Lynn Margulis Quotes

United States, Scientist
March 5, 1938 – November, 22, 2011.

Lynn Margulis (born Lynn Petra Alexander; March 5, 1938 – November 22, 2011) was an American evolutionary theorist and biologist, science author, educator, and popularizer, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has said that "Lynn Margulis's name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution."

Also known as Author, Educator

The smallest bacterium is so much more like people than Stanley Miller’s mixtures of chemicals, because it already has these system properties. So to go from a bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to that bacterium.

Lynn Margulis
- People
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-creates, and outdoes itself.

Lynn Margulis
- Life
- Earth
- Question

Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves, and so it cannot so easily be fixed with a single number.

Lynn Margulis
The fundamental division of forms of life on Earth is not that between plants and animals, as is commonly assumed, but between prokaryotes-organisms composed of cells with no nucleus, that is, bacteria-and eukaryotes-all other life forms.

Lynn Margulis
- Life
- Earth
Why does everybody agree that atmospheric oxygen... comes from life, but no one speaks about the other gases coming from life?

Lynn Margulis
- Life
- Why
1 + 1 = 1

Lynn Margulis
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.

Lynn Margulis
- Life
- History
- Earth