Lynn Margulis

"Living beings defy neat definition. They fight, they feed, they dance, they mate, they die. At the base of the creativity of all large familiar forms of life, symbiosis generates novelty. It brings to…"

"I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and microorganisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge, and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoo…"

"The question "What is Life?" is... a linguistic trap. To answer according to the rules of grammar, we must supply a noun, a thing. But life on Earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-crea…"

"In the long run, the most vicious predators, like most dread disease-causing microbes, bring about their own ruin by killing their victims. Restrained predation—the attack that doesn't kill or does ki…"

"There is little doubt that the planetary patina—including ourselves—is autopoietic. Life at the surface of the Earth seems to regulate itself in the face of external perturbation, and does so without …"

"From the paramecium to the human race, all life forms are meticulously organized, sophisticated aggregates of evolving microbial life. Far from leaving microorganisms behind on an evolutionary "ladder…"

"The view of evolution as a chronic bloody competition among individuals and species, a popular distortion of Darwin's notion of "survival of the fittest," dissolves before a new view of continual coop…"

"Not only did life originate on earth very early in its history as a planet, but for the first two billion years, Earth was inhabited solely by bacteria."