Lynn Margulis

Lynn Margulis (born Lynn Petra Alexander; March 5, 1938 – November 22, 2011) 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 above all 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.Throughout her career, Margulis’ work could arouse singularly intense objection (one grant application elicited the response, ""Your research is crap, do not bother to apply again""), and her formative paper, ""On the Origin of Mitosing Cells,"" appeared in 1967 only after being rejected by about fifteen journals. Still a junior faculty at Boston University at the time, her theory that cell organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts were once independent bacteria continued to be ignored for another decade, becoming widely accepted only after it was powerfully substantiated through genetic evidence. Margulis was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1983. President Bill Clinton presented her the National Medal of Science in 1999. The Linnean Society of London awarded her the Darwin-Wallace Medal in 2008.Called ""Science's Unruly Earth Mother"", a ""vindicated heretic"", or a scientific ""rebel"", Margulis was a strong critic of neo-Darwinism, a position that sparked lifelong debate with leading neo-Darwinian biologists, including Richard Dawkins, George C. Williams, and John Maynard Smith. Margulis' work on symbiosis and her endosymbiotic theory had important predecessors, going back to the mid-19th century – notably Konstantin Mereschkowski, Boris Kozo-Polyansky, and Ivan Wallin – and Margulis took the unusual step of not only trying to promote greater recognition for their contributions, but of personally overseeing the first English translation of Kozo-Polyansky's Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution (Harvard University Press) which appeared the year before her death. It has sometimes been said that Margulis not only preached symbiosis but actively lived it, a prime example of this being that many of her major works, particularly those intended for a general readership, were collaboratively written with her son Dorion Sagan.