Evolution is endlessly creative.

Things don't stop evolving.

I'm an evolutionary biologist and you usually get interested in evolution by going to museums, seeing T-Rex fossils and things like that.

In evolution, there have been these really pivotal events, but they're sort of one offs.

They happened in the past, and I study evolution in a very different way.

I watch evolution as it's happening in real time.

We can start with the same microorganism.

We can propagate them in identical environments.

We can watch it unfold over and over again, and we can quantify how reproducible evolution is.

I'm going to get out the ancestral strains which are here.

So we're ready to do the competitions.

Yes.

Microbes in some sense rule planet Earth.

They're so abundant, they perform so many critical processes that allow all of life on earth to thrive.

And at the same time, there are many microbes that are potentially dangerous to humans.

COVID being a recent example, their sequences are changing.

Their ability to evade the immune system may be changing.

So the fundamental research we do bears on these questions of tremendous importance economically and for health.

Can you show me a hypothetical example that you'd think your model fits pretty well?

Yeah.

Besides studying evolution in real living organisms, we've studied evolution in the context of self-replicating and evolving computer programs, computer programs that copy themselves, that make mistakes as they copy mutations like in biological systems, and they compete with one another to actually solve mathematical and logical problems.

That lead us to form a National Science Foundation center to think about the broader impacts of evolution and how society could harness it for good.

Are these some of the ones that you're going to sequence their genomes also?

Yes.

I really would like to see.

Awesome.

Evolution doesn't work unless there's diversity.

And in the same way, science doesn't work and won't work unless we have diversity among the scientists who are contributing to the growth of ideas, ideas that we have not yet confirmed, thoughts that we have not yet invented.

Universities are these repositories of knowledge, and in some ways it's very much like evolution.

It's not written in the code of DNA.

It's written in our books.

It's written in our minds.

And that is the spark that I think drives science and drives universities.

Being a University Distinguished Professor is a great honor.

But really it's a tremendous reflection on all the wonderful people I've worked with here at MSU and around the world.

And for those interactions as well as this honor, I'm tremendously grateful.