Quotes by Lynn Margulis

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

“Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.”

“Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create... Neo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again t...”

“There is no scientific reason to think that we, even with space travel, are going to survive as a species for ever, certainly not by biting off the hand that feeds us, which is exactly what we are ...”

“Despite our very recent appearance on the planet, humanity combines arrogance with increasing material demands, even as we become more numerous. Our toughness is a delusion. Have we the intelligenc...”

“I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.”

“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.”

“Of course, the plea for respect for nonhuman life goes far beyond the scientific delight of familiarity with our planet mates. The nonhuman forms of life with which we 6,000 million talking, uprigh...”

“Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.”

“Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves, and so it cannot so easily be fixed with a single number.”

“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 ...”

“The oxygen crisis that began only two billion years ago prompted the evolution of respiring bacteria. These microbes that used oxygen to derive biochemical energy more efficiently than ever before ...”

“[The smallest bacterium] is so much more like people than Stanley Miller’s mixtures of chemicals, because it already has these system properties. So to go from a bacterium to people is less of a st...”

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

“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 witho...”

“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 ladd...”

“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 coo...”

“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.”

“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, bact...”

“In the long run, the most vicious predators, like most dread disease-causing microbes, bring about their own ruin by killing their victims. Restrained predation—the attack that doesn't kill or does...”