Lynn Margulis (1938–2011)

Margulis strives in this short book to connect the idea of Gaia with her symbiotic theory of evolution and does so quite convincingly to my mind. I appreciate her scientific explication of the Gaia Hypothesis, as opposed to the widespread, pop-spirituality one of a personified uber-organism. In Margulis's words, "Gaia itself is not an organism directly selected among many. It is an emergent property of interaction among organisms, the spherical planet on which they reside, and an energy source, the sun."… (more)

Mind, Life and Universe affords all the pleasures as well as the dissatisfactions of a short-format TV program(in fact, the 36 interviews with distinguished scientists presented here are excerpted from interviews conducted by Eduardo Ponset for Spanish television). The reader is titillated by the taste of something good, but never quite makes it to the real meal. That said, an extensive supplementary reading list follows the interviews, to encourage readers to read on. The interviews are grouped under 4 headings (each with sub-headings) entitled "People Primates," "Animal Body-Mind," "Life on an Animate Planet," and "Toward the Invisible." The interviewees are all currently active and influential in their respective fields: Psychology, Neuroscience, Zoology, Psychobiology, Ethology, Entomology, Evolutionary Biology, Cognitive Studies, Human Genetics, Mechanics, Medicine, Human Biology, Paleontology, Microbiology, and Physics.
Among the interviewees are Jane Goodall, Edward O. Wilson, Oliver Sacks, Diana Deutsch, William Haseltine, James E. Lovelock, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Dorion Sagan, Eugene Chudnovsky and Lisa Randall. Interestingly, although the book is edited by evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, only three female scientists are included. And, despite characterization of the world of scientific research and exploration as transnational and unbounded, the male scientists are all North Americans or Europeans. This last may be simply a function of access and/or language, but I still find it disappointing.
Read this collection like a magazine and it won't disappoint. At a minimum, it points in some interesting directions.




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