What do you think?
Rate this book
Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution
Microcosmos brings together the remarkable discoveries of microbiology of the past two decades and the pioneering research of Dr. Margulis to create a vivid new picture of the world that is crucial to our understanding of the future of the planet. Addressed to general readers, the book provides a beautifully written view of evolution as a process based on interdependency and the interconnectedness of all life on the planet.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
56 people are currently reading
3761 people want to read
About the author
Lynn Margulis
81 books199 followersLynn Margulis (1938-2011) was a Professor of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
February 15, 2025
A great exploration of the greatest force in the evolution of life, namely synergy between creatures, which accounts for the great leaps between sub-cellular life forms and cells with organs, the leap to multi-cellular organisms, all the advances in synergy among communities of plants or animals, and the synergy of humans in families, communities, nations, and beyond. This is an understanding of the positive force in evolution that Darwin anticipated in his "Descent of Man," and it puts "realism" in a whole new light.
January 15, 2023
No doubt this book is now somewhat of date, and the author is deceased -- but when I read it, her idea of endosymbiosis in early microbial life was still gaining acceptance. Now it's received dogma, and Margulis would have received a Nobel prize had she lived a few more years. She lived an interesting life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Ma... She died too young, at age 73.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Ma... She died too young, at age 73.
April 29, 2019
The book reads like a summing up of her (she co-authored with her son) long work as a pre-eminent biologist. (1) Life, Margulis writes, is autopoietic, by which she means that it actively maintains “itself against the mischief of the world. Life responds to disturbance, using matter and energy to stay intact. An organism constantly exchanges its parts, replacing its component chemicals without ever losing its identity. This modulating, ‘holistic’ phenomenon of autopoiesis, of active self-maintenance, is at the basis of all known life….”
For many, life’s beginnings start more or less 500 million years ago during the Cambrian period in the Paleozoic era when the first (hard-shell, bone) fossilized evidence of life appeared. But Margulis takes it back to 4 billion years ago, at that transition between life and non-life (she titles Chapter 2 as “The Animation of Matter”), when molecules began self-replication. (2)
Then she moves to the Age of Bacteria (3.5 billion years ago) and this is her focus. For the longest time in this period, prokaryotes (organisms composed of cells with no nucleus) dominated. “In their first two billion years on earth,” she writes, “prokaryotes continuously transformed the earth’s surface and atmosphere. They invented all of life’s essential, miniaturized chemical systems.” Some bacteria were able to breath oxygen that was toxic to other bacteria. Other bacteria were able to take light energy from the sun and “put it to use.” This is photosynthesis which is “undoubtedly the most single metabolic innovation in the history of life.” Sun energy was converted to ATP energy that was “used for movement and synthesis, such as conversion of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the food and replicating carbon compounds needed to self-maintain and grow.” And those bacteria that “could move to maximize their exposure had an advantage. Behavior began. Even in these very ancient times, a combination of movement and simple systems of chemical sensing developed for detecting foods and avoiding poisons.”
Because of the sun’s damaging ultraviolet radiation, bacteria developed “mechanisms for repairing sun-damaged DNA” by borrowing “DNA from their neighbors.” Bacteria invented sex, she says, which is “a mixing or union of genes from separate sources…. when a bacterium replaced some of its sun-damaged genes with fresh ones from a virus, a live bacterium, or even the old, discarded DNA of a dead cell.” Then, she adds, that “at the beginning of the bacterial sex act there are two partners. At the end there usually is only one sexually produced offspring: the parent itself – the recombinant bacterium that now carries genes from two sources. The bacterium, without even reproducing, may now carry 90 percent new genes.” This is not the reproductive, meiotic sex seen in our world as “bacterial sex preceded animal sex by at least 2,000 million years.” (3)
About 2.200 million years ago, a new kind of cell emerged from the prokaryotes. This was the eukaryotic cell with a nucleus. The “difference between nonnucleated bacterial cells,” she states, “and cells with nuclei is far greater than that between plants and animals” and “the division between bacteria and the new cells is, in fact, the most dramatic in all biology.” She goes on to say that “All cells either have a nucleus or do not. No intermediates exist. The abruptness of their appearance in the fossil record, the total discontinuity between living forms with and without nuclei, and the puzzling complexity of internal self-reproducing organelles suggest that the new cells were begotten by a process fundamentally different from simple mutation or bacterial genetic transfer.” This she believes was “symbiosis. Independent prokaryotes entered others. Inside them they digested cellular wastes; their waste, in turn was used as food. The outcomes of such intimate sharing were permanent relationships, cells reproducing offspring well adapted to life within other cells. With time, these populations of coevolved bacteria became communities of microbes so deeply interdependent they were, for all practical purposes, single stable organisms – protists. Life had moved another step, beyond the networking of free genetic transfer to the synergy of symbiosis.”
Margulis highlights three of these confederated symbiotic units that, in particular, are central to life as we know it today. Unicellular eukaryotes (protists) perform photosynthesis, which is the role of plant life and the food chain that we are familiar with. The bacteria formed 3 billion years ago to breathe oxygen exists “now in our bodies as mitochondria” where they provide waste disposal and oxygen-derived energy in return for food and shelter.” And the undulipodia, the tiny cell whips on cells with nuclei originated, she believes (she admits this is a more controversial argument), through a merger with bacteria. These cell whips were crucial to the development of life as cells could move to food, or move food to themselves.
