What Is Life? - Review - book reviews

WHAT IS LIFE? Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan. 1995; 207 pp. $40. Simon 8, Schuster.

Whatever biology we learned in grade school is deeply outdated. Even the familiar story of photosynthesis is a new story of microbial symbiosis. Margulis's great work has been to shift our whole understanding of life toward microbes and toward symbiotic creation. It was "bacterial geniuses" who symbiotically generated the four other kingdoms (protoctists, fungi, animals, and plants). They also created Earth's oxygen, thrive in the extremest environments, run 15,000-rpm rotary motors, and comprise in effect one enormous species making up most of the Earth's real variety and metabolism.

I think it's time for business and economic metaphors to shift from species-bound evolution and pond-and-forest ecology to the far more dynamic processes of Margulis's microbial soup, with its fast cycling (half-hour reproduction), explosive diversity, constant and wanton trait exchange, and embrace-anything symbiotic strategies.

"Bacteria have already mastered nanotechnology; already miniaturized, they have control of specific molecules about which human engineers dream. Far more complex than any computer or robot, the common bacterium perceives and swims toward its food. Choosing and approaching destinations, bacteria propel themselves by flagella, corkscrew-shaped spinning protein filaments attached to living motors in the membranes of their cells. Complete with rings, tiny bearings, and rotors, they are called "proton motors" and spin at about 15,000 rpm.

"Imagine that in a coffee house you brush up against a guy with green hair. In so doing, you acquire that part of his genetic code, along with perhaps a few more novel items. Not only can you now transmit the gene for green hair to your children, but you yourself leave the coffee shop with green hair. Bacteria indulge in this sort of casual quick-gene acquisition all the time.

"Life can evolve suddenly, by jumps, when separate parties unite. Interkingdom alliances between fungi and algae produced lichens; a similar alliance may have been crucial to the development of the first forests. Root growths called mycorrhizae result from the dual growth of fungi and plants.

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