Top 31 Margulis Quotes
#1. The proportions of these salts and minerals in our tissues are uncannily similar to those in sea water - we sweat and cry sea water, as Margulis and Sagan have put it - but curiously we cannot tolerate them as an input.
Bill Bryson
#2. All scientists agree that evolution has occurred - that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?
Lynn Margulis
#3. Why does everybody agree that atmospheric oxygen comes from life, but no one speaks about the other gases coming from life?
Lynn Margulis
#4. To this point, musical repetition has been viewed as a particular kind of object. But it can also be viewed as a particular kind of behavior.
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis
#5. There is no scientific reason to think that we, even with space travel, are going to survive as a species for ever, certainly not by biting off the hand that feeds us, which is exactly what we are doing.
Lynn Margulis
#6. Life did not take over the world by combat,
but by networking.
Lynn Margulis
#7. All living beings, not just animals, but plants and microorganisms, perceive. To survive, an organic being must perceive - it must seek, or at least recognize, food and avoid environmental danger.
Lynn Margulis
#8. The accumulation of genetic mutations were touted to be enough to change one species to another ... .No. It wasn't dishonesty. I think it was wish fulfillment and social momentum. Assumptions, made but not verified, were taught as fact.
Lynn Margulis
#9. New mutations don't create new species; they create offspring that are impaired.
Lynn Margulis
#11. Politicians need a better understanding of global ecology. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are 'chosen', the unique species for which all the others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous.
Lynn Margulis
#12. Although the detail of our sexual energies and their objects and objectives vastly vary, the existence of our sexuality itself is an undeniable truth.
Lynn Margulis
#13. My work more than didn't fit in. It crossed willy-nilly the boundaries that people had spent their lives building up. It hits some 30 subfields of biology, even geology.
Lynn Margulis
#14. What kind of grad student do you take? I never take a straight A student. A real scientist tends to be critical, and somewhere along the line, they had to rebel against their teachers.
Lynn Margulis
#15. To romp along the connected rooftops and fire escapes of Chicago's second city of garages was my young life's passion.
Lynn Margulis
#16. People say I am against Darwin. That is ridiculous.
Lynn Margulis
#17. Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.
Lynn Margulis
#18. Of course, the plea for respect for nonhuman life goes far beyond the scientific delight of familiarity with our planet mates. The nonhuman forms of life with which we 6,000 million talking, upright apes share this finite planet are directly or indirectly connected to our well-being.
Lynn Margulis
#20. For all the accomplishments of molecular biology, we still can't tell a live cat from a dead cat.
Lynn Margulis
#21. All of us from fertile egg to embryo to corpse, are exactly that: warm, wet, furry animals compelled by the sexuality of our forefathers and foremothers to be, either directly or indirectly, our own exciting and excitable, provocative and provocable selves.
Lynn Margulis
#22. People think the earth is going to die and they have to save it. That's ridiculous. If you rid the earth of flowering plants, people would die, period. But the earth was without flowering plants for almost all of its history.
Lynn Margulis
#23. Despite our very recent appearance on the planet, humanity combines arrogance with increasing material demands, even as we become more numerous. Our toughness is a delusion. Have we the intelligence and discipline to vigilantly guard against our tendency to grow without limit?
Lynn Margulis
#24. Possibly here in the Holocene, or just before ten or twenty thousand years ago, life hit a peek of diversity. Then we appeared. We are the great meteorite.
Lynn Margulis
#25. All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.
Lynn Margulis
#26. Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn't look anything like a butterfly.
Lynn Margulis
#27. If you really want to study evolution, you've got go outside sometime, because you'll see symbiosis everywhere!
Lynn Margulis
#28. Life on earth is such a good story you cannot afford to miss the beginning ... Beneath our superficial differences we are all of us walking communities of bacteria. The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape made of tiny living beings.
Lynn Margulis
#29. The urgency to mate persists in all people as in all other mammals because of the evolutionary drive to continue the species, the inborn imperative for genes to reproduce and hormonal differences that evolved over millions of years.
Lynn Margulis
#30. The fewer species there are and the fewer species we know about, the fewer questions we even know to ask.
Lynn Margulis
#31. Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.
Lynn Margulis
