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el_entrenador_loco's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
akemi_666's review against another edition
3.0
Wowa, scientists really love talking shit about politics without having read a single work in that field, eh? Even when I was a dumb wee genetics kid I knew there was something worth hearing from the counterculture. Seems Lynn Margulis just lumps all cultures together into one big monomyth of ignorance, which her scientific mind cuts through like a prismatic spray.
So the good points.
Lynn Margulis radically challenges Neo-Darwinism with her theory of endosymbiosis. Essentially, Darwinists (though perhaps not Darwin himself) saw competition as the sole driving force of evolution. There is interspecies competition (between species) and intraspecies competition (within species). An example of interspecies competition: two different species have overlapping niches. Mutations in either of the species' gene pools that enable greater exploitation of the environment (absorption, utilisation, expansion, etc), will lead to more successful future populations. An ongoing arms race ensues, and both species change over evolutionary time. An example of intraspecies competition: two animals of the same species are courting a mate of the opposite sex. They're being judged on their ability to build a comfy nest. The one who is selected and the one who does the selecting will pass on their genes. The population will shift towards comfph city, with both the desire for comfy nests and the capacity for building comfph surviving.
As any humanities student will notice, this understanding of a natural law is suspiciously aligned with capitalist ideology which arose concurrently during the Enlightenment and Western imperialism . . . we'll come back to this later.
Lynn Margulis argues that endosymbiosis is a far more important driver for evolution than competition. Her theory of endosymbiosis can be understood as the merging of two previously distinct species. If Darwinian selection branches the tree of life, endosymbiosis merges branches into rhizomal networks. Visualise two branches of the tree of life coming together and then splitting off into three. Two of these lines are the original ancestors (who keep trucking along) and the third is the new progeny (who has novel capacities and will likely colonise an uninhabited niche). This theory was proposed in the 60's and ridiculed for decades. It is now taught in high schools.
Even though Lynn is against "politics" and implicitly posits "science" as the cure for . . . well everything (scientists love doing this and it's arrogant and boring as heck), her theory fundamentally challenges Darwinian and capitalist ontologies. In other words, her theory is political. She suggests a world whose development came about not through competition and the slow accruement of beneficial mutations, but through the wholesale merging of separate beings with all their genetic matter. Species proliferate from their interspecies ruptures into one another's lifeworlds, through failed ingestions that lead to indelible biological alliances. Out of two comes one. This is an ontological reversal of the most extreme case.
Out of this understanding, comes a political revelation that life innovates through mutualism. In other words, Lynn Margulis reproduces Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid argument, at the level of biogenesis. This is the biological equivalent of the discovery of quantum physics. It's profound, strange and exuberant.
Later on, she connects endosymbiosis to the Gaia theory. Gaia theory is the idea that earth itself is living, in the sense that it has a metabolism. A metabolism is simply something that regularly transforms matter (one chemical compound into another chemical compound) through the use of energy (solar, sugar, protein, etc). A homeostatic environment is created. This is not a static (still) environment, but a regulated (flowing) environment. Things transform, but in a predictable manner. In other words, constant change creates stability. Gaia, like endosymbiosis, is the merging of all ecosystems into a greater emergent totality — it is the Tao of Earth.
So the bad points.
The book kinda ends with Lynn saying heyo, we got no control over anything, Gaia will just do its thing, dumb scientists are dumb and environmentalists succ.
Like, she spends all this time, literally undoing the ontology of genetics, and then just doesn't go into its implications. She makes fun of spiritualist understandings of Gaia, but her own understanding is cynical detachment. She fails to understand that being apolitical is the political stance of the status quo.
It's like she has absolutely no understanding of how Darwin's theories of evolution have reinforced capitalist ideologies, leading to the massive exploitation of Earth's resources towards a state that will, (of course) right itself in due time, but after the death of many, many beings. I'm pretty nihilistic, but Lynn's detached cynicism is disgusting. She doesn't seem to understand that the beings on the margins of society will suffer far fucking more than those in the centre driving catastrophic climate change (yes, I'm talking about capitalists). Like yeah whoopie! Gaia will never die, but we will. I don't think life is precious, but I think freedom is, and that freedom is the freedom to live or die however I want. In such a way, freedom has to be understood as a network of effects that intersect at both micro- and macro-social levels. It is never individual, but mutually constituted by our environment and our kin (yiff). Lynn seem to understand that on a biological level but not on a political one. She doesn't seem to understand that catastrophic climate change is a tyrannical end determined by the few towards the many. It is the destruction of freedom through the theft of the future.
