Dr. Lynn Margulis
I’d actually heard of her, but not this story! Enjoy!
She said evolution isn't about competition—it's about cooperation. Fifteen journals rejected her theory. Male scientists called her research "crap." Genetic evidence proved she was right. Every cell in your body proves it.
We've been taught that evolution is brutal, solitary struggle. "Survival of the fittest." Red in tooth and claw. Everyone competing, fighting for scraps. A narrative used to justify cutthroat capitalism, social Darwinism, the idea that success means crushing competitors.
Lynn Margulis looked at that story and said: "You're telling it wrong. You're missing the most beautiful part."
Born in 1938 in Chicago, Margulis was brilliant from the start. She graduated from the University of Chicago at nineteen with a degree in liberal arts. She earned her master's in genetics and zoology from Wisconsin, her PhD from Berkeley in 1965.
She was also a young mother navigating 1960s academia—a world dominated by men who dismissed women's contributions and questioned whether mothers could be serious scientists.
But Margulis had noticed something her male peers, focused on genes and competition, had overlooked. She was captivated by collaboration—by the profound power of symbiosis.
In 1967, she proposed a radical idea that would change biology forever: endosymbiotic theory.
She argued that complex cells making up our bodies—and every plant, animal, and fungus—didn't evolve through competition alone. They began when ancient microbes didn't fight and consume each other, but chose to merge.
Here's what she proposed:
Billions of years ago, one bacterium swallowed another. But instead of digesting it, they formed a partnership. The swallowed bacterium was good at converting oxygen into energy. Rather than being destroyed, it became the mitochondria—the "powerhouse of the cell" every biology student learns about.
Every breath you take, every movement you make, is powered by ancient bacteria living inside your cells.
Later, another merger occurred. A microbe capable of capturing sunlight was incorporated and became the chloroplast—the engine of photosynthesis allowing plants to turn sunlight into food, producing oxygen we breathe.
Think about what this means:
Every cell in your body is a collective. You are not a single organism but a community—a commonwealth of ancient bacteria that decided, billions of years ago, to work together rather than destroy each other.
The very foundation of complex life isn't built on battles won, but on partnerships forged.
This wasn't minor revision. It was fundamental reimagining of how life evolved. It suggested cooperation, not just competition, was a driving evolutionary force—that the most important evolutionary leaps happened through collaboration.
The scientific establishment hated it.
Margulis submitted her paper to about fifteen different journals. All rejected it. Reviewers called it speculative, fringe science, work of someone who didn't understand "real" evolutionary biology.
Some resistance was scientific conservatism—the theory challenged established paradigms. But Margulis also faced dismissal as a woman in a male-dominated field, a young mother whose collaborative, holistic thinking was seen as less rigorous than reductionist, competitive frameworks favored by male peers.
One reviewer literally wrote: "Your research is crap. Don't ever bother me again."
But Lynn Margulis was stubborn. Brilliant. And most importantly, she had evidence.
She kept researching, gathering data, building her case piece by piece. She studied electron microscope images. She examined DNA of mitochondria and chloroplasts and found they had their own genetic material, separate from the cell's nucleus—exactly what you'd expect if they were once independent bacteria.
Finally, in 1967, the Journal of Theoretical Biology published her paper: "On the Origin of Mitosing Cells."
The scientific community largely ignored it.
Margulis didn't give up. She expanded research, published more papers, wrote a book (Origin of Eukaryotic Cells, 1970), and continued presenting evidence becoming harder to dismiss.
By the 1980s, advances in genetic sequencing provided definitive proof. Scientists could compare DNA of mitochondria and chloroplasts to modern bacteria. The similarities were undeniable.
Mitochondria and chloroplasts weren't just similar to bacteria—they were bacteria, or rather, descendants of ancient bacteria incorporated into other cells.
The theory rejected by fifteen journals and ridiculed by establishment scientists was now accepted as fundamental biological fact.
Lynn Margulis had been right all along.