Stepping back from all of this, Margulis believes this view of life fundamentally challenges the idea that “evolution is a bloody struggle in which only the strong survive.” Darwin, she argues, used Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” language to mean not that the strong survive via competitive battles, but was rather about organisms that leave the most offspring. “Fit, in evolution, means fecund,” she states, and fitness occurs through symbiosis as well as through competitive struggle. (4) “Competition in which the strong wins has been given a good deal more press than cooperation,” she writes. “But certain superficially weak organisms have survived in the long run by being part of collectives, while the so-called strong ones, never learning the trick of cooperation, have been dumped onto the scrap heap of evolutionary extinction.” This, not the Spencer formula, explains the origin of reciprocal altruism in human life where there is cooperation for mutual benefit. This is consistent with her view “that all large organisms came from smaller prokaryotes that together won a victory for cooperation, for the art of mutual living.”
Margulis is not an easy read. Her prose is an intermixture of lay-friendly and scientific descriptions. While the overall organization of her book is good, I found that key pieces of her argument jumped around and she often buried her most insightful comments in the middle of dense prose. While this made the book a challenge to follow, her primary arguments - that the microcosmos of the past lives on in life and us today, and that evolution is more than mutation and natural selection - eye-opening.
(1) Margulis had prominent scientific standing (she was a member of the National Academy of Sciences). She also reportedly denied the airplane attacks on the twin towers on 9-11, saying that their collapse had all the hallmarks of a programmed implosion.
(2) “The flexibility of carbon is one of the secrets of life on Earth,” she writes. “In their highly agitated states during the hot, wet, and molten Archean conditions, carbon atoms combined rapidly with hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur to generate a vast diversity of substances. This collection of carbon-containing molecules has continued to exist, interact and evolve. Those six elements are now the chemical common denominator of all life, accounting for 99 percent of the dry weight of every living thing.”
(3) “Indeed,” she comments, “the vertebrate, mammalian form of sex is a rarity in the living world.” Later she writes that “with genetic exchange possible only during reproduction, we are locked into our species, our bodies, and our generation. As it is sometimes expressed in technical terms, we trade genes ‘vertically – through the generations – whereas prokaryotes trade them ‘horizontally’ – direction to their neighbors in the same generation. The result is that while genetically fluid bacteria are functionally immortal, in eukaryotes, sex becomes linked with death.”
(4) “Symbiosis leads abruptly to new species,” she writes. “These new species…did not evolve gradually by accumulating mutations over a long period of time,” and this is where she butts heads directly with neo-Darwinian theory. Her argument is that survival and evolution proceed by symbiosis as well as by mutation and natural selection.
For many, life’s beginnings start more or less 500 million years ago during the Cambrian period in the Paleozoic era when the first (hard-shell, bone) fossilized evidence of life appeared. But Margulis takes it back to 4 billion years ago, at that transition between life and non-life (she titles Chapter 2 as “The Animation of Matter”), when molecules began self-replication. (2)
Then she moves to the Age of Bacteria (3.5 billion years ago) and this is her focus. For the longest time in this period, prokaryotes (organisms composed of cells with no nucleus) dominated. “In their first two billion years on earth,” she writes, “prokaryotes continuously transformed the earth’s surface and atmosphere. They invented all of life’s essential, miniaturized chemical systems.” Some bacteria were able to breath oxygen that was toxic to other bacteria. Other bacteria were able to take light energy from the sun and “put it to use.” This is photosynthesis which is “undoubtedly the most single metabolic innovation in the history of life.” Sun energy was converted to ATP energy that was “used for movement and synthesis, such as conversion of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the food and replicating carbon compounds needed to self-maintain and grow.” And those bacteria that “could move to maximize their exposure had an advantage. Behavior began. Even in these very ancient times, a combination of movement and simple systems of chemical sensing developed for detecting foods and avoiding poisons.”
Because of the sun’s damaging ultraviolet radiation, bacteria developed “mechanisms for repairing sun-damaged DNA” by borrowing “DNA from their neighbors.” Bacteria invented sex, she says, which is “a mixing or union of genes from separate sources…. when a bacterium replaced some of its sun-damaged genes with fresh ones from a virus, a live bacterium, or even the old, discarded DNA of a dead cell.” Then, she adds, that “at the beginning of the bacterial sex act there are two partners. At the end there usually is only one sexually produced offspring: the parent itself – the recombinant bacterium that now carries genes from two sources. The bacterium, without even reproducing, may now carry 90 percent new genes.” This is not the reproductive, meiotic sex seen in our world as “bacterial sex preceded animal sex by at least 2,000 million years.” (3)
About 2.200 million years ago, a new kind of cell emerged from the prokaryotes. This was the eukaryotic cell with a nucleus. The “difference between nonnucleated bacterial cells,” she states, “and cells with nuclei is far greater than that between plants and animals” and “the division between bacteria and the new cells is, in fact, the most dramatic in all biology.” She goes on to say that “All cells either have a nucleus or do not. No intermediates exist. The abruptness of their appearance in the fossil record, the total discontinuity between living forms with and without nuclei, and the puzzling complexity of internal self-reproducing organelles suggest that the new cells were begotten by a process fundamentally different from simple mutation or bacterial genetic transfer.” This she believes was “symbiosis. Independent prokaryotes entered others. Inside them they digested cellular wastes; their waste, in turn was used as food. The outcomes of such intimate sharing were permanent relationships, cells reproducing offspring well adapted to life within other cells. With time, these populations of coevolved bacteria became communities of microbes so deeply interdependent they were, for all practical purposes, single stable organisms – protists. Life had moved another step, beyond the networking of free genetic transfer to the synergy of symbiosis.”
