Lynn Margulis
Lynn Margulis
Lynn Margulis was an American evolutionary theorist, science author, educator, and popularizer, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in biological evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has said that "Lynn Margulis’s name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution." In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei – an event Ernst Mayr called "perhaps the most important and dramatic event in the history of life"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth5 March 1938
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
People think the earth is going to die and they have to save it. That's ridiculous. If you rid the earth of flowering plants, people would die, period. But the earth was without flowering plants for almost all of its history.
There is no scientific reason to think that we, even with space travel, are going to survive as a species for ever, certainly not by biting off the hand that feeds us, which is exactly what we are doing.
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.
Why does everybody agree that atmospheric oxygen comes from life, but no one speaks about the other gases coming from life?
If you really want to study evolution, you've got go outside sometime, because you'll see symbiosis everywhere!
All scientists agree that evolution has occurred - that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?
Of course, the plea for respect for nonhuman life goes far beyond the scientific delight of familiarity with our planet mates. The nonhuman forms of life with which we 6,000 million talking, upright apes share this finite planet are directly or indirectly connected to our well-being.
My work more than didn't fit in. It crossed willy-nilly the boundaries that people had spent their lives building up. It hits some 30 subfields of biology, even geology.