In 1983, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1999, President Bill Clinton awarded her the National Medal of Science—one of America's highest scientific honors.
By her death in 2011, endosymbiotic theory was taught in every biology textbook. It's now considered one of the most important discoveries in evolutionary biology.
But Margulis's impact went beyond one theory. She fundamentally changed how we think about evolution itself.
She showed Darwin's model—while correct about natural selection and competition—was incomplete. Evolution isn't just individuals fighting for survival. It's also about cooperation, merger, symbiosis. The most important evolutionary innovations came not from one organism defeating another, but from organisms joining together.
As Margulis herself wrote: "Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking."
Her life's work validates what many know intuitively: connection is a form of strength. Collaboration can be revolutionary. The most profound transformations happen not when we wall ourselves off, but when we come together, creating something new and magnificent from fusion of different strengths.
Every cell in your body is proof of this truth. You are, quite literally, a walking testament to the power of cooperation.
Think about that. Right now, as you read this, billions of ancient bacterial partnerships are working inside you. Your mitochondria—once independent bacteria—are converting oxygen to energy. If you're near a plant, its chloroplasts—also once independent bacteria—are converting sunlight to oxygen you'll breathe.
You exist because of cooperation. Not metaphorically. Literally.
Complex life couldn't exist without those ancient mergers. Without bacteria choosing partnership over predation billions of years ago, there would be no plants, no animals, no fungi. No you.
In a world that tells us success means beating others, that vulnerability is weakness, that we must compete or die—Lynn Margulis reminds us of a different story.
The story written in every cell of your body: we are stronger together. Collaboration isn't just nice—it's how complex life came to exist. The most important evolutionary leap in history happened when organisms chose partnership.
And she was proven right by the very genetic technology that didn't exist when she first proposed her theory.
The scientist who looked at cells and saw communities. The mother who understood cooperation. The woman told she was wrong by the entire scientific establishment—who had the evidence and courage to prove them wrong.
Sometimes the most revolutionary act is seeing the world differently and refusing to back down until others see it too.
Lynn Margulis (1938-2011). Evolutionary biologist. Mother. Visionary.
The woman who proved that the foundation of all complex life is cooperation, not competition.
Every cell in your body is her legacy. Every breath you take is powered by ancient partnerships she helped us understand.
Life took over the globe by networking, not combat.
That's not just beautiful poetry. That's scientific fact.
Thank you, Lynn Margulis, for showing us the truth hiding in plain sight inside every living thing.
We are communities. We are partnerships. We are proof that cooperation works.
SOURCE: The Inspiriest FB page
She said: "I remember waking up one day with an epiphanous revelation: I am not a neo-Darwinist! I recalled an earlier experience, when I realized that I wasn't a humanistic Jew. Although I greatly admire Darwin's contributions and agree with most of his theoretical analysis and I am a Darwinist, I am not a neo-Darwinist." She argued that "Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create", and maintained that symbiosis was the major driver of evolutionary change.
Source: Wikipedia
Ex-wife of Carl Sagan who was father of her oldest two sons. Just FYI.
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Aphrodite Beyond Binaries - Saint of Symbiogenesis
coming tomorrow
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Walk for Peace
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“One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.”
K.L. Toth
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I looked up from my iPad, and out the window saw a white and grey big bird fly by in the distance beyond the trees. In the one second of knowing it was special to look up just as it passed that space, it also flew between myself and the sun, casting a fleeting shadow on me. I thought for a minute, what could it have been? Not fat, not like a dove, not a hawk, too whitish/grey, certainly not chunky enough for any goose...so I'll go for a long-limbed huge-winged Great Blue Heron.
Of course it wasn't.
But the thing is that it's a message to me. Fly. Cross across the sunlight. Be whatever you are, but just be it now. This is the only time that is. Look up!
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Open Yesterday's Pages covers a bit about Margaret Sanger's work today. I'm so grateful to live in a time when birth control became available for women.