Margulis highlights three of these confederated symbiotic units that, in particular, are central to life as we know it today. Unicellular eukaryotes (protists) perform photosynthesis, which is the role of plant life and the food chain that we are familiar with. The bacteria formed 3 billion years ago to breathe oxygen exists “now in our bodies as mitochondria” where they provide waste disposal and oxygen-derived energy in return for food and shelter.” And the undulipodia, the tiny cell whips on cells with nuclei originated, she believes (she admits this is a more controversial argument), through a merger with bacteria. These cell whips were crucial to the development of life as cells could move to food, or move food to themselves.
Stepping back from all of this, Margulis believes this view of life fundamentally challenges the idea that “evolution is a bloody struggle in which only the strong survive.” Darwin, she argues, used Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” language to mean not that the strong survive via competitive battles, but was rather about organisms that leave the most offspring. “Fit, in evolution, means fecund,” she states, and fitness occurs through symbiosis as well as through competitive struggle. (4) “Competition in which the strong wins has been given a good deal more press than cooperation,” she writes. “But certain superficially weak organisms have survived in the long run by being part of collectives, while the so-called strong ones, never learning the trick of cooperation, have been dumped onto the scrap heap of evolutionary extinction.” This, not the Spencer formula, explains the origin of reciprocal altruism in human life where there is cooperation for mutual benefit. This is consistent with her view “that all large organisms came from smaller prokaryotes that together won a victory for cooperation, for the art of mutual living.”
Margulis is not an easy read. Her prose is an intermixture of lay-friendly and scientific descriptions. While the overall organization of her book is good, I found that key pieces of her argument jumped around and she often buried her most insightful comments in the middle of dense prose. While this made the book a challenge to follow, her primary arguments - that the microcosmos of the past lives on in life and us today, and that evolution is more than mutation and natural selection - eye-opening.
(1) Margulis had prominent scientific standing (she was a member of the National Academy of Sciences). She also reportedly denied the airplane attacks on the twin towers on 9-11, saying that their collapse had all the hallmarks of a programmed implosion.
(2) “The flexibility of carbon is one of the secrets of life on Earth,” she writes. “In their highly agitated states during the hot, wet, and molten Archean conditions, carbon atoms combined rapidly with hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur to generate a vast diversity of substances. This collection of carbon-containing molecules has continued to exist, interact and evolve. Those six elements are now the chemical common denominator of all life, accounting for 99 percent of the dry weight of every living thing.”
(3) “Indeed,” she comments, “the vertebrate, mammalian form of sex is a rarity in the living world.” Later she writes that “with genetic exchange possible only during reproduction, we are locked into our species, our bodies, and our generation. As it is sometimes expressed in technical terms, we trade genes ‘vertically – through the generations – whereas prokaryotes trade them ‘horizontally’ – direction to their neighbors in the same generation. The result is that while genetically fluid bacteria are functionally immortal, in eukaryotes, sex becomes linked with death.”
(4) “Symbiosis leads abruptly to new species,” she writes. “These new species…did not evolve gradually by accumulating mutations over a long period of time,” and this is where she butts heads directly with neo-Darwinian theory. Her argument is that survival and evolution proceed by symbiosis as well as by mutation and natural selection.
August 28, 2011
Tom Miley, his older brother and I once shared an apartment in East Rogers Park, Chicago. Both the Miley brothers are, like myself, dissatisfied with themselves and both have striven mightily to make improvement. Much, but not all, of this effort has been along the lines of self-education in the common sense of going to schools, reading lots of books, writing and talking about one's studies. We have long inspired and comforted one another. We have, despite their moves to San Francisco and Sonoma years ago, maintained contact by means of regular visits, phonecalls and correspondence. Indeed, Michael, the older brother, is visiting as I write this.
By profession, Tom is a composer, primarily of electronic music. There isn't much commercial demand for this so he's worked a variety of jobs, some in sound engineering, some in programming, some in the academy. Once, during the time I was visiting him and given this book to read, he even went back to school to obtain expertise in the life sciences, thinking to completely change careers--quite an ambition in one's middle age! He was quite successful academically, but hated the lab job he obtained, so he's returned to music and programming, but his interest in biology has abided.
My own study of biology ended in high school, except for the occasional book on the subject. This book, Microcosmos, was written for a general audience and so was an appropriate recommendation.
Margulis' concentration has been on the formation of complex biological entities within the framework of evolutionary theory. This book, like several of the others she's written, is about how evolution may have favored symbiotic relationships between individual cells and led, ultimately, to us and other vastly complex cellular communities.
By profession, Tom is a composer, primarily of electronic music. There isn't much commercial demand for this so he's worked a variety of jobs, some in sound engineering, some in programming, some in the academy. Once, during the time I was visiting him and given this book to read, he even went back to school to obtain expertise in the life sciences, thinking to completely change careers--quite an ambition in one's middle age! He was quite successful academically, but hated the lab job he obtained, so he's returned to music and programming, but his interest in biology has abided.
My own study of biology ended in high school, except for the occasional book on the subject. This book, Microcosmos, was written for a general audience and so was an appropriate recommendation.
