Lynn Margulis disses evolution in Discover magazine, embarrasses both herself and the field

Around 1970, biologist Lynn Margulis achieved renown for suggesting, and then showing, that eukaryotic cells originated by a symbiotic union of early prokaryotes, with some engulfing others and then the engulfed bacteria evolving into at least two of the cell’s vital organelles: mitochondria and (in plants) chloroplasts. Although others had suggested this before, Margulis gets the credit for pushing the theory forward, supporting it with biochemical and microbiological data, and recognizing its implications. Later work on DNA sequencing supported her completely. She became famous and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

To reword the old political slogan for science: fame corrupts, and huge fame corrupts hugely. This isn’t always true, but if a scientist achieves tremendous fame and adulation, there’s always the temptation to think that what you say on every topic bears special weight and consideration. Such solipsism is especially likely to develop in those who, like Margulis, have to push a correct theory against the entrenched doubt and scorn of their colleagues.

And Margulis has become corrupted in this way. In the last couple decades she’s been going around casting doubt on modern evolutionary theory. She has said, for example, that modern evolutionary biology is “a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology” and that “Neo-Darwinism, which insists on (the slow accrual of mutations), is in a complete funk.” Since she’s famous, she’s invited many places, and often uses these occasions to dump on modern evolutionary biology. In this respect she may be worse for science than creationists, since her scientific credibility remains high. You may also remember that Margulis “handled” (i.e., allowing it to be published despite dissenting referees) the Williamson paper positing a hybrid origin of the lepidopteran life cycle (caterpillar then adult) through mating of an ancestral volant butterfly with a velvet worm. (The paper was subsequently debunked.) I suspect she forced it into publication because it fits her notion that symbiosis—and I suppose you can consider hybridization as something akin to symbiosis—is the overarching factor in evolution.

Margulis and her son, Dorion Sagan, even wrote a book on speciation, Acquiring Genomes, suggesting that the criticial factor in the origin of species was endosymbiosis. I was asked to review it for The New York Times, but it was so dreadful, so completely ignorant of decades of work on speciation (including observations that reproductive barriers nearly always map to genes, not cytoplasmic organelles), that, although I enjoy writing for the Times, I refused on this occasion. I didn’t want to publicize such a misguided book.

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