The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2012 [antikvár]

Foreword Last November, while gathering articles for this collection, I read that Lynn Margulis had died. She was one of the great evolutionary biologists of our time, and exceedingly controversial. In 1967, when she was twenty-nine, she published a paper that transformed our understanding of the evolution of life. Before being accepted by the Journal of Theoretical Biology, the manuscript had been rejected by fifteen other journals—the academic equivalent of publishing houses turning down the first Harry Potter book. Her forty-nine-page article challenged one of the bedrock principles of modern biology: that random mutation was the prime driver of evolution. Margulis argued instead that some of the most crucial evolutionary developments in the 3.8-billion-year history of life on Earth were the result of cooperative and mutually beneficial relationships among organisms. Specifically, she was convinced that more complex forms of life arose when simpler ones merged into a single organism—to the advantage of all parties involved. She called the process symbiogenesis. Margulis looked to the humblest living things to find evidence for her hypothesis. She argued that in the distant past, primitive single-celled creatures combined, creating more elaborate cells that would eventually give rise to all higher forms of life. The traces of those ancient unions remain today in nearly every cell of our bodies. It is now generally accepted that mitochondria— microscopic components of our cells that provide the chemical energy that keeps us alive—once existed as free-living bacteria that were engulfed by some larger cell, an event that probably hap-