Lynn Margulis Quotes

• We are all of us walking communities of bacteria.
  The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape
  made of tiny living beings.

  Lynn Margulis

  Community, World, Landscape

  Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan (1986). “Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors”, p.191, Univ of California Press

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• Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.

  Lynn Margulis

  Verbs, Earth

  Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan (1995). “What is Life?”, p.14, Univ of California Press

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• To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable - the rhetoric 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 our sick planet, is evidence of our immense capacity for self delusion. Rather, we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.

  Lynn Margulis

  Moving, Responsibility, Self

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• 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

  Running, Honesty, Cash Flow

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• The idea that we are "stewards of the earth" is another symptom of human arrogance. Imagine yourself with the task of overseeing your body's physical processes. Do you understand the way it works well enough to keep all its systems in operation? Can you make your kidneys function? Can you control the removal of waste? Are you conscious of the blood flow through your arteries, or the fact that you are losing a hundred thousand skin cells a minute?

  Lynn Margulis

  Cells, Blood, Ideas

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• All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.

  Lynn Margulis

  Consciousness, Compare, Ecology

  "Attack of the Microbiologists" by Elizabeth Royte, www.nytimes.com. 1996.

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• 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

  Self, Order, Years

  Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan (1995). “What is Life?”, p.17, Univ of California Press

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• 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

  Tree, Earth, Evolution

  Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan (1995). “What is Life?”, p.93, Univ of California Press

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• 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

  Animal, Environmental, Plant

  Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan (1995). “What is Life?”, p.27, Univ of California Press

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• Politicians need a better understanding of global ecology. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are chosen, the unique species for which all the others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous.

  Lynn Margulis

  Powerful, Unique, Understanding

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• Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.

  Lynn Margulis

  Natural, Natural Selection, Selection

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• Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn't look anything like a butterfly.

  Lynn Margulis

  Butterfly, Looks, Caterpillars

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• Neo-Darwinian language and conceptual structure itself ensures scientific failure: Major questions posed by zoologists cannot be answered from inside the neo-Darwinian straitjacket. Such questions include, for example, 'How do new structures arise in evolution?' 'Why, given so much environmental change, is stasis so prevalent in evolution as seen in the fossil record?' 'How did one group of organisms or set of macromolecules evolve from another?' The importance of these questions is not at issue; it is just that neo-Darwinians, restricted by their resuppositions, cannot answer them.

  Lynn Margulis

  Issues, Environmental, Groups

  Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan (2013). “Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution”, p.100, Springer Science & Business Media

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• 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.

  Lynn Margulis

  Mutation, Taught, Accumulation

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• Life learned early on to recognize itself.

  Lynn Margulis

  "Life’s Most Amazing Invisible Secrets" by Andy Mannle, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 11, 2012.

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• 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 intelligence and discipline to vigilantly guard against our tendency to grow without limit?

  Lynn Margulis

  Discipline, Humanity, Arrogance

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• We are unconscious of most of our body's processes, thank goodness, because we'd screw it up if we weren't. The human body is so complex, with so many parts...a system which is far more complex than we can fully imagine. The idea that we are consciously care-taking such a large and mysterious system is ludicrous.

  Lynn Margulis

  Ideas, Environmental, Body

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• Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement... Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation.

  Lynn Margulis

  Loss, Wings, Population

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• People think the earth is going to die and they have to save it. Thats ridiculous. If you rid the earth of flowering plants, people would die, period. But the earth was without flowering plants for almost all of its history.

  Lynn Margulis

  Thinking, People, Earth

  "Attack of the Microbiologists" by Elizabeth Royte, www.nytimes.com. January 14, 1996.

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• The accumulation of genetic mutations were touted to be enough to change one species to another….No. It wasn’t dishonesty. I think it was wish fulfillment and social momentum. Assumptions, made but not verified, were taught as fact.

  Lynn Margulis

  Thinking, Wish, Mutation

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• All scientists agree that evolution has occurred-that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?

  Lynn Margulis

  Groups, Extinction, Ancestry

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• People say I am against Darwin. That is ridiculous.

  Lynn Margulis

  People, Ridiculous

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• The fewer species there are and the fewer species we know about, the fewer questions we even know to ask.

  Lynn Margulis

  Species, Fewer, Knows

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• All of us from fertile egg to embryo to corpse, are exactly that: warm, wet, furry animals compelled by the sexuality of our forefathers and foremothers to be, either directly or indirectly, our own exciting and excitable, provocative and provocable selves.

  Lynn Margulis

  Animal, Self, Eggs

  "A Woman's Worth: 1857 Letter Echoes Still; Some Basic Disputes Over Feminism Persist" by Patricia Cohen, www.nytimes.com. July 18, 1998.

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• The urgency to mate persists in all people as in all other mammals because of the evolutionary drive to continue the species, the inborn imperative for genes to reproduce and hormonal differences that evolved over millions of years.

  Lynn Margulis

  Years, Differences, People

  "A Woman's Worth: 1857 Letter Echoes Still; Some Basic Disputes Over Feminism Persist" by Patricia Cohen, www.nytimes.com. July 18, 1998.

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