Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution [Paperback]

Lynn Margulis is one of the most successful synthetic thinkers in modern biology. This collection of her work, enhanced by essays co-authored with Dorion Sagan, is a welcome introduction to the full breadth of her many contributions. EDWARD O. WILSON, AUTHOR OF THE DIVERSITY OF LIFE An important contribution to the history of the 20th century. Read it and you will taste the flavor of real science. JAMES LOVELOCK, AUTHOR OF GAIA: A NEW LOOK AT LIFE ON EARTH Truly inspirational and of fundamental importance. This thoughtful series of essays on some of the largest questions concerning the nature of life on earth deserves careful study. PETER RAVEN, MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDENThis enticing collection is as devoted to the profound power of figures of speech as any oration of old Hellas. Metaphor reigns as we encounter the identification of our Earth as a Single, integrative organism, a tale told in image and passion. The discoveries and conjectures upon which this grand view rest are here as well. I have enjoyed these two dozen pieces hugely. No family tree of animal life but must somewhere disclose a cousinly infolding. We are compact of life past, and the looped handing down is more complex than the Mendel-Morgan dance of chromosomes and genes. That dance is essential, certainly, but it is the vital editing of an epic and many-rooted work, a book more like the Bible than like one great artists Remembrance of Things Past. We follow a few old shelves of bound DNA, not just a single book. Our major biochemical package for oxidative metabolism was de? scribed in a small DNA manual, somehow engulfed to become an or? ganelle within a lucky ancient ancestral anaerobe, and passed ever since viii FOREWORD from mother to offspring outside of the chromosome shuffie. The sperm do carry half the compact genetic message of the human DNA, but they are too small to transfer this equally essential symbiotic one that comes down from the mothers, within roomy egg after roomy egg.I Memoló-