Margulis' concentration has been on the formation of complex biological entities within the framework of evolutionary theory. This book, like several of the others she's written, is about how evolution may have favored symbiotic relationships between individual cells and led, ultimately, to us and other vastly complex cellular communities.
November 6, 2017
clear writing and very immersive. Lynn Margulis takes you to the realm of microscopic life, and offers a view on evolution trough cooperation. well put arguments against a view on evolution that only concerns the individual, as she shows that the whole concept of a individual is troublesome.
September 23, 2015
Life has existed on Earth for nearly 4 billion years. For 80% of that time, according to Microcosmos, it consisted solely of pre-cellular and single-celled organisms. Authors Margulis and Sagan give a convincing and engrossing account of how atoms and molecules on the early Earth may have coalesced and combined, eventually forming more complex molecules that could make copies of themselves. Through a variety of chemical interactions, these complex molecules combined together to form bacterial cells -- groups of molecules contained within a membrane that separated "self" from "non-self" for the first time. Bacteria consumed chemicals from the surrounding environment to produce energy that they used to maintain themselves and to reproduce. The authors explain how early evolution depended as much on symbiosis between different bacteria specialized at different tasks (such as photosynthesis or movement) as it did on Darwin's "survival of the fittest". In the process, they completely changed the Earth, polluting the atmosphere with oxygen that later became a key element for later generations of bacteria. Eventually, the bacteria had developed and evolved almost all the basic biochemical reactions that drive all forms of life on Earth today. Only after the biochemistry problems were solved did multi-cellular life forms like plants and animals evolve.
This is an amazing story, and one that was just becoming understood when I took biology in high school in the late 1970s. I would love to find out what discoveries have been made since this book was first published in 1985.
One weakness of the book is the final couple of chapters. The authors leave microbes behind and outline the possible evolutionary history of plants, dinosaurs, and humans. The final chapter speculates on how humans might evolve as they colonize other planets and space environments. I found those chapters quite a departure from the earlier focus on the titular microscopic organisms.
Be aware that there is a lot of scientific vocabulary in this book, and some descriptions of chemical reactions. You don't have to remember your high school science to understand the gist of this book, but it will certainly help if you do.
This is an amazing story, and one that was just becoming understood when I took biology in high school in the late 1970s. I would love to find out what discoveries have been made since this book was first published in 1985.
One weakness of the book is the final couple of chapters. The authors leave microbes behind and outline the possible evolutionary history of plants, dinosaurs, and humans. The final chapter speculates on how humans might evolve as they colonize other planets and space environments. I found those chapters quite a departure from the earlier focus on the titular microscopic organisms.
Be aware that there is a lot of scientific vocabulary in this book, and some descriptions of chemical reactions. You don't have to remember your high school science to understand the gist of this book, but it will certainly help if you do.
March 12, 2014
One of those mind-bending books that make you rethink many things about yourself, about the world... inspiring, entertaining, exciting...
The authors make an excellent job at taking ideas from many different thinkers and scientists (Lovelock, Darwin, von Neumann, Dawkins... ) and create a coherent narrative that takes the reader (relatively) easily through disciplines such as biology, cybernetics, anthropology and more. At some points the arguments seem to get a bit too far, a bit too speculative, but you are always warned about that and, also, it helps pushing the boundaries of your mind frame set.
All in all, a great new addition to my favourites shelf.
The authors make an excellent job at taking ideas from many different thinkers and scientists (Lovelock, Darwin, von Neumann, Dawkins... ) and create a coherent narrative that takes the reader (relatively) easily through disciplines such as biology, cybernetics, anthropology and more. At some points the arguments seem to get a bit too far, a bit too speculative, but you are always warned about that and, also, it helps pushing the boundaries of your mind frame set.
All in all, a great new addition to my favourites shelf.
June 4, 2021
We are colonies of creatures whose silent intelligence is unfathomable. I am life teeming within; I am made of colonies quietly guiding me. Cooperative colonies may make up many of my organs. My brain is an organ. In this book I saw humanity's innate drive to define 'me' vs 'them' -- in the very way that life began and became life. I can not be certain but I feel that the aliens are nothing compared to the strangers that create me. Interior vs exterior, us vs them, is the inherent metaphor that life and only life creates. Yet: these colonies that created us, through billions of years, became more than individuals.
December 22, 2019
This and the Tree of Knowledge, from Maturana and Varela, were the books that ushered me into Environmental Engineering when I was barely 15. Lynn Margulis' love for live is contagious, and it goes from a molecular level to modern society. It is a tiny book, and still deep enough to throw you 5 billion years ago, and make you whole again with life itself. No wonder Carl Sagan fell in love with this woman.
June 19, 2022
Uno de mis recuerdos más nítidos fue en mi época colegial, en donde tuve que hacer una presentación acerca de la teoría endosimbiótica de Lynn Margulis. Para mí fue un momento revelador que me enseñó la belleza de la biología, y del cual surgió mi pasión por este campo. A pesar de la desactualización en algunos temas, la lectura de este libro no se siente así.
Es un hermoso recorrido de la historia de la vida en el planeta, sobre cómo las primeras moléculas orgánicas comenzaron a interaccionar entre sí, buscando la estabilidad y perdurar el mayor tiempo posible. Esto dio inició a las primeras formas de vida procariotas que poco a poco colonizaron cada rincón del planeta. Es cierto que estas se adaptaron a su ambiente, pero también lo transformaron, y esto junto a la incorporación mitocondrias y cloroplastos, fueron dos de los elementos que permitieron el gran salto a las formas eucariotas, y su subsecuente salto de un mundo micro a uno macro. Es un libro que aborda el enorme poder de las relaciones simbióticas en todo el entramado de la selección natural y que incluye una reflexión sobre nuestro lugar como especie, no como una especie superior a las demás o el pináculo de la evolución, sino como un elemento más, que es parte de un todo.
