Caroline A. Jones

Caroline A. Jones is Professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism section, Department of Architecture, MIT. She studies modern and contemporary art, focusing on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception, and on its interface with science. She has also worked as a curator, recently in three exhibitions at MIT’s List Visual Art Center: Hans Haacke 1967 (2011); Video Trajectories(2007-08); and Sensorium (2006-07). Her exhibitions and/or films have been shown at NY MoMA, SF MoMA, the Hirshhorn DC, and the Hara Museum Tokyo, among other venues. Publications include Machine in the Studio (1996/98), Picturing Science, Producing Art (co-editor, 1998), Sensorium (editor2006), Eyesight Alone (2005/08), Experience (co-editor, 2016), and The Global Work of Art(2016). Caroline is currently researching patterns of occlusion and political contestation in what she calls “the anthropogenic image” of environmental disaster, in collaboration with historian of science Peter Galison.

Essay

Symbiosis

Caroline A. Jones

Symbiosis

Caroline Jones

A beautifully agnostic term in biology when it first appeared, “Symbiosis” came into English from German and French in 1882. The job of this “with-living” coinage? It was needed to calm scientific anxieties over the “vegetable monstrosity” that was the lichen.

Monstrosities are from monstrare—to show. What was suddenly showing? With the naked eye, we could already see the bewildering variety of slow growing lichens. Frilly or flat or sprouting golf-tee shaped “hairs,” these undoubtedly living things spread themselves as patches of dusky green to orange to brown to grey on tree trunks, rocks, or dried-out soil. Their stasis made them seem, surely, some kind of plant; their rootlessness and abilities to live in extreme environments made scientists wonder. In the nineteenth century, lenticular science cracked the mystery. Under ever-improving microscopes, lichens revealed themselves—shockingly—as a tight coupling of two entirely different biological kingdoms: algae (then thought to be some kind of plant) and fungus (claiming all mushrooms). This, then, was the “monster.” Crucial to the scientific proof of their co-dependency was that lichen fungi and lichen algae could be delicately prized apart in the lab and grown separately (albeit with some difficulty). But this symbiotic monster was not like the chimera of Greek myth: a recognizable bull’s head on a manly torso (the Minotaur), a female face and breasts followed by the body of a bird (the Harpy). No, the lichenous chimerical assemblage was thoroughly integrated—scores of chloroplasts were sprinkled throughout the tough, protective thallus of the fungal skin. Lichens’ ability to form ruffled foliose, crustose, and squamulose structures comes from the fungal partner, who can pry nutrients from stone and cellulose and build upward; the sheltered algal bits capture sunlight through the fungal surface, generating sugars and lipids via photosynthesis. The fungus protects the wet-loving algae within its drought-resistant crusts, while each alga tenderly solicits sun and sips rain for energies and fluids to sustain and expand its fungal house. There’s more, much more, in a miniature ecosystem of functional bacteria and virions that adaptively combine in different earth ecosystems to pretty much terraform the planet.

Symbiosis thus begins with the very small, and enlarges to the homeostasis on our living Earth. This essay romps with lichens and placentas and organelles, but ultimately ends up at this planetary scale. Here, the biologist Lynn Margulis and the analytic chemist and inventor James Lovelock offered the ultimate symbiosis theory: Earth was itself a symbiotically maintained superorganism.

But first, linger with the rock-and-wood-munching lichens. The evidently mutualistic relations of these entities were difficult for science to accept. Even before the term, scientists were yoking lichen lifestyles to odious human metaphors of “masters” and “slaves,” as in a 1869 description from Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener in his theorizing of a “dual hypothesis” of fung-algal partnering. The anthropomorphic analogy was so annoying to lichenologist Albert Bernhard Frank that it propelled him to coin the indispensable value-neutral word, Symbiotismus. Implicitly, Frank was chastising the then-young science of biology for being emotional, asking: can we just agree that these things are living together, without value judgments? Symbiosis was thus the place holder for an agnostic encounter of entities, under the aegis of objectivity. But that very neutrality was surrounded by a tumultuous modern world of colonizing, enslaving, and imperial forces. Symbiosis was quietly defiant in offering a radically different world order (in politics, in science, in philosophy of life) — a wholly different conceptualization of what life does, and could be.

