Historical Inertia

The Irish god Trefuilngid Tre-eochair: Triple Bearer of the Triple Key and Master of All Wisdom is the consort of the triple goddess Macha and controls the setting and rising of the sun. With the seamróg or Triple Key he created sacred trees and told the history of Ireland to the people. The latin word for clover is trefoil after him. His feast day is March 17th.


Lynn Margulis was a professor of biology at Boston University. She had provocative ideas about many of the important episodes in the history of life, including the origin of eukaryotes. In several articles and books, Dr. Margulis built a strong case for the theory that eukaryotic cells arose as communities of prokaryotes rather than by gradual modification of individual cells. According to this concept, known as the "endosymbiotic theory," chloroplasts and mitochondria are the descendants of prokaryotes that took up residence within larger bacterial cells.

Dr. Margulis also had an active interest in the diversity of contemporary organisms, and she is coauthor of Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth. This interview and the following chapters develop an important theme of biology: To understand the diversity of life we must trace its evolutionary history.

Clickum to read full interview

Dr. Margulis, what motivated you to choose a career in biology?

As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I took an introductory biology course based on one question: What is inherited from generation to generation? James Watson had taken the same course several years earlier, and I remember the Watson-Crick model being discussed when I was a student. I found that whole problem fascinating, and by the end of the course I knew I wanted to study genetics. It was that simple.

Although you were trained as a geneticist, you have a broad interest in the evolution of biological diversity, which is showcased in your book Five Kingdoms. Nearly all biologists now accept the classification of organisms into Five Kingdoms, as proposed by Robert Whittaker in a paper published in 1969. Considering the problems with the two-kingdom classification's attempt to call everything either a plant or an animal, why did it take biologists so long to adopt a new view of biological diversity?

Historical inertia. Whittaker wrote a version of his broad classification of organisms in 1959, but the concepts in the paper were continually rejected. Whittaker was a perfectionist in every sense of the word. He wouldn't send in a paper until every sentence was perfect. He wouldn't even speak a sentence until every word was perfect. And he said that papers on the Five Kingdoms were the only ones in his whole career that were repeatedly rejected. He finally got it into The American Naturalist, which had the reputation for tolerance.

What happened between '59 and '69 that made biologists more receptive to Whittaker's five-kingdom concept?

Molecular biology ... and cytology ... and electron microscopy. That is, the evidence for his concept became much clearer. Whittaker's classification arguments were ecological. For example, it always disturbed him that the fungi were considered plants because their role as decomposers has nothing whatsoever to do with the primary production of food. As an ecologist studying organisms in the field, Whittaker saw primary producers, consumers, and decomposers: plants, animals, and fungi. But he didn't know the microorganisms well. Whittaker and I spent a couple of days going over groups of microorganisms together, and he welcomed my analysis. He agreed to write the foreword to Five Kingdoms, but by that time he was dying of cancer. All his life he wanted to do a book like that himself, but it just wasn't possible; he didn't have the time and he didn't know the microorganisms.


Let's go back even further in time to the origin of life. What is your evaluation of the prevailing theory that spontaneous chemical evolution on the early Earth produced the forerunners of cells?

The monomers [amino acids and nucleotide base pairs] can be produced in laboratory simulation experiments of the early Earth without life itself. Researchers now have as many as 80 nucleotides spontaneously associating in the absence of enzymes. And when lipids are added to mixtures of organic compounds, they tend to surround and concentrate amino acids, peptides, nucleotides, and nucleotide polymers.

Astronomical cycles-tidal cycles, light cycles, hot and cold-may have been important for these chemical processes to occur early on in Earth history. One of the best techniques for concentrating organic matter is to freeze it. If you freeze it, you take the water out. And what's left are high concentrations of organics. Then you dissolve it and freeze it again. Just adding the water back allows chemistry to go on that couldn't go on otherwise. And taking the water away again concentrates the organics again. And you're not exactly where you were the first time.


We've covered about 4 billion years of Earth history. I'd like to finish with a question about the present. What qualities do you like to see in your students?

Well, certainly intellectual curiosity. One problem I'm observing is that students are scared and they want jobs, or they're here because their parents want them to be, which is very sad. I think science should be taught as a liberal art. I try to resist the pressures to make technicians out of everybody. If they don't get exposure to liberal arts thinking at the college level, they're not likely to get it for the rest of their lives. Students, like scientists, have to stop trusting authority and start looking at nature and people for themselves.


Biota of the Isle of Man

Gaia Is a Tough Bitch

"For more than a billion years, the only life on this planet consisted of bacterial cells, which, lacking nuclei, are called prokaryotes, or prokaryotic cells. They looked very much alike, and from the human-centered vantage point seem boring. However, bacteria are the source of reproduction, photosynthesis, movement — indeed, all interesting features of life except perhaps speech! They're still with us in large diversity and numbers.

They still rule Earth.

Symbiosis has nothing to do with cost or benefit. The benefit/cost people have perverted the science with invidious economic analogies. The contention is not over modern symbioses, simply the living together of unlike organisms, but over whether "symbiogenesis" — long-term symbioses that lead to new forms of life — has occurred and is still occurring. The importance of symbiogenesis as a major source of evolutionary change is what is debated. I contend that symbiogenesis is the result of long-term living together — staying together, especially involving microbes- -and that it's the major evolutionary innovator in all lineages of larger nonbacterial organisms.

......animals are very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution's creativity.

The Gaia hypothesis is a biological idea, but it's not human-centered. Those who want Gaia to be an Earth goddess for a cuddly, furry human environment find no solace in it. They tend to be critical or to misunderstand. They can buy into the theory only by misinterpreting it. Some critics are worried that the Gaia hypothesis says the environment will respond to any insults done to it and the natural systems will take care of the problems. This, they maintain, gives industries a license to pollute. Yes, Gaia will take care of itself; yes, environmental excesses will be ameliorated, but it's likely that such restoration of the environment will occur in a world devoid of people.


Lovelock would say that Earth is an organism. I disagree with this phraseology. No organism eats its own waste. I prefer to say that Earth is an ecosystem, one continuous enormous ecosystem composed of many component ecosystems. Lovelock's position is to let the people believe that Earth is an organism, because if they think it is just a pile of rocks they kick it, ignore it, and mistreat it. If they think Earth is an organism, they'll tend to treat it with respect. To me, this is a helpful cop-out, not science. Yet I do agree with Lovelock when he claims that most of the things scientists do are not science either. And I realize that by taking the stance he does he is more effective than I am in communicating Gaian ideas.

Gaia is a tough bitch — a system that has worked for over three billion years without people. This planet's surface and its atmosphere and environment will continue to evolve long after people and prejudice are gone.

Extracts truffled from Gaia is a Tough Bitch, read full interview with LM at The Edge

LYNN MARGULIS in her life and times was a biologist; Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; author of The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells (1970), Early Life (1981), and Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (2d ed., 1993). She is also the coauthor, with Karlene V. Schwartz, of Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth (2d ed., 1988) and with Dorion Sagan of Microcosmos (1986), Origins Of Sex (1986), and Mystery Dance (1991).





Endosymbiogenesis & the Human Microbiome

Image: Coral quartz and its amazing correspondence with a transected segment of the human sigmoid colon showing polyps.

Konstantin Mereschcowsky (1855-1921) was a prominent Russian biologist, botanist and advocate of eugenics active mainly around Kazan whose research on lichens led him to propose the theory of symbiogenesis - that larger, more complex cells evolved from symbiotic relationship between less complex ones.

He presented this theory in 1909, in his Russian work, The Theory of Two Plasms as the Basis of Symbiogenesis, a New Study or the Origins of Organisms, although the fundamentals of the idea already had appeared in his earlier 1905 work, The nature and origins of chromatophores in the plant kingdom.

He was inspired by his work as a leading lichenologist - lichens were of major interest at the time as it had recently been shown that they exhibit a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae. Around the turn of the century Konstantin collected a sizeable lichen herbarium, containing over 2000 specimens from lands in Russia, Austria and around the Mediterranean. The collection is currently in the possession of Kazan University. He also studied hydras.

Bailey Flower Essences ~ Lichen

Lichens are strange plants composed of two different species living together in an interlocked relationship. The essence of Lichen mirrors this but in a rather different manner. We are part of the universe and the universe is a part of us, but when that relationship becomes strained, when we feel alienated from the source of our being, life can be very difficult and unrewarding. Indeed, in extreme circumstances we may feel that there is just no point in going on living.

Lichen enables us to bond firmly once more with the universe and all that it contains, not only at the material level of physical earth, but also at the psychic and spiritual levels - all part of our birthright.

Although the modern evolutionary synthesis supports Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Merezhovsky's ideas of symbiogenesis are reflected in the modern endosymbiotic theory developed and popularised by Lynn Margulis (1938-2011).

The endosymbiotic theory was advanced and substantiated with microbiological evidence by Lynn Margulis in a 1967 paper, The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells. In her 1981 work Symbiosis in Cell Evolution she argued that eukaryotic cells originated as communities of interacting entities, including endosymbiotic spirochaetes that developed into eukaryotic flagella and cilia. This last idea has not received much acceptance, because flagella lack DNA and do not show ultrastructural similarities to bacteria or archaea.  According to Margulis and Dorion Sagan:

 "Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking"

Twenty-six years have passed since the publication of Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution, co-authored by Lynn Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan.  In 2006, Astrobiology Magazine marked the 20th anniversary of this publication by interviewing Margulis, then a distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

The Astrobiology Magazine Interviews

Microbial Planet ~ Part I

We Are All Microbes ~ Part II

Bacteria Don't Have Species ~ Part III

Bacterial Intelligence ~ Part IV


Margulis was a controversial figure in the world of biological science. Many of the ideas she and Sagan put forth in Microcosmos, which met stiff resistance at the time, are now widely accepted. In  a four-part interview, Margulis talked about how scientific understanding of early life on Earth has changed, and explained one of the central ideas of her life's work: symbiogenesis.

If you look up consciousness in the dictionary, it says, "awareness of the world around you," and that's because you lose it somehow when you become unconscious, right? Well, you can show that microorganisms, or bacteria, are certainly conscious. They will orient themselves, they will work together to make structures. They'll do a lot of things. This ability to respond specifically to the environment and to act creatively, in the sense that that precise action has never been taken before, is a property of life. ~ Lynn Margulis, 2006

Bacteria outnumber human cells in the body by 10 to 1.

Bacteria are the Eldest lifeforms on Earth.

Wisdom of the Elders.

Go Within.

Human Microbiome Project ~ the future of Energy & Vibrational healing.