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Carl Sagan ile Lynn Margulis'in oglu Dorion Sagan'in annesiyle birlikte yaptiklari bilimsel çalismalarin önemli noktalarinin yer aldigi bu kitap, Dünya üzerindeki yasamin bilinmeyen taraflarini ortaya seriyor. Sagan ve Margulis bizleri, geleneksel doga görüsünü terk ederek, tamamen birbirine bagli ve iç içe geçmis bir doga görüsüne dogru bakmamiz için uyariyor. Özellikle, hayali tahtimizdan inmemizi ve insanligin, bütün o teknolojik ve kültürel aksesuarlariyla birlikte, protistlerle, bakterilerle, bitkilerle, hayvanlarla, bizi çevreleyen canli dünyayla birlikte bu muazzam büyüklükteki sistem içine derinlemesine ve ayrilmaz bir sekilde gömüldügünün farkina varmamizi tavsiye diyor. Kitapta, Nietzsche'nin frengi hastaligina neden olan sprikotlerden, AIDS'e neden olan HIV virüsüne kadar pek çok bilinmeyen ya da yanlis bilinenlerin gerçek dogasindan örnekler verilerek, içinde yasadigimiz doganin dogasi eglenceli bir üslupla aktariliyor.
328 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2007
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About the author
Lynn Margulis
84 books206 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.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 8, 2012
Margulus was a remarkable biologist and this, her last book, clearly demonstrates her bold originality.
November 5, 2017
Lynn Margulis is a very experienced evolutionary biologist with some ideas that are definitely not (yet) in the mainstream. This collection of essays (many co-authored by her son Dorian) is a good introduction to her iconoclastic thinking. Whatever you may think of her ideas, she is not a scientist to be lightly dismissed. Her research over decades is absolutely top of the line and is widely acknowledged as such. One of her most famous ideas is that symbiogenesis - the absorption and consequent inclusion of an entire genome by bacteria - is one of the leading drivers of evolution is touched on here and is the main theme of the book I am now reading: "Acquiring Genomes." As an example, both our mitochondria and chloroplasts were free-living once upon a time. They were ingested without being digested and drove the expansion of the eukaryote line(s). Truly fascinating.
January 21, 2022
Five stars for every chapter written by Lynn, three for those written by Dorion, and four for the duo.
January 11, 2026
Five stars for every chapter written by Lynn, three for those written by Dorion, and four for the duo.
April 11, 2015
This book lit a real fire in my brain. Not because I can claim to have understood and instantly assumed a new and explosive philosophy of biology, but because one seems so tantalisingly close and yet so hard to grasp. This pair are definitely onto something. It is now widely recognised that mitochondria represent "fossil" bacteria that at some stage gave up their individuality for the sake of a larger aggregate organism. Nature is teeming with commensal organisms like corals, kelp and lichens in which disparate species meld to create a higher level of superorganism. We ourselves could not live without our gut flora. Kefir, a living dairy drink from the Caucasus, provides a striking further illustration of "individuals" forming out of a commune of 30-odd wildly different organisms and apparently thereby acquiring the need to grow old, die and reproduce. Metamorphosis may have arisen out of symbiogenesis, as in a way may sex have arisen out of unsuccessful cannibalism. Then there is Lovelock's Gaia, on which he contributes a chapter with Margulis, still controversial but with some interesting successes now behind it.
What all this adds up to is that Margulis sees a Commensal Principle in nature - a strong tendency for life to self-organise into higher-level self-regulating systems from biofilms right up to the global climate. And there are so many cases of this happening it is hard to deny that she must be right. But can she state this principle in a single, necessary phrase that fits on a tee-shirt and makes the whole picture inevitable? Can she, hell. There is no "Selfish Gene" or "E=mc²" which says, "Gaia will come," much less why. What is this universal organising principle, and how can I write it out in software language so as to play with it myself? It looks like a generalisation without an explanatory hypothesis, and that has provoked a ferment between my ears as I can't help feeling it's within reach. If this is what you live for then you should read this book!
Margulis requires no introduction for the student of biology and evolution, as hers is the name most usually associated with the idea of symbiogenesis. Sagan's name is equally well known, but what I did not realise is that the two are a mother and son team. The great Carl Sagan was Dorion's father. With a pedigree like that, this little branch of the evolutionary tree must have a fair subset of the genes associated with intellectual gifts, and so it appears to have turned out. Margulis' passages are very readable and no less solid than you would expect from a giant of modern biology. The odd crashing solecism and an unpleasantly poststructuralist-sounding turn of phrase seem to be attributable to Sagan. I would not go so far as to say that he spoiled the book, but I think I have to read it again to pin down all of the ideas and that is more down to Sagan's florid language than the intractability of the ideas.
One picks up undercurrents of conflict in this book, especially with the gene-selectionists in biology championed by Dawkins. Coming from outside the field, I can only hazard that Dawkins has his t-shirt and knows how to tell you clearly, while Margulis' ideas don't seem to be pinned down with the same precision yet. I hope this will change, as Margulis is clearly onto something at a systems level that we urgently need to understand. Are we Gaia's reproductive organs, the phallic Soyuz rockets Earth's way of penetrating space to inseminate neighbouring planets? Or are we its latest itch, now due a catastrophic scratch? Or is the whole idea of Gaia really gratuitous personification, Lovelock's mechanistic Daisyworld notwithstanding? Who can say. We can only say that we as yet lack even a mathematical language in which to formulate the questions with sufficient precision to be wrong, and that with anthropogenic warming now toasting its feet by our fire we need that language right now so we can at least pose precise questions. Margulis does not give us this language, but she can point to the reasons why it must be available.
