Throughout her prolific and distinguished career, biologist Lynn Margulis made several groundbreaking contributions to science that we take for granted as common knowledge today. For example, she championed James E. Lovelock’s “Gaia concept,” which posited that the Earth self-regulates to maintain conditions for life.

But by far, her most notable theory was symbiogenesis. While it was first written off as “strange” and “aesthetically pleasing” but “not compelling,” it would ultimately prevail, and completely rewrite how we viewed the origin of life itself.

The paper that changed everything

In the late 1960s, Margulis wrote a paper titled “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells,” that was quite avant-garde. InThroughout her prolific and distinguished career, biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) made several groundbreaking contributions to science that we take for granted as common knowledge today. For example, she helped develop James E. Lovelock’s “Gaia concept,” which posited that Earth’s living and nonliving systems form a self-regulating system that maintains conditions for life.

But by far, her most notable theory was symbiogenesis. While it met plenty of skepticism, including a 1972 Science paper that called the symbiotic theory “aesthetically pleasing” but “not compelling,” it would ultimately prevail, and completely rewrite how we viewed the origin of life itself.

The paper that changed everything

In 1967, Margulis, then publishing under the name Lynn Sagan, wrote a paper titled “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells,” that was quite avant-garde. In it, she proposed a theory: that life evolved through organisms merging together to become inseparable.

In essence, she argued that cooperation, not just competition,........

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