And then came the first of three major revolutions that have wracked our view of life in the past half century. This first was instigated by Lynn Margulis in the summer of love, 1967. Complex cells did not evolve by ‘standard’ natural selection, Margulis argued, but in an orgy of cooperation, in which cells engaged with each other so closely that they even got inside each other. Symbiosis is a long-term interaction between two or more species, usually some sort of trade for wares or services. In the case of microbes, those wares are the substances of life, the substrates of metabolism, which
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