A certain thread reminds me of why I think Lynn Margulis is a crank.

[Odin2005]

This interview of her was posted in the "are you a quack" thread and it hit a nerve:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0903/S00194.htm

Apparently she's still spouting nonsense about "close-minded Neo-Darwinists" and saying that natural selection can't account for evolutionary change and similar BS. :banghead: And she's played a large part in causing James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis to be wrongly thought of as New Age woo-woo by many.

[JackRiddler]

1. Please let's at least be fair and sober, even if one or both of us are wrong.

1. Lynn Margulis is an evolutionist. That, in fact, is her scientific profession as a practicing university biologist. With her collaborators she has devoted decades to studying the life forms that 4.6 billion years of evolution have brought forth on this planet, in an attempt to usefully categorize them. That work stands or falls, in part or in whole, on its own.

2. She considers natural selection to be an undeniable, self-evident process arising from the fact that life gives birth to many more individual organisms than nature can possibly sustain and allow to reproduce. Its effects are obvious in microevolution, i.e. the frequency of given traits within a species, and in advantaging given species within a niche or habitat.

3. She hypothesizes that the additional, most important mechanism of macroevolution and the genesis of new species is symbiogenesis: the symbiotic acquisition of genomes or parts of genomes from other species. This also advantages given species within a niche or habitat, she would say. No one denies any more that symbiotic absorption of portions of other genomes exists; she would however ascribe it to it a central role in species genesis, and that is the crux of her disagreement with the mainstream of the neo-Darwinian synthesis.

4. In her early career she was first to advance the hypothesis that organelles such as mitochondria began as independent species absorbed by larger cells into a symbiotic arrangement that was then propagated in all future generations. She predicted, correctly, that mitochondria would be found to possess their own DNA, and that other DNA would be found outside the cell nucleus. This early work (which clearly informs her more current and broader hypotheses on symbiogenesis) met with mockery from many members of the academic establishment of that time. Ultimately it was accepted as self-evident. It revolutionized biology and was a great service to science, something which can be said of very few cranks. It makes her into a titan, even if she might be a crank in other ways.

5. She remains one of the most successful scientific revolutionaries of the last century, in the league of Einstein or Watson and Crick, even if she turns out to be wrong about anything or everything else she hypothesizes. In fact, that's all right too. Science is a robust practice for proving hypotheses are wrong. Imagine Lynn Margulis never got anything wrong in her life, but also didn't formulate the hypothesis of symbiotic absorption of organelles, for which she is celebrated today. Would that have been preferable?

6. If cranks, creationists or New Age religionists hold up her work or her hypotheses falsely in support of some faith-based and unscientific assertions (unscientific = impossible to falsify, for example a hidden god or inferred designer), that's on them.

7. Lots of great scientists who advanced scientific knowledge in one way turned out to be cranks in some other way. That's all right. It may even go with the territory. Perhaps we can be more forgiving, without needing to accept every idea that seems insupportable to us.

8. Again, none of this makes anyone else or any other scientifically hypothesized idea right or wrong. Each stands on its own, against the criteria of falsifiability and repeatability. If you read what she says and writes, she wouldn't have it any other way.

9. In that thread I specifically cited her views, as a practicing and funded scientist, on the sociology of science as an organized human pursuit:

Scientists in general need funds. An aspect of science that is less true of the humanities or arts, is that they must chase money because the rate of cash flow must increase to increase research activity. Scientists almost always need equipment, materials, man-power, in short, money. All except some theoretical scientists need money and, for research results to be accurate and meaningful even the "theoretikers" must work with experimentalists who always need money.

So the economic system to me is such that university people, like most everyone else, maximize the rate of cash flow per square foot of institutional space. That is the main pressure. Scientists, like anyone else, follow the money flow. Many are entirely honest about it. Some of them will make bombs. Most won't go that far. The humanities and philosophy scholars receive far less public and corporate money because, in general, what they do is not perceived as practical. All they do is make books and teach esoterica to students.

This also doesn't make anyone right or wrong in itself, but I'm wondering if you might comment on it.

Thanks!

[Odin2005]

3. Oh, I am no way belittling the good contributions she made.

But she took her initial brilliant discovery and IMO let it go to her head, letting herself think that she found some Grand Unifying Theory. I don't disagree with her that symbiosis has played an important part in the history of life, but to say that is the dominant force is simply wrong. Indeed, modern DNA comparisons show that all mitochondria come from a single ancestor, and same with chloroplasts, contradicting Margulis's claim that it occurred many times independently.

Chloroplasts originated once in the common ancestor of land plants, green algae, and red algae. Other groups of Eukaryotes with cholorplasts (like dinoflagellates, Euglena, and kelp) got their chloroplasts from symbiotic relationships with green or red algae.

It was originally thought that some protozoans without mitochondria never had them but we now know that all Eukaryotes have nuclear DNA derived from mitochondria, and thus the common ancestor of all living Eukaryotes had mitochondria, Margulis's supposedly primitive anaerobic flagellated ameobae (and, indeed, most slime molds and ameobae, including the archetypal Amoeba proteus) turn out to be closely related to Animals and Fungi.

There is no good evidence supporting her claims that Eukaryotic flagella and the cell division apparatus are derived from Spirochetes, indeed, more recent evidence frankly contradicts it, with the closest bacterial analogue being the retractable stalks of a group of fresh-water bacteria called the Plactomyces (some of which even have primitive nuclei).

Money definitely can be a corrupting force, but I don't see how that has anything to do with the consensus of evolutionary biology. IMO Margulis is projecting ideological motives where none exist. Bad science based on corruption always gets exposed eventually, as the made-up stem-cell research in Korea that was exposed a couple years ago shows.

[JackRiddler]

4. Thanks for an interesting post.

I'd have to read (and re-read) a great many articles and books to even begin to argue, and that's assuming that after I did, I would even wanted to argue; and so for now I'm happy to be persuaded by your superior knowledge of the biology. (No danger either way, as I'm not an evolutionary biologist being interviewed anywhere!)

As for the sociology: "Ideological motives" or the conditioning that comes from growing up within an ideology can be a lot more subtle than you seem to allow for, and operate on a nearly unconscious level.

In that interview and in other statements she's made about the scientific community, I do not see Margulis imputing "science based on corruption" at all! That would be the extreme case, and indeed be subject to complete exposure. But to focus on that alone disregards the subtleties.

Margulis instead advances observations on the power of group culture to cause people to conform to shared ideas, and to justify themselves (above all to themselves) as they go about advancing their interests. Especially given the alternatives (challenging authorities, okay, but: No money!?) people tend to be very good at finding reasons why they should follow the money, persuading themselves to do so without necessarily therefore being consciously corrupt.

This operates universally, of course, it's hardly a plague restricted to science. All she's saying in a way is that funded science is part of the same society as everything else.

---

In the public self-presentations of the more outspoken evolutionary scientists (among them Dawkins -- although I do realize Dawkins started as a philosopher -- and several others who write regularly on edge.org, where I most often follow them), I do see a pronounced tendency to present capitalist competition ideology as nature, to reduce humans to puppets of mechanics, to extend a simplistic rendering of evolutionary theory into politics, and to make less of the rich evidence for cooperation among individuals as an evolutionary advantage. This isn't necessarily a function of funding; at present, capitalist ideology is a lot like air.

That also would not, by the way, reflect either way on the question of natural selection vs. symbiogenesis as primary mechanisms for macroevolution. Nor does it necessarily reflect on the validity of the scientific work of the same writers outside their public self-presentations and political statements. But the latter are highly influential. Believe it or not, scientists when they make statements about society tend to be taken even more seriously in influential circles than fundamentalist preachers!

[Warpy]

2. She has a point about natural selection

because of the discontinuous nature of macroevolution, happening in large leaps with long periods of stability in between. Natural selection as the only mechanism has been in doubt for a long time, and the presence of viral DNA in some gene sequences would give credence to her theory of symbiogenesis, especially in the larger, more complicated species.

Truth will likely be found in DNA and we're just scratching the surface of it now. Undoubtedly some of her theories will be disproven down the line but for now, she's light years ahead of most others in the field.