What they say. . .

In 1966, Lynn Margulis published a landmark paper in which she argued that millions of years ago, protozoans symbiotically acquired photosynthetic plant cells and that, working together, they eventually developed into an entirely new life form—the eukaryote or multicelled organism. Margulis and her notion of “symbiogenesis” were scoffed at by Neo-Darwinists, who represented the status quo of the scientific community at the time, because evidence of cooperation in biology directly contradicted their theory of the “selfish gene.” For twenty years, Margulis fought for her work to gain acceptance, and eventually her tenacity paid off. Today the idea that symbiogenesis is one of the mechanisms of evolution is taught in the majority of high school biology classes.

Proof of cooperation in nature has also informed the work of David Sloan Wilson, who in the early 1970s pushed the Neo-Darwinian fold even further by resurrecting the theory of group selection—the idea that individuals can cooperate rather than compete with one another and become social groups that are “so functionally integrated they become higher-level organisms in their own right.” In this way, Wilson argues, natural selection takes place not only at the level of DNA but also between groups of animals and entire ecosystems—a process he calls “multi-level selection.” Using the idea of group selection to explain the development of human history and culture, the former media publicist and rogue scientific theorist Howard Bloom writes, “Evolution is not just a competition between individuals. It is a competition between networks, between webs, between group souls.”

What it means. . .

You’d be hard-pressed to find Wilson or Margulis talking about direction, purpose, or spirituality in evolution. He tends to reduce God and religion to biological instincts, and she shares many of the naturalistic proclivities of her former husband, Carl Sagan. But their accomplishments are something all subsequent biologists and theorists should be thankful for. They expanded the conceptual boundaries of the mechanics of evolution and were among the first to question the reigning orthodoxy of Neo-Darwinism. The implications of their work are profound: by showing that cooperation is fundamental to the nature of life and the evolutionary process, they’ve helped to galvanize paradigm shifts in fields beyond science, such as politics, psychology, philosophy, and movements for social change.

“We do not deny the importance of mutations. Rather we insist that random mutation, a small part of the evolutionary saga, has been dogmatically overemphasized. The much larger part of the story of evolutionary innovation, the symbiotic joining of organisms . . . has systematically been ignored by self-proclaimed evolutionary biologists.”

Lynn Margulis