Lynn Margulis echoed his views in 2002, claiming that the creation of new symbioses between distinct organisms – which she called symbiogenesis – has been the main force behind the origin of new species. To her, the kinds of relationships you’ve seen so far in this book were not just pillars of evolution, but its very foundations. She failed to make her case, though. She listed plenty of examples of symbiotic microbes that led to important evolutionary adaptations, but, crucially, presented almost no evidence that they actually gave rise to new species, much less that they are the principal
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interesting