Es un hermoso recorrido de la historia de la vida en el planeta, sobre cómo las primeras moléculas orgánicas comenzaron a interaccionar entre sí, buscando la estabilidad y perdurar el mayor tiempo posible. Esto dio inició a las primeras formas de vida procariotas que poco a poco colonizaron cada rincón del planeta. Es cierto que estas se adaptaron a su ambiente, pero también lo transformaron, y esto junto a la incorporación mitocondrias y cloroplastos, fueron dos de los elementos que permitieron el gran salto a las formas eucariotas, y su subsecuente salto de un mundo micro a uno macro. Es un libro que aborda el enorme poder de las relaciones simbióticas en todo el entramado de la selección natural y que incluye una reflexión sobre nuestro lugar como especie, no como una especie superior a las demás o el pináculo de la evolución, sino como un elemento más, que es parte de un todo.
April 15, 2025
This book doesn't seem to have been widely accepted thinking about where we are now. The "species" within our human kingdom should not be defined by skin/hair/eye colors/appearances. but by microbiota living in our bodies. A more simplified version/example of us is: half the population is in harmony with Covid virus which the other half are struggling against.
The book foreshadowed a "marginal" evolution theory of life as a complex interconnected web, while the current mainstream theory is still Darwinism "tree of life" that directs public health policy, disease treatment, farming, fishing, etc.
The book foreshadowed a "marginal" evolution theory of life as a complex interconnected web, while the current mainstream theory is still Darwinism "tree of life" that directs public health policy, disease treatment, farming, fishing, etc.
Read
May 13, 2023J'ai naïvement cru que je pouvais me lancer dans la lecture d'un essai de microbiologie avec zéro base. Ca avait l'air fascinant, mais je n'ai pas les connaissances et le recul nécessaire pour me plonger dans cette lecture un peu pointue. J'ai aussi été perturbée par le fait que l'essentiel des sources citées par Margulis sont ses propres travaux. Etant peu armée pour aborder ce genre de sujet, je ne pouvais pas replacer ses théories dans un contexte plus large et bien comprendre leurs apports et leurs limites. J'ai laissé tomber au bout d'une dizaine de pages.
June 27, 2023
This is the most wonderful book! It's almost as old as I am, but I only recently heard about it. I really wish I could have read this years and years ago! This is a book that truly can change your life. I've been studying (as a hobby) evolution all my life, but I learned something new and extraordinary on almost every page, especially the early chapters on archaea and bacteria and the evolution of eukaryotes. It is not long, and Sagan's prose is very clear and readable, yet it is packed with information. I could not recommend any better primer on the evolution of life on Earth, and indeed, what life on Earth really is. I would especially recommend it to anyone who wants clear refutation of the anti-evolution garbage nonsense arguments that have unfortunately infiltrated our American public discourse, and, worse, our schools. It also contains the best explanation of Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis I've ever read--a concept all too important to us right now, in the impending apocalypse of anthropogenic global warming.
All the time I was reading this, I wanted to share it with others. I still find myself thinking back on descriptions from this book that evoked new thinking or images in my mind, some of them not strictly speaking part of the nominal subject of the book--the processes that created the Witwatersrand Formation, for example, or the fact that every single human cell in your body contains a strand of DNA so long it could stretch from Earth to the moon and back again and again, 120,000 times. Wow. No wonder there's still so much about how we're made that we don't know.
My only caveat is that new research has changed some of what we know about the specific evolution of hominids and our own species, so Chapter 12, "Egocentric Man" has some information that is no longer considered accurate. But the rest of the book is still extremely accurate and, in some cases, still ahead of its time, as I'll explain now.
Lynn Margulis was a pioneering microbiologist who first discovered (in the 1960s) that mitochondria, chloroplasts, and other "organelles" within eukaryotic cells are in fact relict free-living prokaryotic organisms that evolved to live mutualistically together for their common benefit. Indeed, every single eukaryote organism is a mutual symbiote formed of many once-individual members now joined as one--a fact that undoubtedly allowed them (us) to take symbiosis a huge step farther and live as multicellular organisms, like every single living being you can see with the naked eye, including yourself. I almost tagged this book under Feminism because of Margulis's own story, and the fact that she even wrote this book was an act of defiance against the narrow-minded misogynists who belittled and dismissed her groundbreaking work on the origins of life as we know it. Her discovery has since become part of the standard understanding of evolution, usually without crediting her for her intelligence and perseverance against a system riddled with prejudice.
Still today, her work remains largely willfully ignored, specifically the implication that the nature of life on Earth is cooperative, mutualistic, and codependent on every level. Instead the nonsensical (and inherently teleological) "Selfish Gene" hypothesis dominates science curricula, publications, and popular media. This trend is deeply troubling on many levels, and frustrating to people like me, who gave up on careers in science because we weren't such self-confident, stubborn women, and didn't know how to stand by what we (I) knew was right, in the face of overwhelming (frequently male) hostility. (I don't regret my choice to drop out of school and pursue writing, but I am so incredibly grateful for books like this one, and the work of other pioneering evolutionary biologists like Joan Roughgarden, that I can at least read for myself, and incorporate what I learn into science fiction.). Thanks to this book, I now even have a word for these people: Neo-Darwinists. Like the Social Darwinists (who were not scientists), the Neo-Darwinists have taken an excellent, well-supported scientific concept and reductoed it ad absurdam to cut it into the shape of the Procrustean bed of their own cultural biases.
