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Lynn Margulis Biography

Lynn Margulis (born Lynn Petra Alexander; March 5, 1938 – November 22, 2011) was an American evolutionary theorist and biologist, science author, educator, and popularizer, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in 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" – by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria. Margulis was also the co-developer of the Gaia hypothesis with the British chemist James Lovelock, proposing that the Earth functions as a single self-regulating system, and was the principal defender and promulgator of the five kingdom classification of Robert Whittaker.

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Lynn Margulis Quotes

Politicians need a better understanding of global ecology. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are chosen, the unique species for which all the others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous.

Arrogance, Chosen, Powerful, Understanding, Unique

The urgency to mate persists in all people as in all other mammals because of the evolutionary drive to continue the species, the inborn imperative for genes to reproduce and hormonal differences that evolved over millions of years.

Differences, Evolved, People, Persists, Reproduce, Years

The idea that we are "stewards of the earth" is another symptom of human arrogance. Imagine yourself with the task of overseeing your body's physical processes. Do you understand the way it works well enough to keep all its systems in operation? Can you make your kidneys function? Can you control the removal of waste? Are you conscious of the blood flow through your arteries, or the fact that you are losing a hundred thousand skin cells a minute?

Blood, Cells, Fact, Ideas, Waste, Way

Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn't look anything like a butterfly.

Butterfly, Caterpillars, Everybody, Knows, Look, Looks

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.

Create, Eliminates, Natural, Natural Selection, Selection

The accumulation of genetic mutations were touted to be enough to change one species to another…. No. It wasn’t dishonesty. I think it was wish fulfillment and social momentum. Assumptions, made but not verified, were taught as fact.

Facts, Fulfillment, Momentum, Social, Thinking, Wish

The fewer species there are and the fewer species we know about, the fewer questions we even know to ask.

Ask, Fewer, Know, Knows, Species

Why does everybody agree that atmospheric oxygen comes from life, but no one speaks about the other gases coming from life?

Doe, Gases, Life, Oxygen, Speak, Speaks

Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.

Earth, Like, Outdoes, Repairs, Verb, Verbs

All living beings, not just animals, but plants and microorganisms, perceive. To survive, an organic being must perceive - it must seek, or at least recognize, food and avoid environmental danger.

Animal, Environmental, Organic, Perceive, Plant

To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable - the rhetoric 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 our sick planet, is evidence of our immense capacity for self delusion. Rather, we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.

Earth, Guide, Moving, Responsibility, Self, Takes

Neo-Darwinian language and conceptual structure itself ensures scientific failure: Major questions posed by zoologists cannot be answered from inside the neo-Darwinian straitjacket. Such questions include, for example, 'How do new structures arise in evolution?' 'Why, given so much environmental change, is stasis so prevalent in evolution as seen in the fossil record?' 'How did one group of organisms or set of macromolecules evolve from another?' The importance of these questions is not at issue; it is just that neo-Darwinians, restricted by their resuppositions, cannot answer them.

Environmental, Failure, Groups, Issues, Prevalent, Resuppositions

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

Earth, Evolution, Linear, Multidimensional, Tree

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.

Alteration, Claw, Fruit, Loss, Mutations, Wings

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?

Ancestry, Driver, Explain, Extinction, Groups, Natural

People think the earth is going to die and they have to save it. Thats 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.

Earth, Flowering, People, Ridiculous, Thinking

All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.

Compare, Consciousness, Ecology, Human, Spirochete

We are unconscious of most of our body's processes, thank goodness, because we'd screw it up if we weren't. The human body is so complex, with so many parts. . . a system which is far more complex than we can fully imagine. The idea that we are consciously care-taking such a large and mysterious system is ludicrous.

Body, Consciously, Environmental, Ideas, Large, Parts

We are all of us walking communities of bacteria. The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape made of tiny living beings.

Community, Landscape, Pointillist, Shimmers, World

Body concentrates order. It continuously self-repairs. Every five days you get a new stomach lining. You get a new liver every two months. Your skin replaces itself every six weeks. Every year, 98 percent of the atoms of your body are replaced. This non-stop chemical replacement, metabolism, is a sure sign of life.

Concentrates, Days, Order, Self, Two, Weeks