American biologist Lynn Margulis has died. Prolific and determined, Margulis was best known for her development of
Endosymbiotic Theory, the now widely-accepted idea that complex cells began as a combination of simpler, prokaryotic ones, and the
Gaia Hypothesis, which posited the Earth as a type of living organism. Some of her later ideas, including the claim that
HIV is not the cause of AIDS or that caterpillers and butterflies were once separate organisms, received less support, but Endosymbiotic Theory, in the words of Richard Dawkins, remains "one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology."
posted by Tubalcain
on Nov 23, 2011 -
32 comments
Forming (NSFW - cartoon nudity) is a webcomic by
Jesse Moynihan (NSFW) that tells the history of the evolution of man via the machinations of various alien entities whose familiar names (and unfamiliar stories) have been recorded in various religions throughout time.
[more inside]
posted by lyam
on Dec 16, 2010 -
24 comments
At the beginning was the noosphere. The existence of a "sphere of ideas", beyond the "sphere of life" (biosphere) and the "sphere of matter" (geosphere) was apparently first postulated by the pioneering Russian-Ukrainian geochemist
V.I. Vernadsky. Vernadsky thought not only that the biosphere had entirely reshaped the geosphere, but that the burgeoning noosphere of interconnected thought would ultimately change the biosphere just as much.
French jesuit and paleontologist
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin took the concept and
ran with it...(more inside)
posted by Skeptic
on Nov 28, 2006 -
24 comments
We're overdue for a big disaster. "Two years without a harvest? It would probably bust civilisation. People would survive all right. It really would cut us back, and that is the sort of thing nobody really prepares for. It's not some ecological poison or GM foods or nuclear that is going to get us, it is going to be some perfectly ordinary natural event."
Almost enough to make me stock canned goods again.
posted by norm
on Sep 19, 2000 -
0 comments
