Tireless, controversial, and hugely inspirational to those who knew her or encountered her work, Lynn Margulis was a scientist whose intellectual energy and interests knew no bounds. Best known for her work on the origins of eukaryotic cells, the Gaia hypothesis, and symbiogenesis as a driving force in evolution, her work has forever changed the way we understand life on Earth.
When Margulis passed away in 2011, she left behind a groundbreaking scientific legacy that spanned decades. In this collection, Dorion Sagan, Margulis's son and longtime collaborator, gathers together the voices of friends and colleagues to remark on her life and legacy, in essays that cover her early collaboration with James Lovelock, her fearless face-off with Richard Dawkins during the so-called "Battle of Balliol" at Oxford, the intrepid application of her scientific mind to the insistence that 9/11 was a false-flag operation, her affinity for Emily Dickinson, and more.
Margulis was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, received the prestigious National Medal of Science in 1999, and her papers are permanently archived at the Library of Congress. Less than a month before her untimely death, Margulis was named one of the twenty most influential scientists alive - one of only two women on this list, which include such scientists as Stephen Hawking, James Watson, and Jane Goodall.
"Although she could be a bulldog, her heart was soft and her spirit loving beneath the scientific realpolitik of her conversation and the insistent tough-mindedness of her sometimes strident and blunt, withering and refreshingly unadorned opinions."-Dorion Sagan, from the introduction "I hope that in due time she will be recognized as one of the greatest scientific thinkers of our time."-Ernest Callenbach, author of Ecotopia
"It's the ideas that really matter―and Lynn certainly had hers. They were novel and profound, and she simply wanted all the rest of the world to adjust their thinking to accommodate and embrace what she saw were the simple, beautiful truths that she had uncovered."-Dr. Niles Eldredge, contributor, and author of Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life
"I can't imagine what the world of biological science in the twentieth century would have been had Lynn Margulis not come along. In this volume, we can read about some of the vast range of intellect she influenced."-Wes Jackson, president, The Land Institute
"Lynn and I often argued, as good collaborators should, and we wrangled over the intricate finer points of self-regulation, but always remained good friends, perhaps because we were confident that we were right."-Dr. James Lovelock, contributor, and author of The Vanishing Face of Gaia
"It was life―profligate, teeming life in all its weirdness―that held the magic for her, not this featherless biped with its confused aspirations. Lynn intuited and doggedly gathered evidence to show that most anything we two-leggeds take special pride in―our capacities for cogitation, conviviality, and culture―had been invented, eons before, by the microbial entities that compose us."-David Abram, contributor, and author of Spell of the Sensuous
"In this thoughtful and expertly curated collection, Margulis's son and long-time collaborator, Dorion Sagan, calls her "indomitable Lynn." A fearless and zealous advocate of her theories who could also display a loving heart, he writes, "[H]er threat was not to people but to the evil done to the spirit by the entrenchment of unsupported views." In other essays, Margulis's complex personality beguiles, frustrates, charms, and elevates various writers, resulting in a stunning portrait that no single remembrance could have captured.
Taken as a whole, Sagan's collection is a fitting tribute to a woman whose life and legacy have touched so many others. As he notes, her indomitable spirit lives on through her children, grandchildren, colleagues, and
