The Mission
Imagine trying to invent the airplane — but without knowing how wings work, or even what “flying” looks like.
In traditional engineering, that sounds impossible.
Not so in biology. So long as a particular environmental condition provides pressure to develop a certain trait or ability, species in that environment can naturally evolve it. Nothing has to know or plan ahead of time how that trait works.
Directed evolution lets us humans harness that same blind, brilliant process to create molecules, enzymes, proteins, and technology that otherwise might have taken years of painstaking design to generate.
Our organization’s mission is to spread awareness of the power of evolution to as many people as possible, and “evolving their understanding” of this powerful process. This proceeds through a two-part plan:
General Public Outreach: Inform the general public about how evolution is relevant to them and why it is important to understand its concepts. We will do so by citing examples of potential ways directed evolution can improve our society, and how understanding evolution can lead to better understanding our planet, other people, and ourselves.
Scientific Outreach: Directed evolution has the potential to vastly speed up the work that scientists perform on a day to day basis, from biologists to even chemists, climate scientists, and material scientists. We plan to outreach to scientists to inform them of the latest in directed evolution technology so they don’t fall behind the curve, and can implement its procedures to accelerate their groundbreaking work.
Our Members
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John Wycliff
FOUNDER
John Wycliff researched directed evolution as part of an internship in college and became instantly enamored with the subject. Later, during his Master’s degree work in a biology lab researching the mechanism of chaperone proteins (small proteins that help fold amino acid sequences into fully functional proteins), he was shocked to find that his coworkers knew little of directed evolution. John, feeling it could accelerate their work, introduced directed evolution to them. The researchers were able to use directed evolution to essentially re-evolve the chaperones, allowing them to spot common patterns that allowed them to more easily deduce the mechanism of the chaperones. Seeing the impact of directed evolution on his own lab’s work, John felt called to bring it to other labs in the same way as he brought it to his own lab. Thus, he started Evolving Understanding so he could make a difference in the way people do research.
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Lily Manders
OUTREACH MANAGER
Lily Manders decided to major in Evolutionary Biology while in college, fascinated by how evolution was able to generate the vastness of the diversity of life on Earth. She was surprised to learn while on an online forum one day that not many people cared for the subject of evolution, or remembered learning about it when they were in school. Seeking to make a difference, Lily decided to start outreach in her local neighborhood, educating people about the impact on their lives that understanding evolution could have. When she learned of John’s mission, they were quick to join forces and together they established their respective main components of Evolving Understanding’s mission. Lily currently serves as the Outreach Manager, in charge of the public outreach. She also is currently working on her own personal curriculum for teaching evolution rapidly which she calls “The Spark of Biology”.
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John Ahnstad
COMMUNICATIONS
Jonathan “John” Ahnstad is the current director of communications. In this role, he creates the website material, presents the material to interested parties, and similar related tasks. John himself got his start in studying evolution during his Master’s degree in biology. His advisor’s lab was researching transposons (“jumping genes”) in E. coli to challenge the paradigm that mutations, which provide the variation that natural selection and genetic drift act upon, might not be completely random. John’s research contributed to this by analysis of the environmental and genetic situations that affected when a particular copy of a transposon would initiate a jump.