Her ignorance of politics is most evident in Chapter 2 where she outlines the resistance to her ideas in the 60's-onwards from the scientific community. While she is right that there are dogmatic scientists who cling to their theories as Platonic ideals, she doesn't understand why this is;
and while I appreciate her stress in materialist practices, hers is a materialism of naivety. Universities organised along capitalist principles of competition lead to neurotic dogmatism, because to be scientifically contested is to be economically undermined. Competition becomes a threat to one's material existence. Furthermore, once an institution has gained widespread legitimacy, the critical thought that founded it becomes secondary to its own reproduction. The effect of institutionalised power in a competitive and hierarchical social field is ignorance, arrogance and gate-keeping.
Lynn laments the lack of critical thinking in the scientific community but she fails to understand its material origins. Anyone who's worked at a university will have experienced the threat of departmental cuts from lowered student numbers (leading to wasteful spending in PR campaigns and petty interdepartmental squabbles) and the auditing of teaching staff performances in relation to student grades (leading to simplified lecture content). It's because of such pressures that critical thinking is less and less taught and instead students are taught diagrams, names and dates. The scientific method comes second place to the reified concept, an infobyte that perfectly resembles the capitalist commodity form. Lecturers and students begin to resemble the dead facts they hollowly recite. This is preferable for the university, for critical may lead to the development of not just scientific critique, but also, social critique. Perhaps Lynn should have paid more attention to the counterculture, instead of denigrating it, because such movements can help us build more grassroots and emancipatory scientific and pedagogical frameworks, that nourish life as a living relation and a mutually-constituted freedom.
So the good points.
Lynn Margulis radically challenges Neo-Darwinism with her theory of endosymbiosis. Essentially, Darwinists (though perhaps not Darwin himself) saw competition as the sole driving force of evolution. There is interspecies competition (between species) and intraspecies competition (within species). An example of interspecies competition: two different species have overlapping niches. Mutations in either of the species' gene pools that enable greater exploitation of the environment (absorption, utilisation, expansion, etc), will lead to more successful future populations. An ongoing arms race ensues, and both species change over evolutionary time. An example of intraspecies competition: two animals of the same species are courting a mate of the opposite sex. They're being judged on their ability to build a comfy nest. The one who is selected and the one who does the selecting will pass on their genes. The population will shift towards comfph city, with both the desire for comfy nests and the capacity for building comfph surviving.
As any humanities student will notice, this understanding of a natural law is suspiciously aligned with capitalist ideology which arose concurrently during the Enlightenment and Western imperialism . . . we'll come back to this later.
Lynn Margulis argues that endosymbiosis is a far more important driver for evolution than competition. Her theory of endosymbiosis can be understood as the merging of two previously distinct species. If Darwinian selection branches the tree of life, endosymbiosis merges branches into rhizomal networks. Visualise two branches of the tree of life coming together and then splitting off into three. Two of these lines are the original ancestors (who keep trucking along) and the third is the new progeny (who has novel capacities and will likely colonise an uninhabited niche). This theory was proposed in the 60's and ridiculed for decades. It is now taught in high schools.
Even though Lynn is against "politics" and implicitly posits "science" as the cure for . . . well everything (scientists love doing this and it's arrogant and boring as heck), her theory fundamentally challenges Darwinian and capitalist ontologies. In other words, her theory is political. She suggests a world whose development came about not through competition and the slow accruement of beneficial mutations, but through the wholesale merging of separate beings with all their genetic matter. Species proliferate from their interspecies ruptures into one another's lifeworlds, through failed ingestions that lead to indelible biological alliances. Out of two comes one. This is an ontological reversal of the most extreme case.
Out of this understanding, comes a political revelation that life innovates through mutualism. In other words, Lynn Margulis reproduces Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid argument, at the level of biogenesis. This is the biological equivalent of the discovery of quantum physics. It's profound, strange and exuberant.
Later on, she connects endosymbiosis to the Gaia theory. Gaia theory is the idea that earth itself is living, in the sense that it has a metabolism. A metabolism is simply something that regularly transforms matter (one chemical compound into another chemical compound) through the use of energy (solar, sugar, protein, etc). A homeostatic environment is created. This is not a static (still) environment, but a regulated (flowing) environment. Things transform, but in a predictable manner. In other words, constant change creates stability. Gaia, like endosymbiosis, is the merging of all ecosystems into a greater emergent totality — it is the Tao of Earth.
So the bad points.
The book kinda ends with Lynn saying heyo, we got no control over anything, Gaia will just do its thing, dumb scientists are dumb and environmentalists succ.
Like, she spends all this time, literally undoing the ontology of genetics, and then just doesn't go into its implications. She makes fun of spiritualist understandings of Gaia, but her own understanding is cynical detachment. She fails to understand that being apolitical is the political stance of the status quo.
