Their 2002 book was Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species, proposing at length what she had claimed elsewhere: that neo-Darwinism (the twentieth-century school of thought merging Darwin’s theory with Mendel’s genetics) is wrong about the main source of genetic variation that drives evolutionary innovation. That crucial element, variation—it doesn’t, according to Margulis and Sagan, come mostly from the tiny random mutations that seem sufficient to neo-Darwinists. “Rather,” they wrote, “the important transmitted variation that leads to evolutionary novelty comes from the
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