[old time music

played on a scratchy record]

So the advent in 1977
of molecular phylogeny
recast and restructured,
fundamentally,
how we look at the emergence
of life on planet Earth.
Now, an important context
for our modern-day understanding
of the emergence of life
is to look at how different
and how drastically changing
and evolving itself
the whole concept
of evolution has been
over the last 150 years,
and in fact even deeper, um,
into human history than that.
So what we wanna do
is take a look at the changes
in evolutionary thought
and how people had tried
to graphically structure
the tree of life, um,
and then see how fundamentally different from that, then,
that the departure is
for the results of Carl Woese
and his colleagues here
at the University of Illinois.
So, we need to start all
the way back actually in 1674
when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek,
who was a, um,
a-a scientist in Holland,
uh, developed
the first microscope,
and that first microscope
was actually a-a brass plate
with a few very crude lenses,
um, and a-a setting screw
that allows you to change,
um, uh, the angle
and therefore the magnification
of the lenses.
Well, Leeuwenhoek, um,
is very famous because of that
development of the microscope,
and he's the first one
who actually published
an observation
that there was life
on a very small scale,
and that microscope was
strong enough for him to see,
uh, one-micron cells,
some of which were,
uh, bacteria.
Uh, some of them were Eukarya,
the more advanced, um, uh,
forms of cellular life
on the planet,
and [clears throat]
that publication
in the "Proceedings of the Royal
s-Academy of Science,"
um, uh, was a-a benchmark.
It was the first time that-that- that human beings had seen life,
um, active
at that kind of scale.
The next step in the process
was about 100 years later,
and in 1735, Linnaeus,
who was a-a Swedish scientist,
um, decided to use primarily, um, the observations
of the diversity of life
on planet Earth
for morphology, the size,
the shape, the color,
some of the attributes
of how the organisms lived,
try to use those
to break all of life
into pieces and compartments,
uh, that can be used
to look at the structure
and-and eventually the
historical evolution of life.
And Linnaeus came up with two,
uh, kingdoms he called them.
One was-one were the animals,
and one were the plants.
And so, uh, Linnaeus was-was-
was critically important
for developing
the ability to describe
morphological differences,
um, and-and-and, uh,
move forward with that kind
of what we call taxonomy,
that descriptive taxonomy
of what was living.
Well, and a-again, about another
100 years plus had passed,
and in 1866, um, Haeckel,
um, decided to start structuring
not only morphologies
you could see with the eye,
but also some morphologies
you could see
under the microscope.
Now remember, this is long, long
before the genetic tools
were available,
so this was using
whatever tools of observation,
uh, were-were-were possible
at these times.
And what Haeckel
put together was,
um, a very different
kind of tree.
Um-um, again, Linnaeus
had animals and plants.
Haeckel,
as you can see from this,
also had plants and had animals,
but also had another
small group of, uh, organisms
called the Protists,
and these Protists
were single-cells
or sometimes multiple cells,
but they were small
and they moved around
and he could see
they had these different
morphological features;
they had some different colorations.
But then also
he broke things into
another group called the Monera.
And the Monera were,
what we call in the present day,
the single-celled microbes that
eventually were Bacteria
and Archaea.
So the Monera was
kind of a loose grouping
of-of single-celled organisms.
The Protists were
the more complex
yet still small organisms,
and he-he kept
with the plants and the animals.
Well, another
100 years plus passed,
and there was a benchmark work
by a scientist named Whittaker in 1969.
And you can see from
the Whittaker tree of life,
um, there was this concept
of having eukaryotes,
and that was the-one of the,
uh, earlier times
that eukaryotes had been coined,
um, and then we had prokaryotes,
and those were all the
single-celled, small organisms.
So going from prokaryotes
to eukaryotes,
and you can see that tree
makes it
a very linear progression
of the two,
implying that eukaryotes
evolved directly
from the prokaryotes
and all of the prokaryotes.
And you can see some
of the same names were kept.
Uh, the Monera were
part of that prokaryote group,
and the Protists,
um, again, these more complex, small single-cells.
So the Whittaker tree
is actually what is still used
in a lot of applications,
uh, within science today,
and can still be found
in some textbooks.
Well the advent of the 1977,
uh-uh, publication
by Woese and Fox,
and then the ensuing publications,
especially Woese et al. 1990,
reset, fundamentally,
the stage of how we
understand that the structure
of the evolution of life
on this planet took place.
So all these came together
to produce a drastically
different-looking
tree of life,
and in this tree of life
you can see that we're,
uh, hovering in a helicopter,
if you will,
looking down at the uppermost
branches of that tree of life,
and in the middle
we have an origin,
we have a root or a stalk,
um, versus having
these three branches,
uh, Bacteria, Archaea,
and Eukarya,
uh, coming up and out.
The importance is
that the context
of the history of the evolution
of the idea
of a tree of life itself
really sets the stage for us,
because it compares
and contrasts
what was thought of
as being simpler life
and more complex life
and what came first
and what came second.
Instead of some
of those paradigms
and-and hypotheses
that were put up,
and very reasonably,
based on morphology,
the genetic tool,
the molecular phylogeny
allows us to quantify
these relationships
and look deep into time to see
how diversity on this planet
is actually structured
in terms of its capabilities of- of lifestyles, ecology,
but, then even more importantly,
its genetic composition.
[old time music
played on a scratchy record]