Of course, biologists strove for more specificity about precisely what relationships pertained in varieties of organisms, when they found species living together. Whether they were to be revealed as parasites or commensals (messmates at a shared food source), obligate or serendipitous, the terms of any particular symbiosis awaited further analysis. As the term was gradually adopted in science (with the steepest climb between 1975-85), it turned out that lichens were only the first composite organisms to prove the existence of cross-species relationships that become constitutive of the entity in question. That bump in usage, and the much more widespread acceptance of symbiosis as existing everywhere and over long timespans, followed the tireless advocacy of Margulis, who put it all together in the late 1960s to forward endosymbiosis as the very driver of speciation on an evolutionary scale. With that little prefix signifying “inside,” Margulis pushed for yet another mental shift in the symbiotic worldview.

Margulis’s theory of endosymbiosis—an internalized, intracellular “with-living”—confronted Neo-Darwinian theories of competition and predation directly, contesting narratives that positioned aggression as the main driver of evolution (“nature red in tooth and claw,” “survival of the fittest”). On the contrary, more than a century after its conceptualization, symbiosis was, Margulis insisted, mostly a matter of mutually advantageous adaptation. This was the backbone of Margulis’s revolutionary synthesis of the scientific findings; collaboration and incorporation, features of symbiosis, were the main creators of new species. Let us retool the imperialists, and pronounce: Survival of the most symbiotically interdependent and flexibly adaptive. The “endo” was Margulis’s hard-won contribution, signifying the primordial act of engulfment by amoeboid actions that lay at the very origin of multicellular “eukaryotic” life, in her once-controversial theory. (“Eu” for good, “karyote” for seed – the good seeds that constitute our narcissistic species and all other complex multicellular organisms). Engulfment, or incorporation via incomplete digestion, or targeted entry by virions—all these active, “with-living” combinatorial mechanisms allowed creatures to fuse partially or fully with other creatures. One + One = another different One. Margulis finally won the respect of reductive micro-biology when genomics did prove that contemporary nucleated cells have organelles that derive from Archaea that once entered other Archaea, since archaeal DNA is found alive and well inside our mitochondria and in plant chloroplasts.

Although symbiosis was invented to hold off anthropomorphic analogies in science, there was no way to control the metaphoric creep of the concept into everyday language. (Consider all the businesses today touting the “nearly bottomless force of adaptability known as symbiosis.”) Such usage is perhaps overdetermined, even foreshadowed by the fact that an earlier, Latin-wielding age had borrowed “symbiosis” from that language to describe collaborative human economies. Since the biological meaning confounded the very category of the “individual,” symbiosis theory immediately attracted fire-brand socialists to foment political lessons from this natural evidence of mutual aid. Enter Russian political theorist, naturalist, and polymath Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). Writing Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution in 1902, he took up the new science of symbiosis as evidence for socialist collaboration as a law of nature. In parallel, swift political opposition to the evidence of symbiosis emerged from British philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who was the one touting “survival of the fittest” as he invented “Social Darwinism,” calling out symbiosis as “communistic” theory.

Meanwhile, lichens persisted. Algae-fungi symbionts parade across the planet, conducting their multicolor terraforming in reciprocity where little else can thrive. Crumbling mountains, beginning the work of breaking down trees right on healthy bark, finding a foothold in deserts and arctic tundra and even inside solid rock (growing “endolithically,” between the grains), lichens inhabit a hefty part of the Earth’s crust. Lichenous symbionts are ready to live in places where neither the alga nor the fungus can function alone. (Indeed, they only couple themselves into a lichen when exigent circumstances demand it—as in the Reindeer Lichen, Cladonia spp., which thrives on nutrient-poor surfaces in the windy Arctic tundra.)

