Complete Evolution

Year of Discovery: 1967

What Is It? Evolution is driven by symbiotic mergers between cooperating
species.
Who Discovered It? Lynn Margulis

Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?

Charles Darwin was the first to conceive that species evolvedchangedover time,
and the first to identify a driving force for that changesurvival of the fittest. Darwins theories instantly became the bedrock of biological thinking and survived unchallenged for a
century.
Lynn Margulis was the first to discover and prove modification to Darwins theory of
evolution. In so doing, she filled in the one, nagging gap in Darwins theory. More than any
scientist since Darwin, she has forced a radical revision of evolutionary thinking. Like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Darwin before her, Margulis has uprooted and changed
some of sciences most deeply held theorems and assumptions.

How Was It Discovered?

Born in 1938, Lynn Margulis was raised on the streets of Chicago. Called precocious
as a child, she entered the University of Chicago when only 14 years old. There she studied
genetics and evolution.
Since Darwins time the field of evolution has struggled with a problem called variation. Researchers assumed that variation in an individuals DNA provided the trial balloons that natural selection kept or discarded. Those mutations that nature kept would
slowly spread through the entire species.
However, a nagging question could not be answered: What causes new variations in
the individuals of a species? Theories centered on random errors that somehow rewrote sections of the DNA genetic code.
Even early in her career, it seemed obvious to Margulis that this was not what really
happened. Margulis saw no hard evidence to support small, random mutations driving species evolution. Instead she found evidence for large, sudden jumpsas if evolution happened not as a slow, steady creep, but as sudden, dramatic adaptive advances. She saw that
evolutionary change was not nearly so random as others believed.
Margulis focused on the concept of symbiosistwo organisms (or species) living cooperatively together for their mutual benefit. She found many elementary examples of two

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species choosing to live in intimate, interdependent existence. Lichens were composed of

an algae and a fungus that, living as a single organism, survived better than either could
alone. Cellulose-digesting bacteria lived in the gut of termites. Neither could survive without the other. Yet together they both thrived. Without a symbiotic merger, this arrangement
could never have developed.
Margulis found symbiotic relationships abounding wherever she looked. Existing species sought out new cooperative, symbiotic relationships to improve their survivability. Human corporations did it. So did nature when, for example, a bacterium (a highly evolved life
form) incorporated itself into another existing species to create a new symbiotic mutation
and the species jumped forward in its capabilities.
Margulis studied Earths early life forms and discovered four key symbioses that allowed the development of complex life on Earth: (1) a union between a heat-loving
archae-bacterium and a swimming bacterium (a spirochete). Some of the original spirochete genes were then coopted (2) to produce the organizing centers and filaments that pull
genetic material to opposite sides of a cell before it splits. This allowed the creation of complex life forms. This new creature engulfed (3) an oxygen-burning bacterium (once oxygen
began to proliferate in the atmosphere). Finally, this swimming, complex, oxygen-processing one-celled organism engulfed (4) a photosynthesizing bacterium. The result of this
four-step evolutionary merger was all modern algae and plants!
Margulis showed that the cells of plants, animals, fungi, and even humans evolved
through specific series of symbiotic mergers that represented large, instant steps forward
for the involved species.
She published her landmark work in 1967, but biologists were skeptical until it was
shown that mitochondria in all human cells have their own DNA, thus establishing that even
human cells are the result of at least one symbiotic merger. This discovery spurred a generation of scientists who have searched for, found, and studied symbiotic mergers. They have
found them everywhere.
Nine out of ten plants survive because of symbiotic mergers with root fungi that process crucial nutrients from the soil. Humans and other animals have whole colonies of cooperating bacteria and other bugs living in our guts to process and digest the food we eat.
Without them, we would not survive. Without Marguliss discovery, Darwins theory
would have remained incomplete.
Fun Facts: Margulis and her writer/astronomer husband, Carl Sagan, are
the ones who said: Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by
networking (cooperation), and Darwins notion of evolution driven by
the combat of natural selection is incomplete.

More to Explore
Adler, Robert. Science Firsts. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
Brockman, John. Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist. New York:
Knopf, 2005.
Margulis, Lynn. Diversity of Life: The Five Kingdoms. Hillside, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 1996.