It's like she has absolutely no understanding of how Darwin's theories of evolution have reinforced capitalist ideologies, leading to the massive exploitation of Earth's resources towards a state that will, (of course) right itself in due time, but after the death of many, many beings. I'm pretty nihilistic, but Lynn's detached cynicism is disgusting. She doesn't seem to understand that the beings on the margins of society will suffer far fucking more than those in the centre driving catastrophic climate change (yes, I'm talking about capitalists). Like yeah whoopie! Gaia will never die, but we will. I don't think life is precious, but I think freedom is, and that freedom is the freedom to live or die however I want. In such a way, freedom has to be understood as a network of effects that intersect at both micro- and macro-social levels. It is never individual, but mutually constituted by our environment and our kin (yiff). Lynn seem to understand that on a biological level but not on a political one. She doesn't seem to understand that catastrophic climate change is a tyrannical end determined by the few towards the many. It is the destruction of freedom through the theft of the future.
Her ignorance of politics is most evident in Chapter 2 where she outlines the resistance to her ideas in the 60's-onwards from the scientific community. While she is right that there are dogmatic scientists who cling to their theories as Platonic ideals, she doesn't understand why this is;
and while I appreciate her stress in materialist practices, hers is a materialism of naivety. Universities organised along capitalist principles of competition lead to neurotic dogmatism, because to be scientifically contested is to be economically undermined. Competition becomes a threat to one's material existence. Furthermore, once an institution has gained widespread legitimacy, the critical thought that founded it becomes secondary to its own reproduction. The effect of institutionalised power in a competitive and hierarchical social field is ignorance, arrogance and gate-keeping.
Lynn laments the lack of critical thinking in the scientific community but she fails to understand its material origins. Anyone who's worked at a university will have experienced the threat of departmental cuts from lowered student numbers (leading to wasteful spending in PR campaigns and petty interdepartmental squabbles) and the auditing of teaching staff performances in relation to student grades (leading to simplified lecture content). It's because of such pressures that critical thinking is less and less taught and instead students are taught diagrams, names and dates. The scientific method comes second place to the reified concept, an infobyte that perfectly resembles the capitalist commodity form. Lecturers and students begin to resemble the dead facts they hollowly recite. This is preferable for the university, for critical may lead to the development of not just scientific critique, but also, social critique. Perhaps Lynn should have paid more attention to the counterculture, instead of denigrating it, because such movements can help us build more grassroots and emancipatory scientific and pedagogical frameworks, that nourish life as a living relation and a mutually-constituted freedom.
jacob_wren's review against another edition
5.0
Two short passages from Symbiotic Planet:
*
Life is a planetary level phenomenon and the Earth has been alive for at least 3000 million years. To me the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable - the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal a sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self-delusion. Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves.
*
So far the only way in which we humans prove our dominance is by expansion. We remain brazen, crass, and recent, even as we become more numerous. Our toughness is a delusion. Have we the intelligence and discipline to resist our tendency to grow without limit?
*
Life is a planetary level phenomenon and the Earth has been alive for at least 3000 million years. To me the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable - the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal a sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self-delusion. Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves.
*
So far the only way in which we humans prove our dominance is by expansion. We remain brazen, crass, and recent, even as we become more numerous. Our toughness is a delusion. Have we the intelligence and discipline to resist our tendency to grow without limit?
dracoaestas's review
3.0
The ideas were fantastically interesting and thought-provoking (as with Margulis's last book I read, Microcosmos, which was cowritten with her son Dorion Sagan).
The actual writing style and execution, though, were not great. Repetitive, incohesive structure, sometimes unclear. Margulis is not much of a long-form writer. Still, I was definitely interested enough to read the whole book. The writing wasn't bad, just not great.
The actual writing style and execution, though, were not great. Repetitive, incohesive structure, sometimes unclear. Margulis is not much of a long-form writer. Still, I was definitely interested enough to read the whole book. The writing wasn't bad, just not great.
nickrs's review
4.0
Scattered but illuminating: for its articulation of symbiogenesis and its centrality to life’s development, for Margulis’s passionate microbe-level view of the world, and for its clearing of the air around Gaia.
The memoirish bits, to my mind, actually add a lot, helping locate these concepts amid networks of scientists, discourses, attitudes at a particular moment. She mentions that one thing she valued in her university training was an emphasis on reading the original writings of pivotal researchers alongside the more typical, updated textbook syntheses of their ideas. That’s what we get here, and I think it’s invaluable for understanding late-20th-c biology.
The memoirish bits, to my mind, actually add a lot, helping locate these concepts amid networks of scientists, discourses, attitudes at a particular moment. She mentions that one thing she valued in her university training was an emphasis on reading the original writings of pivotal researchers alongside the more typical, updated textbook syntheses of their ideas. That’s what we get here, and I think it’s invaluable for understanding late-20th-c biology.
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