Symbiosis/Introduction

Otherness, process, multiplicity and cooperation

For the biologist Lynn Margulis, symbiosis has been the major theme around which she developed her, by some viewed as controversial, evolutionary biological research. Margulis states that in science there are still many hidden assumptions that man is the center of things and resides in the middle of the chain of evolution, ‘below god and above rock’. However, as Margulis has defended in her revolutionary work on the importance of endosymbiosis for evolution, all life forms can be seen to have evolved from microbes and from the interactions between bacteria. In some cases symbiosis even evolves into symbiogenesis, which is when certain forms of long-term living together lead to the appearance of new species or new organs.

Organisms merge with other organisms, acquiring their gene sets at the same time. Margulis main claim, for which she draws amongst others on earlier work by the biologist Ivan Wallin, is thus that in most cases evolutionary novelty arises as a consequence of symbiosis, which goes directly against a Darwinian ‘nucleocentric view of evolution as a bloody struggle of animals. Margulis claims concerning symbiosis have within mainstream evolutionary biology been seen as controversial and extreme, not only through her insistence on symbiosis and evolutionary cooperation as an alternative theory to Darwinian struggle, but also in her insistence that not only plants an animals evolved from the interaction of microbes , but all lifeforms. And as she states ‘the idea that new species arise from symbiotic mergers among members of old ones is still not even discussed in polite scientific society.’

Another aspect of Margulis adaptation and use of symbiosis in biological discourse that has been controversial is her connection with James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. The gaia hypotheses proposes a holistic view on the earth as a self regulating system of organic and inorganic matter, through its feedback system operating as a close unity. This idea is visible in many present-day ecosophies. However, the mixing of a near spiritual and religious rhetoric with scientific facts was not claimed serious enough by many biological researchers and it was seen as too harmonious according to the ‘struggle as survival’ evolutionary strand of neodarwinians.