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

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

Body concentrates order. It continuously self-repairs. Every five days you get a new stomach lining. You get a new liver every two months. Your skin replaces itself every six weeks. Every year, 98 percent of the atoms of your body are replaced. This non-stop chemical replacement, metabolism, is a sure sign of life.

Lynn Margulis

Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn't look anything like a butterfly.

Lynn Margulis

I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

Lynn Margulis

All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.

Lynn Margulis

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

If you really want to study evolution, you've got go outside sometime, because you'll see symbiosis everywhere!

Lynn Margulis

Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.

Lynn Margulis

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

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

People say I am against Darwin. That is ridiculous.

Lynn Margulis

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

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

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

To romp along the connected rooftops and fire escapes of Chicago's second city of garages was my young life's passion.

Lynn Margulis

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

The fewer species there are and the fewer species we know about, the fewer questions we even know to ask.

Lynn Margulis

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

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.

Lynn Margulis

Life learned early on to recognize itself.

Lynn Margulis