Margulis, too, persisted. Echoing her coinage of endosymbiosis, we might want to call lichens exosymbionts. They remain separable agents, that fungus and that alga; they come together in urgency within environments that challenge other forms of life. Yet the terraforming by endosymbionts is even more extravagant and ancient, as Margulis realized. If lichens started coming together for their with-living 250 million years ago, it was at least 2.7 billion years ago that eukaryotes emerged from several acts of endosymbiosis—incorporation of symbionts within. These newly enhanced critters churned out enough waste gas—oxygen—that they produced a planetary extinction cataclysm 2.4 billion years ago: the Great Oxygenation Event. Driving ever more mergings, speciation, and evolutionary criss-crossing, atmospheric oxygenation ultimately facilitated our species’ emergence and efflorescence in the Holocene billions of years later. The endosymbiotic revolution began after an alpha-proteobacterium (a speculative name for the family line from which such an archaic single-celled bacterium must have evolved) took up residence in an engulfing, amoeboid host cell (the thought is this may have been a rare event, yet it was so evolutionarily powerful that present-day chloroplasts and mitochondria dominate planetary life-forms). But Margulis saw this process happening more than once, between a variety of biological entities and at different times over the span of planetary life. She offered “Serial Endosymbiosis Theory” or SET to account for the wild proliferation and increasing complexity of species over time. Confirmed by contemporary genomics, we know that aerobic, oxygen-tolerating bacteria yielded the mitochondria, and photosynthesizing cyanobacteria yielded the chloroplasts.

Others have joined Margulisean speculations that other organelles present in current life forms did not emerge de novo, but were also the results of endosymbiosis. Nobel prize-winner Christian de Duve, who separated cellular micro-organelles in the 1940s with little more than a blender (and no microscope!) forwarded the idea that the entities he had discovered, eukaryotic organelles named peroxisomes, may have been the first endosymbionts, driven inside a larger cell by the increasing amount of atmospheric oxygen characteristic of that Great Oxygenation Event. (Margulis would not have agreed, since she held that the oxygenation was itself a product of the newly-minted eukaryotes, much preceding peroxisomes.) Peroxisomes produce the enzymes eventually responsible for the oxidation of long-chain fatty acids in the cell. Although termed “peroxisomes” in mammalian cells, DeDuve and others observed that these organelles are members of a large family of evolutionarily related entities that show up in many different organisms, including plants and protozoa, where they’ve been differently named glyoxysomes and glycosomes—all of them enabling the living assemblage to process reactive oxygen for the benefit of the cell they inhabit. Like the mitochondria, they generate energy from metabolites available inside and around the cells—they are little fuel engines that help burn available oxygen. Symbionts yield even environmental relations, such as humans burning oxygen and breathing out CO2, and plants taking in CO2 and respiring out oxygen.

The crazy dance of endosymbionts—aerobes diving into cells to help burn oxygen, anaerobes going in too, precisely to hide from this same toxic reagent—and the regular environmental symbiosis of one entity’s exhalation becoming another entity’s life-enabling air, had extraordinary planetary effects as life really got going. The planet had started as a volcanic fire pit, barren as hell (hence the name, Hadean Eon.) Life, once it showed up, became a force for gentling this habitus. After the oxygen metabolization trick was solved and multicellularity proliferated during the Ordovician period (~470 million years ago), the first primitive plants slimed their way out of the ocean, followed by invertebrates (arthropods) around 430 million years ago. As science writer Ferris Jabr puts it: “Life breathed oxygen into the atmosphere, dyed the sky blue, concocted the modern oceans, and converted barren crust into fertile soil [becoming] a critical component of our planet’s capacity to regulate its climate and maintain balance.” As organelles came under scientific scrutiny and genomic analysis, Margulis was tireless in taking up such real-time evidence for living symbiosis, insisting on bringing processes evident in living cells into the deep time of our evolutionary past. Centuries of biologists have noticed how mitochondria divide on a different schedule than the cell they are housed in: they’re still following some archaic circadian rhythm set by the planet from an earlier epoch. Margulis wasn’t the first to speculate that mitochondria looked a bit like free-floating cyanobacteria (now subdivided into the class of Alpha-proteobacteria). She followed Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschkowski (who first published on endosymbiosis in 1905 and speculated chloroplasts were ancient cyanobacteria) and took many lessons from American biologist Ivan Wallin (who extended the idea of an endosymbiotic origin to mitochondria in the 1920s). But since both of these precursors had been largely ignored, she took up the gauntlet to create a comprehensive and compelling theory of evolution by pulling all the earlier science together. Based on an evident process of incorporation of Archaeal bacteria into the engulfing cells of what would become animal, plant, and fungal kingdoms, she pointed out that serial acts of endosymbiosis were the main drivers of speciation—without ever displacing the bacteria that, after all, still cover the planet.