A brilliant collection of essays, simultaneously irritating and challenging.
What all this adds up to is that Margulis sees a Commensal Principle in nature - a strong tendency for life to self-organise into higher-level self-regulating systems from biofilms right up to the global climate. And there are so many cases of this happening it is hard to deny that she must be right. But can she state this principle in a single, necessary phrase that fits on a tee-shirt and makes the whole picture inevitable? Can she, hell. There is no "Selfish Gene" or "E=mc²" which says, "Gaia will come," much less why. What is this universal organising principle, and how can I write it out in software language so as to play with it myself? It looks like a generalisation without an explanatory hypothesis, and that has provoked a ferment between my ears as I can't help feeling it's within reach. If this is what you live for then you should read this book!
Margulis requires no introduction for the student of biology and evolution, as hers is the name most usually associated with the idea of symbiogenesis. Sagan's name is equally well known, but what I did not realise is that the two are a mother and son team. The great Carl Sagan was Dorion's father. With a pedigree like that, this little branch of the evolutionary tree must have a fair subset of the genes associated with intellectual gifts, and so it appears to have turned out. Margulis' passages are very readable and no less solid than you would expect from a giant of modern biology. The odd crashing solecism and an unpleasantly poststructuralist-sounding turn of phrase seem to be attributable to Sagan. I would not go so far as to say that he spoiled the book, but I think I have to read it again to pin down all of the ideas and that is more down to Sagan's florid language than the intractability of the ideas.
One picks up undercurrents of conflict in this book, especially with the gene-selectionists in biology championed by Dawkins. Coming from outside the field, I can only hazard that Dawkins has his t-shirt and knows how to tell you clearly, while Margulis' ideas don't seem to be pinned down with the same precision yet. I hope this will change, as Margulis is clearly onto something at a systems level that we urgently need to understand. Are we Gaia's reproductive organs, the phallic Soyuz rockets Earth's way of penetrating space to inseminate neighbouring planets? Or are we its latest itch, now due a catastrophic scratch? Or is the whole idea of Gaia really gratuitous personification, Lovelock's mechanistic Daisyworld notwithstanding? Who can say. We can only say that we as yet lack even a mathematical language in which to formulate the questions with sufficient precision to be wrong, and that with anthropogenic warming now toasting its feet by our fire we need that language right now so we can at least pose precise questions. Margulis does not give us this language, but she can point to the reasons why it must be available.
A brilliant collection of essays, simultaneously irritating and challenging.
October 14, 2008
Weak and labored, academically lilting and a bit trite with argument. The mother-son writing team experiments with novelty, but it reads as a loaded gimmick and doesn't add much to the material (as in the circular passage that simply begins in the middle of a sentence that can serve as a continuous read from the incomplete terminating sentence). Not without merit, but I don't think much meaning would be lost with a well-paced skim of this.
As an aside, it's a serious flaw that Sagan and Margulis bring up the argument against HIV's causative role in clinical AIDS without directly reasoning it out. That argument is so heated (and dramatically favored against the position taken in this book) that it's irresponsible to mention it and then simply tell the reader, "you can read more about this elsewhere." That's not much reflection, and downright lazy in the context of writing to enlighten.
As an aside, it's a serious flaw that Sagan and Margulis bring up the argument against HIV's causative role in clinical AIDS without directly reasoning it out. That argument is so heated (and dramatically favored against the position taken in this book) that it's irresponsible to mention it and then simply tell the reader, "you can read more about this elsewhere." That's not much reflection, and downright lazy in the context of writing to enlighten.
March 30, 2016
The chapters by lynn get 4-5 stars. Writing with Dorion was a huge mistake. Motherly love is great but makes for bad science. His chapters deserve between and 3 stars. By far, his best chapter was the final one co-authored with Eric Schneider.
Even with Dorion's terrible writing style and far too sensational manner, the chapters by Lynn are spectacular enough to make this book a must read.
Note; My dislike of Dorion might be influenced by his severe daddy issues (Carl Sagan is his father), outlined in the first few chapters. It set a bad tone and made it difficult to take him seriously.
Even with Dorion's terrible writing style and far too sensational manner, the chapters by Lynn are spectacular enough to make this book a must read.
Note; My dislike of Dorion might be influenced by his severe daddy issues (Carl Sagan is his father), outlined in the first few chapters. It set a bad tone and made it difficult to take him seriously.
September 14, 2011
I was recommended this book by a friend. Being a predominantly fiction reader, this was a stretch. It took me several sittings spaced over several weeks to complete it, but I found myself re-reading certain sections. There was fascinating theory that I found extremely interesting; however, the deeper science information was way above normal people's realm of understanding.
July 15, 2009
Actually, it is written by Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis. It is a fascinating book about science. Some of their ideas were amazing, such as the one about the brain developing because of bacteria.
January 16, 2012
Five stars for every chapter written by Lynn, three for those written by Dorion, and four for the duo.
May 29, 2012
Thought-provoking essays on how micro-nature relates to macro-nature, evolution and the interwoven marvelousness of the world.
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August 24, 2012This was the most inspiring science book I have ever read. Combining mystery with knowledge and creativity.
October 21, 2015
A fascinating collection of essays on science, ecology, mythology and philosophy that build on each other and carefully lays the groundwork for a perspective on Earth as a dynamic living system.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews