Lynn Margulis

This book represents an attempt by Dorion Sagan, the son of and collaborator with Lynn Margulis, to summarise Lynn's life and work. He has got 25 friends of Lynn, each of whom she literally bumped into, to encapsulate their years of knowing and working with her into a few pages each. Each contributor brings out particular events in her packed life, or notes new viewpoints generated from her work. Since I cannot usefully shorten further every account, I concentrate on those contributions which reflect some aspects of Lynn's relationship with the Network's spiritual concerns. What has Lynn Margulis achieved? Since her student days, Lynn laboured to bring the idea of serial endosymbiosis into the mainstream of biological science; that all eukaryotic cells (cells with nuclei) have evolved from a symbiosis of bacteria without nuclei that had previously lived independently. This gives a new view on evolution, very different from the recent fashion of Neo-Darwinism. There are no magic 'random' events in Lynn's work, as with the Neo-Darwinists. Lynn is probably best known for her later devoted collaboration with James Lovelock in the development of Gaia theory. Jim saw the earth from the top down (1965 work with NASA), Lynn saw it through a microscope, the earth from the bottom up, bacteria living in mud. Taken together, these provide a view of life and earth on a far grander scale than before. Symbiosis implies that all life is the result of existing organisms getting together to create a more complex new entity. Lynn saw every living thing from bacteria up to the highest level of complexity as an organism which could feel and react to outside events. And organisms can join together to create more complex organisms. This is Panpsychism. As an example of symbiosis, only 10% of the cells inside each of us are human. The rest are other life forms, essential to our existence, so we are already legion. Each organism can affect all other organisms up and down the chain of complexity. So life is autopoietic; developing life influences all previously existing life. We are finished with reductionism. Lynn's now accepted work on symbiosis makes Neo-Darwinism out of date. Lovelock needed to stay close to more conventional views to get published and recognised, but Lynn didn't care. From early on, she experienced academic Peer review as a method of suppressing new thinking.

Lynn and Spiritual Concern Our book has an article by Lynn herself, where she makes clear that until recently she had experienced only conservative evangelical Christian theology, and knew nothing of modern religious or philosophical studies. She seems not aware of Teilhard de Chardin and his vision of a noosphere [3], nor Whitehead's view of all structures in existence as organisms in process [1], which would have supported her viewpoint. Though she rejected the idea of 'belief' in God as a conventional assent to a series of statements, her life demonstrated an all-consuming love of the whole of creation, and caring love for her army of students, visitors and local friends. Any religion might agree that little else matters. In our book, William Irwin Thompson shows that Darwin's and Neo-Darwinists' theories are built in the mind-set (Kuhn) of Empire achieved by conquest, typical of the 19th Century (British) and 20th Cent (American) Empires. They believed that Empire by conquest represents the ideal perfectionist state of humans, with animals and everything else assumed to be dominated by them. The 'fittest' state is that which has triumphed through the 'conquest' of other possible states. Thompson also attacks the illusion of proceeding from 'facts' to theory, pointing out that the definition and measurement of every 'fact' depends on some pre-existent theory. David Ray Griffin and John Cobb are philosophers and theologians who have studied Lynn's work for many years, and become continually more aware of how her ideas impact their own [2]. They have developed the Process Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, which they see as mutually supporting Lynn's ideas of life interacting creatively with the earth. Their philosophy is also based on organism rather than mechanism: Physics deals with small organisms, electron, protons, atoms; Biology is concerned with larger organisms, cells and more complex assemblages. A cell can experience other cells, and has some spontaneity. It may exist only momentarily, may just be a "drop of experience". The eucaryotic cell, the basis of higher life, is already an organism, a union of more primitive organisms. With Lynn and Whitehead, causation is not one-way, but all things interact in a network rather than a heirarchy. Simple cause and effect are no longer obvious. And with Lovelock, life collaborates with the whole earth to create Gaia. Though there is both competition and cooperation in Gaia. Denis Noble confirms that Lynn makes Neo-Darwinism out-dated. And the development of Epigenetics, alternative ways of modifying genes apart from 'random' mutations (whatever that means) amplifies her viewpoint. As he also points out, we are made from something like a collection of musical notes, and yet we also sing the song, which has a meaning beyond the notes. Andre Khalil studied under Lynn. With her, he experienced the breadth and the excitement of her vision of the world, from the smallest inhabitants of ooze to the edge of space. She joined geology, genetics, biology, chemistry, literature, embryology and paleontology into a unified whole in later work with Lovelock. Apart from a splendid memorial to Lynn, I suggest that this book provides the best short introduction to Lynn's work and her essential contributions to Gaia theory. It also shows how hard it is to introduce radically new ideas into existing entrenched academic fashions in theory. With the aid of this book, everyone can now move into a genuine Earth History[4], an integration of the Earth's previous 4 billion years with the (at most) five thousand years currently believed to be significant by most historians. But now, collaboration not competition is the name of the game; and it is in a different court. As William Irwin Thompson says: "Study Lynn because all you think in the old paradigm is wrong. Lynn has changed everything..." Personal note: As with any sudden death, we are all left with unfinished business and regrets. The Earth Systems Science (Gaia) group of the Geological Society organised a London meeting for Lynn, and the last time I was with her I promised to send on a nicely printed version of our rather fine poster for the meeting, which she was keen on. I never did…

References [1] For more information: John B Cobb Jr: Back to Darwin: A richer account of evolution William B. Eerdmans 2008 [2] Alfred North Whitehead: Science and the Modern World New York; Free Press, 1967 [3] Teilhard de Chardin: The Vision of the Past: See http://archive.org/details/VisionOfThePast [4] For Earth History as part of Big History, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Historyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big History