Lynn Margulis Quotes

Life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking.

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.

New mutations don't create new species; they create offspring that are impaired.

All the complex life-forms that we see were formed through symbiogenesis, a term coined by the person who first recognized its existence, Lynn Margulis.

What kind of grad student do you take? “I never take a straight A student. A real scientist tends to be critical, and somewhere along the line, they had to rebel against their teachers.

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create... Neo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change [which] led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

Possibly here in the Holocene, or just before ten or twenty thousand years ago, life hit a peek of diversity. Then we appeared. We are the great meteorite.

According to pioneering microbiologist Lynn Margulis, "fully 10 percent of our own dry body weight consists of bacteria, some of which, although they are not a congenital part of our bodies, we can't live without." In fact, a healthy human body has more bacterial cells than animal cells (bacterial cells are far smaller). Our own bodies are in some ways microcosms of the biosphere as a whole.

Life is a planetary level phenomonon and the Earth has been alive for at least 3000 million years. To me the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable - the rhethoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal a sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self-delusion. Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves.

Lynn Margulis comments, “Most bacteria have far more important things to do on this Earth than to devour our tissues while we are still alive, drink our blood when we are old and weak, or fight with us over who will eat our food first. . . . Those who hate and want to kill bacteria indulge in self-hatred. Our ultimate ancestors, yours and mine, descended from this group of beings. Not only are bacteria our ancestors, but also . . . as the evolutionary antecedent of the nervous system, they invented consciousness.

For all the accomplishments of molecular biology, we still can't tell a live cat from a dead cat.

As Lynn Margulis writes: “All the world’s bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years.

Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement... Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation.

Or as Lynn Margulis (and Dorion Sagan) once put it, “Our intolerant slogans continually denigrate the nonhuman life with which we share this planet.

There will be a layer in the fossil record where you'll know people were here because of the squashed remains of automobiles. It will be a very thin layer.

Life on earth is such a good story you cannot afford to miss the beginning... Beneath our superficial differences we are all of us walking communities of bacteria. The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape made of tiny living beings.

We people are just like our planetmates. We cannot put an end to nature; we can only pose a threat to ourselves. The notion that we can destroy all life, includng bacteria thriving in the water tanks of nuclear power plants or boiling hot vents, is ludicrous. I hear our nonhuman brethren snickering: "Got along without you before before I met you, gonna get along without you now", they sing about us in harmony. Most of them, the microbes, the whales, the insects, the seed plants, and the birds, are still singing. The tropical forest trees are humming to themselves, waiting for us to finish our arrogant logging so they can get back to their business of growth as usual. And they will continue their cacophonies and harmonies long after we are gone.

This is a miracle of coevolution—the bacteria that coexist with us in our bodies enable us to exist. Microbiologist Michael Wilson notes that “each exposed surface of a human being is colonized by microbes exquisitely adapted to that particular environment.”21 Yet the dynamics of these microbial populations, and how they interact with our bodies, are still largely unknown. A 2008 comparative genomics analysis of lactic acid bacteria acknowledges that research is “just now beginning to scratch the surface of the complex relationship between humans and their microbiota.”22 Bacteria are such effective coevolutionary partners because they are highly adaptable and mutable. “Bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus,” explains bacterial geneticist James Shapiro, who reports “multiple widespread bacterial systems for mobilizing and engineering DNA molecules.”23 In contrast with our eukaryotic cells, with fixed genetic material, prokaryotic bacteria have free-floating genes, which they frequently exchange. For this reason, some microbiologists consider it inappropriate to view bacteria as distinct species. “There are no species in prokaryotes,” state Sorin Sonea and Léo G. Mathieu.24 “Bacteria are much more of a continuum,” explains Lynn Margulis. “They just pick up genes, they throw away genes, and they are very flexible about that.”25 Mathieu and Sonea describe a bacterial “genetic free market,” in which “each bacterium can be compared to a two-way broadcasting station, using genes as information molecules.” Genes “are carried by a bacterium only when needed . . . as a human may carry sophisticated tools.”26

Sergestid shrimp, he suggests, acquired, integrated, and put to work at least four intact genomes. To Williamson the inheritance of these acquired genomes, not random mutations, determines the evolutionary success of these shrimp today.

Parasitism and symbiosis were the true basis for evolutionary change. These processes lay at the heart of all evolution, and had been present from the very beginning. Lynn Margulis was famous for demonstrating that bacteria had originally developed nuclei by swallowing other bacteria.

According to biologist Lynn Margulis, it was this collaborative approach which allowed life to survive the first toxic pollutant holocaust—the spread in the atmosphere of a gas lethal to earth’s horde of early inhabitants. The killer gas was oxygen. But mitochondria living in the new eukaryotic cells saved the day, gulping oxygen before it could do its harm and turning the murderous vapor into food for their protectress and for the other members of her cellular commune.

One thing seems certain: a huge step forward was also an enormous step back. As Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan point out in their brilliant book Microcosmos, multicelled organisms lost the rapid-fire external information exchange, quick-paced inventiveness, and global data sharing of bacteria. With their newly developed nervous systems and brains, multicellular creatures made awesome contributions to the elaboration of cell-to-cell communication. And with the elaborate facilities in their nuclei, they giant-stepped the powers of genetic memory. But their data was now stuck inside the body. Most of it would take a billion years to get back out again.

action, and there are also structures so distinct from the rest of the cell ‘jelly’, like cells within cells, that the best explanation of their presence is that that is indeed what they are. These semi-autonomous ‘cells within the cell’ are called organelles. As we saw in Chapter Four, Lynn Margulis has explained how the ancestors of the organelles used to be separate, bacteria

The work of the radical biologist Lynn Margulis and others has shown humans to be not solitary beings, but what Margulis memorably calls ‘holobionts’ – collaborative compound organisms, ecological units ‘consisting of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that coordinate the task of living together and sharing a common life’, in the philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s phrase.

In 1967, the visionary American biologist Lynn Margulis became a vocal proponent of a controversial theory that gave symbiosis a central role in the evolution of early life. Margulis argued that some of the most significant moments in evolution had resulted from the coming together—and staying together—of different organisms.

Los cuerpos grandes son una ventaja para los luchadores; los genitales grandes lo son para los amantes.