Margulis's cowriter, Dorion, her son with famous astronomer Carl Sagan, is a popular science writer who cowrote many books with Margulis and with other scientists. He also wrote a biography of his mother. None of them have I read. Funnily enough, Wikipedia tells me that one of his more recent books deals with the science that inspired James Cameron's Avatar movies--films I watched literally yesterday, and which annoy me enormously both scientifically and creatively.
Anyway, I want to especially highlight the authors' take on the Gaia Hypothesis, one of the most misrepresented concepts in all of science (perhaps second only to Evolution itself), and yet one which is so important right now, and which feels especially timely as James Lovelock died exactly one year and a day ago as I'm writing this review. Interestingly, Lovelock, a chemist working for NASA at the time, was hugely influenced by Margulis's work in developing and refining his concept after his initial observations that one could tell, purely by analyzing (by spectrometry) the chemical composition of its atmosphere, whether or not a planet was inhabited by Earth-like life.
Indeed, that event is likely the worst mass extinction event in Earth's entire history. For the silly argument that one species could never alter the climate/atmosphere of an entire planet, this oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere was accomplished by microscopic organisms who had no brains, and yet nevertheless drowned the entire planet in their own waste. And it was a process that took them at least 500 million years to fully accomplish. We, with our superior multicellular intelligence, will not survive to achieve such spectacular results in atmospheric composition change (we are increasing Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide load by only a thousandth of a percent or so), but we have our ancestors beat by about 499,999,850 years.
The result of this, and other mass extinctions, of course, was rapid evolution of new species better able to survive the new conditions. But what's extraordinary about life on Earth, is that as all these individual species evolve to better survive the same conditions again, so therefore has life collectively become better suited to the kinds of changes common in Earth's history. They have not done this through any understanding of how they are changing, nor with any plan for future survival, and yet over time life itself has evolved collectively (just as the various diversity of individuals within a species makes the entire species more evolutionarily resilient) to maintain more and more stable conditions on Earth, by each one getting more and more efficient at filling its own place in the vast, interconnected web of life.
Lovelock (with the help of his then-student Andrew Watson) demonstrated this beautifully with their Daisyworld mathematical model. This famous computer simulation showed how individual organisms, working merely according to their own nature, with no cooperative goal in mind, nevertheless end up creating a self-reinforcing mutualistic feedback loop in which both together create the best conditions for both together to survive.
I'll just leave with one last arresting image from the book. After a few millions of billions of thoughtless photosynthetic bacteria flooded Earth's atmosphere with deadly oxygen, some prokaryotes survived by seeking refuge, not in the depths of the ocean, but within the living cells of other organisms, and finally within commensal communities of cells. Inside all of us we carry the primordial sea in which life on Earth first evolved, every now and then leaking out in blood, sweat, and tears as lightless, saline, and oxygen-poor as our original home.
No content warnings. Highly recommended to all readers.
All the time I was reading this, I wanted to share it with others. I still find myself thinking back on descriptions from this book that evoked new thinking or images in my mind, some of them not strictly speaking part of the nominal subject of the book--the processes that created the Witwatersrand Formation, for example, or the fact that every single human cell in your body contains a strand of DNA so long it could stretch from Earth to the moon and back again and again, 120,000 times. Wow. No wonder there's still so much about how we're made that we don't know.
My only caveat is that new research has changed some of what we know about the specific evolution of hominids and our own species, so Chapter 12, "Egocentric Man" has some information that is no longer considered accurate. But the rest of the book is still extremely accurate and, in some cases, still ahead of its time, as I'll explain now.
Lynn Margulis was a pioneering microbiologist who first discovered (in the 1960s) that mitochondria, chloroplasts, and other "organelles" within eukaryotic cells are in fact relict free-living prokaryotic organisms that evolved to live mutualistically together for their common benefit. Indeed, every single eukaryote organism is a mutual symbiote formed of many once-individual members now joined as one--a fact that undoubtedly allowed them (us) to take symbiosis a huge step farther and live as multicellular organisms, like every single living being you can see with the naked eye, including yourself. I almost tagged this book under Feminism because of Margulis's own story, and the fact that she even wrote this book was an act of defiance against the narrow-minded misogynists who belittled and dismissed her groundbreaking work on the origins of life as we know it. Her discovery has since become part of the standard understanding of evolution, usually without crediting her for her intelligence and perseverance against a system riddled with prejudice.
Still today, her work remains largely willfully ignored, specifically the implication that the nature of life on Earth is cooperative, mutualistic, and codependent on every level. Instead the nonsensical (and inherently teleological) "Selfish Gene" hypothesis dominates science curricula, publications, and popular media. This trend is deeply troubling on many levels, and frustrating to people like me, who gave up on careers in science because we weren't such self-confident, stubborn women, and didn't know how to stand by what we (I) knew was right, in the face of overwhelming (frequently male) hostility. (I don't regret my choice to drop out of school and pursue writing, but I am so incredibly grateful for books like this one, and the work of other pioneering evolutionary biologists like Joan Roughgarden, that I can at least read for myself, and incorporate what I learn into science fiction.). Thanks to this book, I now even have a word for these people: Neo-Darwinists. Like the Social Darwinists (who were not scientists), the Neo-Darwinists have taken an excellent, well-supported scientific concept and reductoed it ad absurdam to cut it into the shape of the Procrustean bed of their own cultural biases.