Surrounded by the arrogant alpha scientists of Neo-Darwinian microbiology, Margulis was extraordinarily tenacious (her critics called her “stubborn and dogmatic”). She kept plumping for symbiosis theory in a world in which the Selfish Gene and its Nobelist male champions held sway. The “central dogma” (as Francis Crick himself called it)—that DNA makes RNA makes Protein—ruled the church of biology, under the captaincy of an authoritative Gene. Yet amazingly, the liturgy began to unravel a bit under the spooling ticker tape of genomics. “Junk DNA” (not useful for coding proteins and thought to be an evolutionary “byproduct”) turned out to govern gene expression; viral bits were showing up, and those Archaeal DNA fragments were right there waiting for us inside the mitochondria and chloroplasts to prove Margulis right.

Eventually, Margulis’s countless papers, textbooks, and popular writing had impact, retooling conventional understandings of evolution and redrawing Darwin’s arboreal “tree of life” into a divinely reticulated meshwork. By 1999, evolutionary and molecular biologist W. Ford Doolittle was willing to announce in Science that the arboreal “consensus” model was all wrong—the more accurate historical picture would be diagrammed as a reticulated net. Genes migrating into organismic lines across species through endosymbiosis produced a radically tangled model of evolution. No longer a simple branching tree, the networked bramble features horizontal transfers of genes from hosts to symbionts, and vice versa. Perhaps the adoption of the translocating tool of CRISPR (a palindromic sequence of codons taken from an archaeal bacterium and used in all current-day genetic engineering) constitutes pragmatic proof of the acceptance of endosymbiosis as an engine of combinatorial newness in how life is arranged. If you use bacterial DNA to force new functions into multicellular organisms, you are an engineer of endosymbiosis (albeit industrially and instrumentally produced).

Endosymbiosis is so effective in its seamless mergings it is often hard to recognize in the bodies that benefit, and only genomics reveals the trace of sym-shenanigans. Just to dramatize the potential for evolutionary leaps in these rhizomatic crossings, consider the example of the placenta. Viruses have the capacity to break cell walls—a capacity called lysing. Such a genetic trick came in handy when species of small egg-laying animals mutated through a lysing virus that jumped into their genomes roughly 130 million years ago. The virus turned them into mammals. That is, the lysing capacity of the virion, inherited as a capacity within the gamete, contributed instrumentally to one of the defining organs of a new species: the placental mammal was born. The placenta is a structure built by a fertilized blastula that deploys the lysing agent to disguise its own alien genetic material from the parent’s vigilant immune system. By extruding a mass of fused cells that attach themselves to a uterine (or other ectopic) surface (the placenta), it can calmly recruit blood vessels from that host to feed itself, and begin pumping the parent with breast-altering hormones. No longer possessing defining cell walls, the placenta and what it shields go without being recognized by the pregnant parent’s protective T cells. Other phage cells are also disarmed by the unrecognizable mass (called syncytial, or “together-cells”). The lysogenic viral codons were crucial to the placental capacity to gestate within a body, replacing the vulnerable, externalized egg.

Symbiosis was clearly integral to all kinds of life processes and their evolution. Margulis suspected that the exuberance and ubiquity of symbiosis had vast implications, but she needed help in getting to the planetary scale. She began to correspond with analytic chemist James Lovelock in the 1970s, reaching out to him to see if he could support and inform her growing interest in the biological origins of the atmosphere. Why Lovelock? Although he knew about biology only through his excruciating specialty in cryogenics (frozen hamsters, artfully revived), he was much more famous for having pioneered precise methods of atmospheric gas chromatography. By the time Margulis wrote to him, he was already consulting with NASA on equipping some of their lunar modules to probe gas on exoplanets. Lovelock responded to Margulis’s invitation to collaborate, and by 1975 the two of them burst into the counter-culture with “The Gaia Hypothesis” in Co-Evolution Quarterly. An offset-printed spur of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue, the CEQ appeared on tan paper and featured Margulis & Lovelock’s article on the cover, illustrating it with two images of Earth’s atmosphere—one an Edenic mix of volatiles made by life forms (spores and microbiota floating around in a rich atmospheric soup), contrasted to a stark desert of volcanic crustal forms, baking under a thin layer of gases devoid of life.

