Lynn Margulis (1938 - 2011)

[Kai]

Lynn Margulis died yesterday evening. Many of you probably recognize the name; she was one of the most influential biologists in the world, the mother of endosymbiotic theory, and the endorser of many crazy ideas, some of which turned out to be right.

More recently she's been in the news for communicating a very strange article to PNAS, which incidentally is now the reason that journal doesn't use that particular method in publication (the communicated articles by members bypassed peer review). In the words of a former student of hers, "she just [had] no bullshit detector". Though a great deal of the recent press on her is vilifiying this predisposition to crazy ideas such as the eukaryotic flagellum coming from spirochates, the larvae of insects coming from onychophorans, and the Gaia Hypothesis, it's important to remember her greatest contribution, that of Endosymbiotic Cell Theory.

Basically, there is a massive amount of evidence to suggest that mitochondria, chloroplasts and possibly other cell organelles were originally free living bacteria, and acquired and integrated over evolutionary history to become the cell components we know them as. It's an idea we take almost for granted today, but in the 1970s when Margulis started writing about endosymbiosis it was not widely accepted. She may have let this success go to her head which lead to the unfortunate inability to discriminate between good and bad ideas, but this first success really carried her career.

And to some extent, I think it's necessary to have at least one outspoken scientist in every field wrestling with so called crazy ideas. The greatest revolutionary hypotheses don't generally come from mainstream science, they come from the backwaters, the bits that are ignored in the mainstream, the ideas no one has thought to investigate, or more likely, no one has had the perseverance to investigate to a conclusion. Lynn Margulis was such a character, and we are at a loss in the biological community without her.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Science can't progress without crazy ideas.

That's what the scientific process is for...Sifting the gems out of the heap of those ideas.

[Kai]

Science can't progress without crazy ideas.

That's what the scientific process is for...Sifting the gems out of the heap of those ideas.

Yeah.

I will say that most scientists know how to drop an idea when research fails to substantiate sufficient evidence for it. Dr. Margulis had some trouble with that.

That being said, Slanted Truths was one of the most influential books I read during high school. Right up there with Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and the Tao Te Ching.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Science can't progress without crazy ideas.

That's what the scientific process is for...Sifting the gems out of the heap of those ideas.

Yeah.

I will say that most scientists know how to drop an idea when research fails to substantiate sufficient evidence for it. Dr. Margulis had some trouble with that.

That being said, Slanted Truths was one of the most influential books I read during high school. Right up there with Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and the Tao Te Ching.

Beats the hell out of most of the physics professors I had.

NEW IS BAD.  CONCENTRATE ON WHAT THE TA IS WRITING ON THE BOARD.  NOBODY WITHOUT A GRADUATE DEGREE TO ASK ANY SILLY QUESTIONS, PLS.

I had one notable exception, who would have great fun following a students weird idea out into left field (usually outside of class hours), and when you were done, you knew why your idea was wrong (it usually is) and since he LED you to the reason, you didn't feel stupid, and you kept thinking about things.

But that was one professor out of an entire department.  The rest had sheepskin disease.

[Elder Iptuous]

interesting and sad, Kai.

Do you know of any in the field that appear to be the ones taking up the mantle of intelligent, but willing to pursue the 'crazy' for the sake of advancement?

[Kai]

interesting and sad, Kai.

Do you know of any in the field that appear to be the ones taking up the mantle of intelligent, but willing to pursue the 'crazy' for the sake of advancement?

No one with the clout of Lynn Margulis.

The most important thing for scientists who pursue crazy ideas is to have a firm background in more standard science; otherwise people won't take their research seriously. Darwin, for example, spent 10 years working on barnacles and as an expert taxonomist/naturalist he was able to convince people better than if he had just been a young upstart. Margulis had her endosymbiosis. Dawkins had his work with Tinbergen on behavior and evolutionary biology before he published The Selfish Gene. E.O Wilson had his work on ant taxonomy before he published Sociobiology. Barbara McClintock was a well known corn geneticist before her work on transposable elements.

Neither Dawkins nor Wilson are known for taking on crazy ideas like Margulis did. Wilson would rather be a conservationist/taxonomist/writer/entomologist, and Dawkins would rather be a humanist/atheist.

BTW, obit through UMass here: http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/newsreleases/articles/141605.php

ETA: and to be honest, both are in their seventies. We need new blood.

[Kai]

Science can't progress without crazy ideas.

That's what the scientific process is for...Sifting the gems out of the heap of those ideas.

Yeah.

I will say that most scientists know how to drop an idea when research fails to substantiate sufficient evidence for it. Dr. Margulis had some trouble with that.

That being said, Slanted Truths was one of the most influential books I read during high school. Right up there with Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and the Tao Te Ching.

Beats the hell out of most of the physics professors I had.

NEW IS BAD.  CONCENTRATE ON WHAT THE TA IS WRITING ON THE BOARD.  NOBODY WITHOUT A GRADUATE DEGREE TO ASK ANY SILLY QUESTIONS, PLS.

I had one notable exception, who would have great fun following a students weird idea out into left field (usually outside of class hours), and when you were done, you knew why your idea was wrong (it usually is) and since he LED you to the reason, you didn't feel stupid, and you kept thinking about things.

But that was one professor out of an entire department.  The rest had sheepskin disease.

Physics has the unfortunate distinction of having laws and principles largely generated before 1930. Unlike, say, biology, where much of the principles haven't yet been worked out. It also /is/ less messy than biology in terms of variables and interactions. So it makes sense that physicists would be rigid about teaching since these are laws we're talking about here, and it was an undergraduate course. It's not /right/, but I can understand the position.

[Kai]

More Margulis obits and links. The author rightly points out that some of her ideas were not only crazy but downright dangerous. She was a prominent HIV-AIDS denialist, for example, thinking that the disease was a symbiotic example of syphilis.

In the comments:

She was right about one big thing – and not many people can say that, so she deserves credit for it. But she more than used that credit up being wrong, in a big way, about almost everything else. She bizarrely saw herself as ant-Darwinian, and bad-mouthed the entire neo-Darwinian synthesis and just about everybody associated with it. She once said, in my presence, "John Maynard Smith does;t understand evolution". Fortunately she was not taken seriously enough for her net influence to be negative, but it's a close-run thing. Sorry to sound grumpy about the dead, but this foolish obituary is enough to drive anyone to it.

There's some massive iconoclasm in the rest of the comments, if you're into that. I wish people would stop talking about "neo-darwinism" though. The neo-darwinian synthesis, which combined natural selection with mendelian heritability/genetics happened over 50 years ago. People need to stop clinging to it.

[Kai]

interesting and sad, Kai.

Do you know of any in the field that appear to be the ones taking up the mantle of intelligent, but willing to pursue the 'crazy' for the sake of advancement?

Okay, not only does there not seem to be anyone willing to "pursue the crazy", but her lab at UMass is shutting down. Seems that without such an important primary investigator, her work, and the work of her grad students and assistants, can't continue. Not to mention the money had run out and the only thing still bringing anything was her being there.