Margulis's cowriter, Dorion, her son with famous astronomer Carl Sagan, is a popular science writer who cowrote many books with Margulis and with other scientists. He also wrote a biography of his mother. None of them have I read. Funnily enough, Wikipedia tells me that one of his more recent books deals with the science that inspired James Cameron's Avatar movies--films I watched literally yesterday, and which annoy me enormously both scientifically and creatively.
Anyway, I want to especially highlight the authors' take on the Gaia Hypothesis, one of the most misrepresented concepts in all of science (perhaps second only to Evolution itself), and yet one which is so important right now, and which feels especially timely as James Lovelock died exactly one year and a day ago as I'm writing this review. Interestingly, Lovelock, a chemist working for NASA at the time, was hugely influenced by Margulis's work in developing and refining his concept after his initial observations that one could tell, purely by analyzing (by spectrometry) the chemical composition of its atmosphere, whether or not a planet was inhabited by Earth-like life.
About 2,000 million years ago--give or take a couple hundred million years--[...] the Archeo-Proterozoic world saw an [...] increase in atmospheric oxygen from one part in a million to one part in five, from 0.0001 to 21 percent. This was by far the greatest pollution crisis the earth has ever endured. Many kinds of microbes were immediately wiped out.
Indeed, that event is likely the worst mass extinction event in Earth's entire history. For the silly argument that one species could never alter the climate/atmosphere of an entire planet, this oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere was accomplished by microscopic organisms who had no brains, and yet nevertheless drowned the entire planet in their own waste. And it was a process that took them at least 500 million years to fully accomplish. We, with our superior multicellular intelligence, will not survive to achieve such spectacular results in atmospheric composition change (we are increasing Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide load by only a thousandth of a percent or so), but we have our ancestors beat by about 499,999,850 years.
The result of this, and other mass extinctions, of course, was rapid evolution of new species better able to survive the new conditions. But what's extraordinary about life on Earth, is that as all these individual species evolve to better survive the same conditions again, so therefore has life collectively become better suited to the kinds of changes common in Earth's history. They have not done this through any understanding of how they are changing, nor with any plan for future survival, and yet over time life itself has evolved collectively (just as the various diversity of individuals within a species makes the entire species more evolutionarily resilient) to maintain more and more stable conditions on Earth, by each one getting more and more efficient at filling its own place in the vast, interconnected web of life.
Lovelock (with the help of his then-student Andrew Watson) demonstrated this beautifully with their Daisyworld mathematical model. This famous computer simulation showed how individual organisms, working merely according to their own nature, with no cooperative goal in mind, nevertheless end up creating a self-reinforcing mutualistic feedback loop in which both together create the best conditions for both together to survive.
I'll just leave with one last arresting image from the book. After a few millions of billions of thoughtless photosynthetic bacteria flooded Earth's atmosphere with deadly oxygen, some prokaryotes survived by seeking refuge, not in the depths of the ocean, but within the living cells of other organisms, and finally within commensal communities of cells. Inside all of us we carry the primordial sea in which life on Earth first evolved, every now and then leaking out in blood, sweat, and tears as lightless, saline, and oxygen-poor as our original home.
No content warnings. Highly recommended to all readers.
January 8, 2025
My goal in reading this book was sort of to challenge myself, as it is rooted in nonfiction deeper than I am used to, and I tried to take notes throughout as well. However, it is surprisingly engaging, with captivating descriptions of evolution and the underlying theories and processes. It is equally a philosophical book as it is scientific, as the story of cells relate to the individual, and even our potential futures. Biggest struggle for me was reading the book’s preface which felt really repetitive in its ideas compared to the later prose; it’s major point is touched on within the book anyway. Also, this really should’ve been a 2024 book since I only had a single chapter left for wayyy too many months, but I was distracted by school and work so better late than never, sorry library. But yeah this was a cool read as it has very many cool bits of knowledge, fit well into a much larger narrative.
March 30, 2018
It was comforting for me to realize after reading this '80s classic that micro-biotic life is smarter than we are. Its uber mind sees a much bigger picture and created humans, and all life that one can see with the naked eye for that matter (1%), as metaphorical transit mechanisms, cities, condominiums, shopping centers... I could only conclude that after we have destroyed our environment, and ourselves and our fellow creatures along with it, this microbial planet will recover rather quickly in geologic time and the symphony will flow on at a different octave. Deeply fascinating description of evolution as symbiosis, rather than Darwinian mutation, i.e. how the Builder built mankind.
March 9, 2018
The authors of Microcosmos provide a fascinating look into the role the bacteria have played on Earth, both influencing the larger environment and life itself. Unfortunately, the last two chapters go a bit off the rails, where the authors try to speculate that humans, cooperating with each other in space exploration, will become the equivalent microbes beyond Earth. While I think there is potential with that argument, it just didn't fit with the rest of the book and dragged on for too long.
September 23, 2015
Read many years ago as part of my study and practice of Continuum. She is a biologist and it resonates with the micromovement and being in contact with your body at a cellular level, including the microtubules.
May 13, 2018
Note: Keep in mind that it's a little outdated, as it's fairly old for a science book. Despite that, it was a fantastic read. Provocative and even mindblowing at times.