“The Atmosphere as Circulatory System of the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis” featured Margulis as first author, but Lovelock was the far more famous one. She needed him to legitimate her leap from microbiology to the climate. In turn, Lovelock may have appreciated how Margulis could propel him slightly away from his association with the petrochemical industry (which had funded his work on atmospheric carbon loading as a harmless or even beneficent part of their industry) and—through her former husband Carl Sagan —she could introduce him to the hippies and environmentalists of the 1970s counterculture, such as Brand. (These communities would echo in those who revived Lovelock assiduously later on, in the time nominated as the Anthropocene). Margulis and Lovelock’s Gaia essay “treats the anomalous Earth atmosphere as an artifact of life and comprehends the planet itself as a single life. The two old puzzles—1) How does the bizarre Earth atmosphere maintain itself? and 2) How does fragile Earth life maintain itself?—solve each other.” The first question is Lovelockian, the second, Margulisean.

Lovelock was coolly uninterested in symbiosis as a concept favoring cooperation among organisms and mitigating human greed; for him, what mattered was that human tinkering with the atmosphere would be cured by planetary homeostasis. We hear Lovelock in Stewart Brand’s preamble to the Gaia essay: “thanks to Gaia, our fears of pollution-extermination are unfounded.” Margulis’s contribution to the essay was to insist, for her part, on the relative unimportance of humans and other animals or even plants in the planetary cycling of atmospheric gases. What mattered to her, always, was microbial life. We hear her in this observation: “It is mainly the prokaryote microorganisms that are involved in gas exchange; the rapidly growing and dividing masters of the microbiological world that make up in chemical complexity and metabolic virtuosity what they lack in advanced morphology.”While Lovelock would go on to fantasize about an engineer’s techno-utopia in Novacene (2019), Margulis had positioned herself cautiously in relation to the Gaia hypothesis with her 1998 Symbiotic Planet:

… thinking about symbiosis is itself a symbiotic phenomenon. The oxygen we breathe enters the brain from our bloodstream and is incessantly metabolized by the mitochondria that we know are former respiring bacteria….we remain symbiotic beings on a symbiotic planet.

Concerned as she was in CEQ with how “man-the-farmer and man-the-engineer are reducing the total variety of responses” available to the planetary system, she would find in symbiosis a link to the adaptability and flexibility of life, in distinction to the monocultural breeders, heedless engineers, and waste-strewing types.

Symbiosis is that-which-is.

