Lynn Margulis famous quotes

04-17-2025

The notion of saving the planet has nothing to do with intellectual honesty or science. The fact is that the planet was here long before us and will be here long after us. The planet is running fine. What people are talking about is saving themselves and saving their middle-class lifestyles and saving their cash flow.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Running #Honesty #Talking
I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Mutation #Taught #Accumulation
Why does everybody agree that atmospheric oxygen comes from life, but no one speaks about the other gases coming from life?
-- Lynn Margulis

#Oxygen #Doe #Speak
The urgency to mate persists in all people as in all other mammals because of the evolutionary drive to continue the species, the inborn imperative for genes to reproduce and hormonal differences that evolved over millions of years.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Years #Differences #People
Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Verbs #Earth
Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn't look anything like a butterfly.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Butterfly #Looks #Caterpillars
All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Consciousness #Compare #Ecology
Life learned early on to recognize itself.
-- Lynn Margulis
The fewer species there are and the fewer species we know about, the fewer questions we even know to ask.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Species
Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Natural #Natural Selection
Although the detail of our sexual energies and their objects and objectives vastly vary, the existence of our sexuality itself is an undeniable truth.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Energy #Details #Sexuality
Politicians need a better understanding of global ecology. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are chosen, the unique species for which all the others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Powerful #Unique #Understanding
People think the earth is going to die and they have to save it. Thats ridiculous. If you rid the earth of flowering plants, people would die, period. But the earth was without flowering plants for almost all of its history.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Thinking #People #Earth
All of us from fertile egg to embryo to corpse, are exactly that: warm, wet, furry animals compelled by the sexuality of our forefathers and foremothers to be, either directly or indirectly, our own exciting and excitable, provocative and provocable selves.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Animal #Self #Eggs
To romp along the connected rooftops and fire escapes of Chicagos second city of garages was my young lifes passion.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Passion #Fire #Cities
To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable - the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth, or heal our sick planet, is evidence of our immense capacity for self delusion. Rather, we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Moving #Responsibility #Self
People say I am against Darwin. That is ridiculous.
-- Lynn Margulis

#People #Ridiculous
Neo-Darwinian language and conceptual structure itself ensures scientific failure: Major questions posed by zoologists cannot be answered from inside the neo-Darwinian straitjacket. Such questions include, for example, 'How do new structures arise in evolution?' 'Why, given so much environmental change, is stasis so prevalent in evolution as seen in the fossil record?' 'How did one group of organisms or set of macromolecules evolve from another?' The importance of these questions is not at issue; it is just that neo-Darwinians, restricted by their resuppositions, cannot answer them.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Issues #Environmental #Records
All scientists agree that evolution has occurred-that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?
-- Lynn Margulis

#Extinction #Ancestry #Groups
Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Tree #Earth #Evolution
Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement... Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Loss #Wings #Population
The accumulation of genetic mutations were touted to be enough to change one species to anotherâ€¦.No. It wasnâ€™t dishonesty. I think it was wish fulfillment and social momentum. Assumptions, made but not verified, were taught as fact.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Thinking #Wish #Mutation
All living beings, not just animals, but plants and microorganisms, perceive. To survive, an organic being must perceive - it must seek, or at least recognize, food and avoid environmental danger.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Animal #Environmental #Plant
We are all of us walking communities of bacteria. The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape made of tiny living beings.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Community #World #Landscape
Body concentrates order. It continuously self-repairs. Every five days you get a new stomach lining. You get a new liver every two months. Your skin replaces itself every six weeks. Every year, 98 percent of the atoms of your body are replaced. This non-stop chemical replacement, metabolism, is a sure sign of life.
-- Lynn Margulis

#Order #Years #Two

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