Lynn Margulis, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Lynn Margulis

American evolutionary biologist

Date of Birth: 05-Mar-1938

Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois, United States

Date of Death: 22-Nov-2011

Profession: zoologist, university teacher, botanist, microbiologist, ecologist, evolutionary biologist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Pisces


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About Lynn Margulis

  • 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." In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei – an event Ernst Mayr called "perhaps the most important and dramatic event in the history of life" – by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria.
  • Margulis was also the co-developer of the Gaia hypothesis with the British chemist James Lovelock, proposing that the Earth functions as a single self-regulating system, and was the principal defender and promulgator of the five kingdom classification of Robert Whittaker. Throughout her career, Margulis' work could arouse intense objection (one grant application elicited the response, "Your research is crap, do not bother to apply again",) and her formative paper, "On the Origin of Mitosing Cells", appeared in 1967 after being rejected by about fifteen journals.
  • Still a junior faculty member at Boston University at the time, her theory that cell organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts were once independent bacteria was largely ignored for another decade, becoming widely accepted only after it was powerfully substantiated through genetic evidence.
  • Margulis was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1983.
  • President Bill Clinton presented her the National Medal of Science in 1999.
  • The Linnean Society of London awarded her the Darwin-Wallace Medal in 2008. Called "Science's Unruly Earth Mother", a "vindicated heretic", or a scientific "rebel", Margulis was a strong critic of neo-Darwinism.
  • Her position sparked lifelong debate with leading neo-Darwinian biologists, including Richard Dawkins, George C.
  • Williams, and John Maynard Smith.
  • Margulis' work on symbiosis and her endosymbiotic theory had important predecessors, going back to the mid-19th century – notably Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper, Konstantin Mereschkowski, Boris Kozo-Polyansky (1890-1957), and Ivan Wallin – and Margulis took the unusual step of not only trying to promote greater recognition for their contributions, but of personally overseeing the first English translation of Kozo-Polyansky's Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution, which appeared the year before her death.
  • Many of her major works, particularly those intended for a general readership, were collaboratively written with her son Dorion Sagan. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized Margulis as one of the 50 most important women in science.

Read more at Wikipedia