Footnotes

This sets aside earlier uses in English texts, when “symbiosis” appeared as a straightforward borrowing from the Latin in economic discourse going back to 1622 (for which see n.5). Here, “with-living” meant “social congress” of various types in human societies, a sense lost when the biological term was adopted around 1882 from the coinage (as Symbiotismus) by German Albert Bernard Frank (1877), echoed and popularized by Frenchman Anton de Bary as “symbiosis” in 1878. See Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Oxford English Dictionary, “Symbiosis,” https://www.oed.com/dictionary/symbiosis_n?tl=true Accessed June 18, 2024. “Vegetable monstrosities” were so named by Albert Schneider in his Textbook of Lichenology (Lancaster, PA: Willard N. Clute, 1897): 15-17.
“Foliose" designates the leaf-like or lobed varieties; "crustose" the tightly attached, crusty types; "squamulose" those that are scaly. Others are "fruticose" (fruiting bodies that look like hairs, or the tubes ending in cups like golf tees), "leprose" (powdery), or rarely, gelatinous, which is self-explanatory.
Mycologist Merlin Sheldrake points to lichening ecosystems as dynamic, ever-shifting assemblages responding to and producing ecosystems from a microbial to a terraforming scale. See Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (New York NY: Random House, 2020). Not pursued in the present essay is the fact that many fungi sporulate on their own, then wait for an alga to find the spore before becoming lichens, some of which then jettison the alga when sporulating. Lichenologists are still trying to figure all this out.
Simon Schwendener was the first to come up with the “dual hypothesis” (algae + fungus) for the lichening pair (1869), for which see Sapp (1994) chapter 1, and Sheldrake (2020), 72.
Simon Schwendener was the first to come up with the “dual hypothesis” (algae + fungus) for the lichening pair (1869), for which see Sapp (1994) chapter 1, and Sheldrake (2020): 72. For Albert Bernhard Frank’s coinage of symbiosis as biological with-living, see Albert Bernhard Frank, "Über die biologischen Verkältnisse des Thallus einiger Krustflechten," Beiträge zur Biologie der Pflanzen 2, no. 2 (1876): 123-200.The title translated is “On the biological relationships of the thallus of some crustose lichens,” in which the word “Symbiotismus” appears as a corrective, value-free neologism on p.195.
Nature red in tooth and claw” is a phrase from Alfred Tennyson’s “dinosaur” canto in the memorial poem for “A.H.H.” written in 1849. The phrase was later popularized by aggressive promoters of Darwin’s evolutionary theory (such as Herbert Spencer, Thomas H. Huxley, and Charles Lyell). These “bulldogs” for Darwin pushed evolutionary theory into social Darwinist practice, now figured as socio-biology, often reeking of colonialism, racism, and sexism. "Neo-Darwinism" took this further in the 1960s as genomics got going, arguing that social destinies (poverty, criminality, sexual "deviance") were determined by maladaptive genes.
For a recent exploration of the different mechanisms by which this "Symbiogenesis" may have happened billions of years ago on Earth, see Dave Speijer, Michael Hammond, and Julius Lukeš, “Comparing Early Eukaryotic Integration of Mitochondria and Chloroplasts in the Light of Internal ROS Challenges: Timing Is of the Essence,” mBio 11, no. 3 (2020): e00955-20. https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.00955-20 The authors clearly distinguish their position as emphasizing mutualism rather than antagonism, placing themselves in the discursive lineage of "endosymbiosis," viz., "We use 'symbiogenic' [...] in order to stress the fact that many eukaryotic characteristics seem to have been the direct result of mutual adaptations."
Rafe Sagarin, “To Overcome Your Company’s Limits, Look to Symbiosis,” Harvard Business Review, June 25, 2013. https://hbr.org/2013/06/to-overcome-your-companys-limits-look-to Accessed June 25, 2024.
“To study and inuent things profitable for the publique Symbiosis.” Edward Misselden, Free Trade; or the meanes to make trade florish (London, 1622), 60, as cited in the Oxford English Dictionary online. Accessed June 23, 2024.
Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York NY: McClure Phillips & Co., 1902). Spencer, an economist, took up Darwin’s theories for his own purposes in his 1864 book, Principles of Biology. See also the polemic against selfish genes and dna “central dogma” in Caroline A. Jones, “Symbiontics: A Polemic for Our Time,” the framing essay in Jones, Natalie Bell, and Selby Nimrod, eds., Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere (Cambridge MA: MIT List Visual Art Center and MIT Press, 2022), 13-49.
During what is called the Paleoproterozoic era, 2.4 billion years ago, ocean cyanobacteria evolved and flourished, pumping their oxygen waste into the Earth's atmosphere and shallow seas. This tipping point took millions of years, but then effectuated the massive extinction event once the concentration of free oxygen soared. Anaerobic life-forms survived by diving deep, but in the meanwhile there were multiple adaptations favoring the metabolization of oxygen—proliferating endosymbionts as anaerobes were shielded within other organisms able to metabolize oxygen itself.
Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: How our Planet Came to Life (New York NY: Penguin Random House, June 2024) (promotional copy).
W. Ford Doolittle, “Phylogenetic Classification and the Universal Tree,” Science 284 (1999): 2124-2128 (1999).
See Leah Aronowsky, “Gas Guzzling Gaia, or: A Prehistory of Climate Change Denialism,” Critical Inquiry 47, no. 2 (2021): 306–27. https://doi.org/10.1086/712129. Aronowsky reviews how Lovelock’s funding from the petroleum industry coddled the data on global warming from fossil-fuel carbon loads in the atmosphere as “curable” by the active planet. For the Margulis-Lovelock relationship as seen through their copious correspondence, see Bruce Clarke and Sébastien Dutreuil, eds., Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022). Lovelock “owned” the Gaia hypothesis in ways Margulis never could. He was featured centrally by Bruno Latour in Zones of Conflict, Latour’s last major exhibition and publication at Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM Karlsruhe). Only at the last minute did the exhibition curators incorporate a compensatory “Margulis unit” curated by Bruce Clark.
CoEvolutionary Quarterly (Summer 1978): 31.
CoEvolutionary Quarterly (Summer 1978): 31.
CoEvolutionary Quarterly (Summer 1978): 39.
James Lovelock, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2019). Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet [A New Look at Evolution] (New York NY: Basic Books, 1998)
Margulis, Symbiotic Planet (1998): 49.
CoEvolutionary Quarterly (Summer 1978): 32.