from the New York Times

www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/science/lynn-margulis-trailblazing-theorist-on-evolution-dies-at-73.html

Lynn Margulis, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 73
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: November 24, 2011

Lynn Margulis, a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution, died on Tuesday at her home in Amherst, Mass. She was 73.

Paul Hosefos/The New York Times

Lynn Margulis, wearing her National Medal of Science Award.

She died five days after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke, said Dorion Sagan, a son she had with her first husband, the cosmologist Carl Sagan.

Dr. Margulis, who had the title of distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1988, drew upon earlier, ridiculed ideas when she first promulgated her theory, in the late 1960s, that cells with nuclei, which are known as eukaryotes and include all the cells in the human body, evolved as a result of symbiotic relationships among bacteria.

The hypothesis was a direct challenge to the prevailing neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation.

Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that a more important mechanism was symbiosis; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing. The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species.

“She talked a lot about the importance of micro-organisms,” said her daughter, Jennifer Margulis. “She called herself a spokesperson for the microcosm.”

The manuscript in which Dr. Margulis first presented her findings was rejected by 15 journals before being published in 1967 by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. An expanded version, with additional evidence to support the theory — which was known as the serial endosymbiotic theory — became her first book, “Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.”

A revised version, “Symbiosis in Cell Evolution,” followed in 1981, and though it challenged the presumptions of many prominent scientists, it has since become accepted evolutionary doctrine.

“Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last 500 million years,” Dr. Margulis wrote in 1995. “But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly 4,000 million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable.

“I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and micro-organisms. 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.”

Lynn Petra Alexander was born on March 5, 1938, in Chicago, where she grew up in a tough neighborhood on the South Side. Her father was a lawyer and a businessman. Precocious, she graduated at 18 from the University of Chicago, where she met Dr. Sagan as they passed each other on a stairway.

She earned a master’s degree in genetics and zoology from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Massachusetts, she taught for 22 years at Boston University.

Dr. Margulis was also known, somewhat controversially, as a collaborator with and supporter of James E. Lovelock, whose Gaia theory states that Earth itself — its atmosphere, the geology and the organisms that inhabit it — is a self-regulating system, maintaining the conditions that allow its perpetuation. In other words, it is something of a living organism in and of itself.

Dr. Margulis’s marriage to Dr. Sagan ended in divorce, as did a marriage to Thomas N. Margulis, a chemist. Dr. Sagan died in 1996.

In addition to her daughter and her son Dorion, a science writer with whom she sometimes collaborated, she is survived by two other sons, Jeremy Sagan and Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma; three sisters, Joan Glashow, Sharon Kleitman and Diane Alexander; two half-brothers, Robert and Mark Alexander; a half-sister, Sara Alexander; and nine grandchildren.

“More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct,” Dr. Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in “Microcosmos,” a 1986 book that traced, in readable language, the history of evolution over four billion years, “but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, has continued for more than three billion years. And the basis of the patina, past, present and future, is the microcosm — trillions of communicating, evolving microbes.”

Video, 9:41. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aceiu6CscNY

In 1986 comedian Charlie Varon performed live a 14-minute skit that is an absolute stitch: "I'm proud to be related to a tree shrew!" he shouts. The audience chimes in with "Praise Darwin!" This vid is richly illustrated with photos taken all around North America by videographer ghostsofevolution, also with playful paleo paintings by Ray Troll (of "Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway" fame), plus downloadables from the web. Oh, don't be ashamed to praise him!

From Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd via Betty Kissilove. Thanks Betty.

Earth created the human creature and endowed it with certain capacities, like language acquisition and creation, problem-solving for survival, bonding with friends and family, as well as its physiology.  For the last 12,000 to 50,000 years, maybe longer, we have been the same physical species. A baby born in one time frame who was transferred by a magical time machine to any other, including our present day, would grow-up as a native, as would we if we were transferred to another time. There would be no difference in capacity or appearance.

Yet, there have been thousands of variations within our human family over time: thousands of cultures and sub-cultures, thousands of languages, thousands of meaning-systems, thousands of interpretations of reality, thousands of ways to survive and thrive within the Earth community. This variety of ways to survive and thrive is what I understand Thomas Berry to mean when he refers to "ways of being human" or "modes of being human".

Because we are born physiologically immature (having to do with the relationship between baby's cranium & brain, mom's pelvis, and our bipedal nature) – I heard someone call it being "born half-cooked" – we are completed by the family and culture into which we are born. Each historical era, each culture, each family, often each generation, invents itself. We humans are self-inventing creatures, to a great extent.

Because we invent ourselves, we also REinvent ourselves. Within the limits given by evolution, we can be whatever we want to be as a species, live wherever we want to live.

By conscious and unconscious action our current "way of being human" is causing irreparable harm to and diminishment of the Earth community, ourselves and the very things, systems, and beings upon which we rely for our survival and thriving as a species.

Thus we must "reinvent the human" by drawing upon our evolutionary capacities to create new cultures, sub-cultures, languages, meaning-systems, interpretations of reality, and ways of surviving and thriving.

It is to this Great Work, the reinvention of the human family, that the section "Reinventing the Human" (and the whole site, really) is dedicated.