Margulis Quotes & Sayings

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

People think the earth is going to die and they have to save it. That's 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

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

If you really want to study evolution, you've got go outside sometime, because you'll see symbiosis everywhere! — Lynn Margulis

The Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock [and Lynn Margulis] puts forward a scientific view of the living Earth, which in one respect is modern, empherical, scientific, in another respect re-awakens an ancient archetype, which in fact is so clearly suggested by the very name of the hypothesis, Gaia, the Greek name for Mother Earth. — Rupert Sheldrake

Repetition draws us into music, and repetition draws music into us. — Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

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

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

According to pioneering microbiologist Lynn Margulis, "fully 10 percent of our own dry body weight consists of bacteria, some of which, although they are not a congenital part of our bodies, we can't live without." In fact, a healthy human body has more bacterial cells than animal cells (bacterial cells are far smaller). Our own bodies are in some ways microcosms of the biosphere as a whole. — Marcia Bjornerud

Although the detail of our sexual energies and their objects and objectives vastly vary, the existence of our sexuality itself is an undeniable truth. — Lynn Margulis

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 doing. — Lynn Margulis

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

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

People say I am against Darwin. That is ridiculous. — Lynn Margulis

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

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

All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology. — Lynn Margulis

To romp along the connected rooftops and fire escapes of Chicago's second city of garages was my young life's passion. — Lynn Margulis

When we acknowledge how, just by living and listening, we have all acquired deep musical knowledge, we must also recognise that music is not the special purview of professionals. Rather, music professionals owe their existence to the fact that we, too, are musical. Without that profound shared understanding, music would have no power to move us ["The Music In You," Aeon, January 8, 2015]. — Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

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

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 that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change [which] led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence. — Lynn Margulis

To this point, musical repetition has been viewed as a particular kind of object. But it can also be viewed as a particular kind of behavior. — Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

Life on earth is such a good story you cannot afford to miss the beginning ... Beneath our superficial differences we are all of us walking communities of bacteria. The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape made of tiny living beings. — Lynn Margulis

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

Why does everybody agree that atmospheric oxygen comes from life, but no one speaks about the other gases coming from life? — Lynn Margulis

Life did not take over the world by combat,
but by networking. — Lynn Margulis

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

Life learned early on to recognize itself. — Lynn Margulis

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

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

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, upright apes share this finite planet are directly or indirectly connected to our well-being. — Lynn Margulis

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

The proportions of these salts and minerals in our tissues are uncannily similar to those in sea water - we sweat and cry sea water, as Margulis and Sagan have put it - but curiously we cannot tolerate them as an input. — Bill Bryson

As Lynn Margulis writes: All the world's bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years. — Steven Johnson

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

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

New mutations don't create new species; they create offspring that are impaired. — Lynn Margulis

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

My work more than didn't fit in. It crossed willy-nilly the boundaries that people had spent their lives building up. It hits some 30 subfields of biology, even geology. — Lynn Margulis

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

For all the accomplishments of molecular biology, we still can't tell a live cat from a dead cat. — Lynn Margulis

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

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