Lynn Margulis Quotes

Lynn Margulis — American Scientist born on March 05, 1938, died on November 22, 2011

Lynn Margulis was an American evolutionary theorist, taxonomist, bacteriologist, protistologist, and botanist, with advanced degrees in zoology and genetics. She was known to the public as a science author, educator, and popularizer, and recognized as the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in biological evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has noted 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 Gaia theory with the British chemist James Lovelock, proposing that the Earth functions as a single self-regulating system, and was the principal defender and promulgater of the five kingdom classification of Robert Whittaker... (wikipedia)

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Lynn Margulis Quotes

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