Lynn Margulis: Quotes about life

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

Lynn Margulis

Source: Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution

Life , World

“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

Source: Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution

Life

“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.”

Lynn Margulis

Source: Mind, Life, and Universe: Conversations with Great Scientists of Our Time

Life , Appearance

“Life today is an autopoietic, photosynthetic phenomenon, planetary in scale. A chemical transmutation of sunlight, it exuberantly tries to spread, to outgrow itself. Yet by reproducing, it maintains itself and its past even as it grows. Life transforms to meet the contingencies of its changing environment and in doing so changes that environment. By degrees the environment becomes absorbed into the processes of life, becomes less a static, inanimate backdrop and more and more like a house, nest, or shell—that is, an involved, constructed part of an organic being.”

Lynn Margulis

What is Life? (1995)

Life , Change , Past , Parting

“The question "What is Life?" is… a linguistic trap. To answer according to the rules of grammar, we must supply a noun, a thing. But life on Earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.”

Lynn Margulis

What is Life? (1995)

Life , Question

“From the paramecium to the human race, all life forms are meticulously organized, sophisticated aggregates of evolving microbial life. Far from leaving microorganisms behind on an evolutionary "ladder," we are both surrounded by them and composed of them. Having survived in an unbroken line from the beginnings of life, all organisms today are equally evolved.”

Lynn Margulis

Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (1986)

Life

“I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and microorganisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge, and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date. Eldredge and Gould and their many colleagues tend to codify an incredible ignorance of where the real action is in evolution, as they limit the domain of interest to animals… very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution's creativity. By "codifying ignorance" I refer in part to the fact that they miss four of the five kingdoms of life… bacteria, protoctista, fungi, and plants.”

Lynn Margulis

"Gaia is a Tough Bitch," The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution ed., John Brockman (1995).

Life , Animals , Parting

“There is little doubt that the planetary patina—including ourselves—is autopoietic. Life at the surface of the Earth seems to regulate itself in the face of external perturbation, and does so without regard for the individuals and species that compose it. More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct, but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, have continued for more than three billion years. …trillions of communicating, evolving microbes. The visible world is a late-arriving, overgrown portion of the microcosm, and it functions only because of its well-developed connection with the microcosm's activities.”

Lynn Margulis

Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (1986)

Life , World , Communication

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

Lynn Margulis

as quoted by Andre Khalil in "As Above, So Below," Lynn Margulis: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel ed. Dorion Sagan (2012).

Life

“Life is bacterial and those organisms that are not bacteria have evolved from organisms that were. …Gene exchanges were indispensable to those that would rid themselves of environmental toxins. …Replicating gene-carrying plasmids owned by the biosphere at large, when borrowed and returned by bacterial metabolic geniuses, alleviated most local environmental dangers, provided said plasmids could temporarily be incorporated into the cells of the threatened bacteria. The tiny bodies of the planetary patina spread to every reach, all microbes reproducing too rapidly for all offspring to survive in any finite universe. Undercover and unwitnessed, life back then was the prodigious progeny of bacteria. It still is.”

Lynn Margulis

What is Life? (1995)

Life , Universe

“Soil is not unalive. It is a mixture of broken rock, pollen, fungal filaments, ciliate cysts, bacterial spores, nematodes and other microscopic animals and their parts. 'Nature,' Aristotle observed, 'proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation.”

Lynn Margulis

Independence is a political, not a scientific, term.
What is Life? (1995)

Life , Way , Nature , Animals

“The view of evolution as a chronic bloody competition among individuals and species, a popular distortion of Darwin's notion of "survival of the fittest," dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networkiing. Life forms multiplied and complexified by co-opting others, not just by killing them.”

Lynn Margulis

Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (1986)

Life , Strong , Dependency

“The fundamental division of forms of life on Earth is not that between plants and animals, as is commonly assumed, but between prokaryotes—organisms composed of cells with no nucleus, that is, bacteria—and eukaryotes—all other life forms.”

Lynn Margulis

Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (1986)

Life , Animals

“Not only did life originate on earth very early in its history as a planet, but for the first two billion years, Earth was inhabited solely by bacteria.”

Lynn Margulis

Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (1986)

Life , History