Lynn Margulis had the audacity to challenge Darwin. And we\u2019re lucky she did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Throughout her prolific and distinguished career, biologist<\/u><\/a> Lynn Margulis made several groundbreaking contributions to science that we take for granted as common knowledge today. For example, she championed James E. Lovelock\u2019s \u201cGaia concept<\/a>,\u201d which posited that the Earth<\/u><\/a> self-regulates to maintain conditions for life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But by far, her most notable theory<\/u><\/a> was symbiogenesis. While it was first written off<\/u><\/a> as \u201cstrange\u201d and \u201caesthetically pleasing\u201d but \u201cnot compelling,\u201d it would ultimately prevail, and completely rewrite how we viewed the origin of life itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the late 1960s, Margulis wrote a paper titled \u201cOn the Origin of Mitosing Cells<\/u><\/a>,\u201d that was quite avant-garde. In it, she proposed a theory: that life evolved through organisms merging together to become inseparable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In essence, cooperation is the driver of life, not competition and domination. This directly went against Darwin\u2019s \u201csurvival of the fittest\u201d principle that was considered gospel in scientific circles. Margulis\u2019 paper was rejected by fifteen journals before getting accepted into the Journal of Theoretical Biology<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Time would be on Margulis\u2019 side, however. By the late \u201870s and early \u201880s, research proved<\/u><\/a> that the two major building blocks of plants and animals, chloroplasts and mitochondria were at one time independent bacteria. This solidified the fact that on a biological level, connection trumps autonomy for longevity. And now that fact is written in textbooks, with no real story of the adversity it overcame to get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While it is customary for most new scientific theories to be met with criticism, especially those that completely shift the current narrative, many have noted that sexism<\/u><\/a> played a key part in Margulis\u2019 initial lack of acceptance. On more than one occasion, she herself had hinted that women were seen as mothers and wives first, and scientists second. She recalled that while married to fellow scientist Carl Sagan that \u201cCarl would finish his sentence, unperturbed<\/u><\/a>\u201d while she was expected to \u201chandle all the duties of a 1950s housewife, from washing dishes to paying the household bills.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, Margulis would have other ideas that were controversial that had nothing to do with her gender. Most famously, she did not believe that AIDS was caused by HIV, and instead believed it was cause by a syphilis-causing type of bacteria, despite there already being decades of research proving otherwise. That view was seen as an endorsement of AIDS denialism, which undermined prevention and treatment effort. Then later in life, Margulis became a vocal proponent of 9\/11 conspiracy theories<\/u><\/a> suggesting government involvement the in Twin Towers attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, perhaps this is one of those \u201cyou gotta take the good with the bad\u201d situations. Margulis\u2019 inherent contrarian nature gave us both these unfounded, even harmful stances, in addition to entirely new paradigms that altered our understanding of life itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if nothing else, it illuminated the need for science to include multiple points of view in order to unlock the truth. It seems life is, after all, about coming together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lynn Margulis had the audacity to challenge Darwin. And we\u2019re lucky she did. Throughout her prolific and distinguished career, biologist Lynn Margulis made several groundbreaking contributions to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10111,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/741556066_1064226286259317_1507584454157963851_n.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10110"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10112,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10110\/revisions\/10112"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}