July 18, 2024
Lynn Margulis changed the science of evolution with her insights into microbiology and ecology. Her symbiogenesis theory utterly changed those fields, and brought them into mainstream science. She was also a profound thinker and writer, later co-developing the Gaia Hypothesis, which holds that planet earth acts as a single, living organism. With her son Dorian Sagan (she was Carl Sagan’s first wife), Microcosmos tells the little known story of the first 2.5 billion years of life on earth when the only living things on the planet were single cells, organisms that would be invisible to us (if we were there to see them), yet so powerful they reshaped a planet, and made us possible. It was during that long epoch, Margulis writes, that all the hard, fundamental work that led to us was invented — sex, cooperation, eating, breathing, reacting. In the end we see how these primeval forces drive all of Earth’s vast ecosystems, and reveal that every living thing on the planet, or created by it, is, in fact, one great and vibrant organism, made possible more because of cooperation than competition.
November 15, 2018
Microcosmos is a history of evolution from the viewpoint of the bacteria. It made me realize how accustomed I have become to reading books into which authors insert themselves. They travel to various places to research their books and they tell about what they learn from their point of view. The authors of this book, in contrast, seemed strangely absent, or behind the scenes. There are just a few humorous phrases to convey a feeling of Microcosmos coming from real actual people. Grade school textbooks used to be like this. The subject matter is certainly interesting and clearly and chronologically presented. The stippled illustrations for each chapter heading are charming. I agree with other reviewers that the last couple of chapters didn’t fit well with the rest of the book because they got way too speculative. I was also really tired from reading this book and could hardly wait to finish it. It really isn’t the kind of book that reads itself. 😊
January 25, 2021
"La vida se convierte en un personaje central, que crea sus propios problemas y las respectivas soluciones."
Dorian y Lynn terminan de lograr lo que Carl Sagan inició con su trabajo de divulgación: crear una profunda y sólida conexión con el cosmos y la vida desde sus inicios más humildes con la ayuda de la simbiogénesis, una nueva teoría de la evolución que se centra en la cooperación constante y sostenido a lo largo de la historia entre los seis reinos de la vida como método de supervivencia a escala planetaria.
Mí único problema con el trabajo es que requiere un nivel bajo-medio sobre microorganismos para entenderse completamente sin interrumpir con su lectura: muchas veces se hacen menciones de partes de bacterias, amebas o células que sin un conocimiento previo no se pueden imaginar; hecho para nada secundario cuando la función de las menciones es explicar como estos seres se iban modificando con el paso del tiempo.
Dorian y Lynn terminan de lograr lo que Carl Sagan inició con su trabajo de divulgación: crear una profunda y sólida conexión con el cosmos y la vida desde sus inicios más humildes con la ayuda de la simbiogénesis, una nueva teoría de la evolución que se centra en la cooperación constante y sostenido a lo largo de la historia entre los seis reinos de la vida como método de supervivencia a escala planetaria.
Mí único problema con el trabajo es que requiere un nivel bajo-medio sobre microorganismos para entenderse completamente sin interrumpir con su lectura: muchas veces se hacen menciones de partes de bacterias, amebas o células que sin un conocimiento previo no se pueden imaginar; hecho para nada secundario cuando la función de las menciones es explicar como estos seres se iban modificando con el paso del tiempo.
November 18, 2022
La vida en la superficie de la Tierra parece regularse a sí misma cuando se enfrenta a perturbaciones externas, y lo hace sin tener en cuenta los individuos y las especies que la componen. Más del 99,99 por ciento de las especies que han existido están extinguidas, pero la pátina del planeta, con su ejército de células, ha continuado existiendo durante más de tres mil millones de años. Y la base, pasada, presente y futura, de esa pátina es el microcosmos, constituido por billones de microbios en comunicación y en continua evolución. El mundo visible es una porción reciente y sobredesarrollada del microcosmos; funciona únicamente gracias a su bien desarrollada conexión con las actividades del microcosmos.
Si he aprendido algo después de leer esta magnífica obra de divulgación científica es HUMILDAD.
June 21, 2024
Une histoire complète de l'apparition de la vie sur Terre où des fois on comprend pas tout, et où des fois on comprend absolument rien (peut-être que si tu as dépassé le niveau collège en SVT c'est plus facile). Qui montre que l'évolution ne se fait pas juste par la compétition mais aussi et surtout par l'entraide et la symbiose (coucou Kropotkine). Le tout écrit il y a plus de 40 ans par une femme trop badass.
December 28, 2022
A very readable presentation of the origins and evolution of life on Earth. Kudos! A "must read" to understand the ongoing climatological changes and the damage humanity is causing to the planet that we call home.
October 8, 2017
Lynn Margulis nos presenta una hermosa y amena lectura acerca de la vida en la Tierra desde un punto de vista novedoso: a través de los microorganismos.
February 25, 2019
NF
275 pages
Excellent!
275 pages
Excellent!
January 22, 2020
A good book. Though I am a biologist I learnt a lot, some totally new viewpoints. Sometimes a bit not 100% scientific to me with not rock solid ideas.
January 24, 2020
Well written but not that dense
April 11, 2021
Fantastisch boek, maakt het ontstaan van het leven heel begrijpelijk
October 4, 2022
Ce livre fait partie des rares ouvrages qui proposent une histoire de la vie sur terre avec des arguments intelligents, originaux et stimulants.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews