“Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.”
― Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)
“New mutations don't create new species; they create offspring that are impaired.”
― Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)
“Life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking.”
― Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)
“What kind of grad student do you take? “I never take a straight A student. A real scientist tends to be critical, and somewhere along the line, they had to rebel against their teachers.”
― Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)
“For all the accomplishments of molecular biology, we still can't tell a live cat from a dead cat.”
― Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)
“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 (1938-2011)
“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 (1938-2011)
"The notion of saving the planet has nothing to do with intellectual honesty or science. The fact is that the planet was here long before us and will be here long after us. The planet is running fine. What people are talking about is saving themselves and saving their middle-class lifestyles and saving their cash flow."
― Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)
"We are all of us walking communities of bacteria.
The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape
made of tiny living beings."
― Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)
"Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself."
― Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)
"Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn't look anything like a butterfly."
― Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)
"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."
― Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)
"Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create."
― Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)
"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 (1938-2011)