. Let me give you a couple of examples. I think most of you have been reading that you can sequence the DNA of human beings and it's called the genome and that genome is looked at by modern day medicine, as something that all of us will have to use as we engage with doctors for our own personal medical delivery. So in other words, the idea is that the human genome will be a boiler plate for designing medicine that can be used for individuals. But in that discussion, there must be the understanding of the emergence of life. There must be a contextual framework for this to say, well, the human body is a product of an evolutionary sequence. The interaction of the majority of cells in our body, which we now know 90% of us are bacterial cells and the rest are mammalian cells by count. So therefore, human medicine relying on the genome is going to need to have the Woesian evolutionary context to make sense of it. Because of the 24,000 genes that are in our genome, how do we find the ones that are making a difference? How do we find the ones that are helping us? How do we find the ones that are hurting us? In the same light, all of us who use fossil fuel energy, which is now virtually everyone on the planet. We depend on our ability to extract carbon from ancient fossilized organic matter and that carbon, the search for it and the use of it and then the breakdown and transformation of it into things like greenhouse gases. That ability to not only find the fossil fuel, but also then to use it in a way that's less environmentally destructive. That's going to rely on using the evolutionary template. Knowing where to look for the oil and gas will depend on knowing what is the history of the organisms that lived in different places of the planet. What's the history of the rock that the oil and gas is in? And how can we use evolution as a context for things like genomic science that it better extract and perhaps even refine oil, and gas in the subsurface before it's brought up to the surface for our use and consumption. [COUGH] Another really important part of this are things like drinking water. Drinking water itself is a very precious commodity and this going to be one of the limiting factors on our planet moving forward for society. And our ability to identify, use and then actually treat and maintain healthy drinking water supplies around the planet is going to depend on using a lot of the DNA genome driven sciences in the context of evolution. Where do the organisms that live the subsurface come from? And you remember that the majority of life on this planet is bacterial and the majority of those bacteria live in the subsurface. So instead of coral reefs and hot springs and rain forests being our biodiversity reservoirs, it's truly biodiversity on planet Earth is housed within the outer crust of the earth. And then that outer crust of the Earth is where we get our natural resources, it is also where we get our drinking water. So these things are all tied together and the contextualization that the tree of life, the dynamic that it provides for us to understand how these natural processes work. That is going to be the primary conceptual framework that allows us to answer the major questions that face society around the planet. So these are the ideas, this is the excitement to bring you to this point where evolution is a well-established, well-understood mechanism now and the work of Professor Carl Woese has given us the tools to understand the basics for the first time of how that evolution actually works. So, I hope you move forward from the course. Think about the application of this in your everyday life and think about how tracking this information in the media is going to be very important. Because now that you have these tools, I can tell you, you probably won't forget about them. And every time you go to the doctor, every time you put oil and gas in your car, every time you take a shower, every time you drink fresh water, you're going to be thinking about. Well, that moment of you utilizing natural resources, utilizing the ability of humans to help to others in terms of medicine. That's all contextualized within the idea of the tree of life in our modern day understanding of evolution. [MUSIC]
