Lynn Margulis has died

[muriel_volestrangler]

The eminent biologist Lynn Margulis died on November 22, 2011, at the age of 73, according to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Born Lynn Alexander in Chicago on March 5, 1938, she enrolled in the University of Chicago at the age of fourteen.
...
Margulis was perhaps most celebrated for her advocacy of the endosymbiotic theory of the origin of organelles, starting with her paper "On the origin of mitosing cells," published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1967. The endosymbiotic theory is now generally accepted for mitochondria and chloroplasts, if not for all of the organelles that Margulis thought. She was also known for her advocacy of the Gaia hypothesis and symbiogenesis, the idea that speciation is driven largely by symbiosis. Her proclivity for such unconventional evolutionary mechanisms allowed her to be steadily misrepresented by antievolutionists hoping to convince the public that evolution is a theory in crisis. But Margulis firmly rejected creationism, writing, for example, "Anthropocentric writers with a proclivity for the miraculous and a commitment to divine intervention tend to attribute historical appearances like eyes, wings, and speech to 'irreducible complexity' (as, for example, Michael Behe does in his book, Darwin's Black Box) or 'ingenious design' (in the tradition of William Paley who used the functional organs of animals as proof for the existence of God). Here we feel no need for supernatural hypotheses. Rather, we insist that today, more than ever, it is the growing scientific understanding of how new traits appear, ones even as complex as the vertebrate eye, that has triumphed" (Acquiring Genomes, p. 202).

http://ncse.com/news/2011/11/lynn-margulis-dies-006966

While she had some strange ideas late in her career (such as AIDS being caused by the syphilis bacterium as it incorporated itself into the human nucleus), she was admirable for going against conventional wisdom with the endosymbiotic theory and sticking with it, until people had to admit she had the evidence.

[Lost-in-FL]

1. ...

:-(

Too sad. I was fascinated with her book Symbiotic Planet and with her theories of sexual evolution.

RIP

[Crunchy Frog]

2. Oh no!

That's sad. :cry:

Maybe somewhere out there, she and Carl Sagan can hook up again.

[HereSince1628]

3. Lost one of the great innovative thinkers there.

To see things anew as she did, is to have revolutionary insight and far-reaching effectiveness.

[frogmarch]

4. She was once married to Carl Sagan,

wasn't she? A few years ago I read a paper she wrote on the endosymbiotic theory, and I heard a recording of an interview she gave.

Thanks for the link. Off to check it now.

Edited to add that in the interview, she said Margulis is pronounced MAR guliss. Till then, I'd wondered.

[Odin2005]

8. They were married for a few years and then got divorced.

[postulater]

5. A pioneer in her field.

Sad news.

[jakeXT]

6. The last time I saw her was for a 911 video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-GFBEX5bjY

[Odin2005]

7. OH NO! She was one of my favorite biologists.

Her ideas about endosymbiosis were revolutionary. She was also a very early supporter of the Gaia Hypothesis.

Unfortunately she had become a bit of a dinosaur in her own field, stubbornly adhereing to the "Five Kingdom" system she popularized, rejecting newer discoveries about the evolutionary relationships of protists and bacteria.

Rest in Peace, Lynn. :(

[Jim__]

9. Scientific American essay on Margulis.

An excerpt:

Lynn Margulis was among the most creative challengers of mainstream Darwinian thinking of the late 20th century. She challenged what she called “ultra-Darwinian orthodoxy” with several ideas. The first, and most successful, is the concept of symbiosis. Darwin and his heirs had always emphasized the role that competition between individuals and species played in evolution. In the 1960′s, however, Margulis began arguing that symbiosis had been an equally important factor–and perhaps more important–in the evolution of life. One of the greatest mysteries in evolution concerns the evolution of prokaryotes, cells that lack a nucleus and are the simplest of all organisms, into eukaryotes, cells that have nuclei. All multi-cellular organisms, including humans, consist of eukaryotic cells.

Margulis proposed that eukaryotes may have emerged when one prokaryote absorbed another, smaller one, which became the nucleus. She suggested that such cells be considered not as individual organisms but as “composites.” After Margulis provided examples of symbiotic relationships among living microorganisms, she gradually won support for her views on the role of symbiosis in early evolution. She did not stop there, however. Like Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, authors of the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis, she argued that conventional Darwinian mechanisms could not account for the stops and starts observed in the fossil record. Symbiosis, she suggested, could explain why species appear so suddenly and why they persist so long without changing.

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