By Rev. Robert Plaisted

Guest Writer

At her death in 2011, Lynn Margulis was Distinguished Professor of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She had been an Associate Professor at Boston University while I was in seminary there. Sadly, our paths never crossed. It would have been great to have known her personally. She is most famous for formulating the theory of Endosymbiosis, a radical reassessment of the importance of symbiotic relationships in biological evolution.  

Like most groundbreaking theories, endosymbiosis was controversial and widely rejected when she proposed it in 1966. Traditional Darwinian evolution taught that complex life evolves from less-complex life, primarily by competition, with poorly adapted life forms being eliminated, aka “survival of the fittest.” Margulis argued that the primary driver of evolution isn’t competition, but co-operation. Symbiotic, mutually beneficial, relationships among simple life forms like bacteria produce ever more complex cells, leading to more complex life. 

In 1978, 12 years after Margulis theorized it, the evolution of complex cells from simple bacteria was first demonstrated in the laboratory.  During the 1980s, enormous advances in genetic science showed her theory to be valid, and it became widely accepted. Biologist Richard Dawkins wrote in 1995, “I greatly admire Lynn Margulis’s sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy.”

One key conclusion of Margulis’s research is that the more often organisms co-operate, the longer they survive. Species that live by survival of the fittest, don’t survive very long. Here today, extinct tomorrow. Bacteria have lived on the earth over a thousand times longer than humans have. They must be doing something right.

I’ve never been a fan of theories based on competition, especially since I learned that science doesn’t support them. Competing really does kill us; co-operating heals and helps us. During my lifetime, I’ve watched as we human beings marched doggedly along a road which leads only to destruction. How many more stupid, bloody wars like Ukraine do we plan to fight before we end up fighting our last one? My generation has lived its entire lifetime under the nuclear Sword of Damocles. Our star of Bethlehem was the 1945 fireball that irradiated the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The countdown clock on human civilization started ticking that day. So far, we’ve managed to survive just one human lifetime without reducing our civilization to ashes and rubble. How much longer do we expect our luck to hold?

Nothing seems able to shake us out of our stupor and force us to co-operate, rather than kill each other, as our strategy for living together on Earth. How many heaps of butchered bodies, how many bombed-out cities, how many acres of toxic, poisoned cropland, how many square miles of clear-cut forest, how much more damage to Earth’s nurturing ecosystem are we willing to cause before we understand we’re on a one-way road to extinction?

We’ve based our culture primarily on competition, reminded every day that “we’ve got to stay competitive.” That’s madness. It’s a perfect way to ensure that our tenure on Earth will be, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In contrast to that grim forecast, we have the ancient promise from God that “you will live long in the land that I am giving you forever” (Deuteronomy 4:40). We can decide which road we’ll travel, but competing never will help us find our way.

Rev. Robert Plaisted is a retired United Methodist clergyman, formerly of Bridgton, now residing in Bath.