"I will never understand this society
First they try to murder me, then they lie to me
Product of a dyin' breed, all my homies tryin' weed
Now the little babies crazed, raised off Hennessy"
First they try to murder me, then they lie to me
Product of a dyin' breed, all my homies tryin' weed
Now the little babies crazed, raised off Hennessy"
2Pac - Staring Through My Rear View
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It occurs to me that mentioning Lynn Margulis in a fantasy TBS faction blurb might've seemed like a non-sequitur to most people. (I get very socially insightful like that sometimes after committing a Rain Man moment.) Or that most did not mark her name during bio class.
During the nineties and until the mid-2000s she was everyone's praised and laureated science baby. Partly this was due to the usual feminist propaganda promoting any woman whatsoever as combating the evil of male existence. But her legitimate claim to fame promoting* the endosymbiotic theory for the origin of eukaryotic cells (read: your cells) has remained uncontested, and makes a fascinating bit of evolutionary history explaining a major step in how all multicellular life even became possible. And the topic found much more widespread applications after that. I did think it a bit ludicrous when doing a semester project around 2010 on freshwater ciliates that it was harder to find papers on algal symbionts from the preceding years which did not name-drop Margulis as last or next-to-last author for celebrity appeal. (Which probably means she contributed a grand total of one phone conversation; maybe fast-tracked a grant.) For a topic closer to the current news cycle, the massive coral die-offs, the worst of which was just last year, you might remember also involve endosymbionts and their loss.
But then, as such things do, the fame went to her head and she continued pushing her pet theory to absurd lengths, insisting that symbiosis and not natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, which is where my fantasy shadow-wolves' banter took a swipe. It's just too easy to demonstrate that symbiosis serves as a competitive advantage within the framework of natural selection (two teaming against various third parties) and mechanisms like parasitic reduction in complexity of genome and function take the wind out of the more hippie-friendly kumbaya view of cooperation above all. But I digress. Margulis went to fringier fringes by promoting the Gaia Hypothesis (that the whole damn planet is a gigantic superorganism) which you might remember made its way not only into SciFi (e.g. the Pandora books) but into video games in the nineties with titles like Sim Earth and Alpha Centauri. Though I absolutely love it as a classic Big Think, even its core claim that the Earth maintains homeostasis had been readily demonstrated by the early 2000s to have far more arguments against it than for.
But none of that quite killed Margulis' star power, until she threw in with the 9/11 Truth movement claiming the World Trade Center was demolished by the U.S. government. After which her name was quietly dropped from polite conversation.
Umm... Why?
How does her belief in a ludicrous (and quite importantly, unrelated) conspiracy theory undo her work on one of the most important evolutionary topics?
This happened near or even shortly before the start of what we now call cancel culture, and biology (like all sciences) has other examples whose names' mere mention is now met with awkward, embarrassed silence despite their previously acknowledged accomplishments. Robert Trivers proudly took money from Jeffrey Epstein because Epstein didn't waste his time to make him debase himself and beg and scrape for every dime like grant committees do. "In order to get paid, forced to make crack sales." Julian Huxley was a leading eugenicist and humanist at the same time. Hell, Konrad Lorenz was a freakin' Nazi! Not neo-, not sympathizing or leaning, but full-bore original flavor Nazi. Sometimes they have shameful youths, sometimes they go a bit loopy in their old age, sometimes they just don't give a shit about wider society's morality except to play along just enough to follow their actual interests. There's a decent chance by the way that your surgeon might be a sociopath who enjoys cutting people up and has merely found a socially acceptable (and highly lucrative) way to do so. Do you want your appendix crammed back in, knowing that?
I find Margulis' example particularly informative for just when she began to be unpersoned. Everyone had known she held fringe interests for decades, but didn't mind so long as they could be spun into convenient leftist academic personal politics. Her balls-to-the-wall promotion of symbiosis as the be-all biological force was melded with feminist propaganda of supposedly higher-minded female cooperation as opposed to masculine head-butting competitiveness i.e. natural selection. The Gaia Hypothesis, obviously enough, is total hippie catnip. So it was all a case of oh, hah-hah, you know that Lynnie, she can be a nutty ol' gal sometimes, but she's still one of ours, one of us chickens... until the World Trade Center thing. Whatever its actual demographics 9/11 Truthism was fundamentally viewed as the domain of crazy gun-toting conspiracy uncles, as right-wing and masculine. Thus, though they would not admit to prioritizing this objectively minor detail of her views, academics gradually stopped bringing her up in conversation, got to shortening her mention in texts as footnote to endosymbiosis itself, where they had previously gone great lengths to voice admiration or beg her for a byline name drop.
But it was great while it lasted, wasn't it, glorifying her for putting men in their place, wasn't it? Wasn't it?
Look, this is not an issue with one idol, or with idolatry in general, or with academia alone. If anything, conservatives are far, far guiltier of getting their panties in a bunch over some public figure voicing the slightest support of environmentalism or socialism or heavens forfend, atheism! And, just like social justice claptrap, it ends up coloring those institutions in which conservative viewpoints prevail. If you think it's hard finding right-wing scientists, try left-wing bankers! Not a lotta hippies preaching up in the stock market temples. Moneyed, religious, meat-and-potatoes kinder/kuche/kirche culture's been cancelling speakers all throughout history. Usually by far more violent means than Hollywood and universities employ.
"True that
Only one life to lead, a fast life of greed
Criminally addicted, infested since a seed"
Criminally addicted, infested since a seed"
But in particular the image of the milquetoast, deferential nerd scientist has never held up any better than the "mad" scientist stereotype at its antipode. Reality is weirder than our mundane monkey intuition, and those minds considering the weirdness of the natural world, from amino acids to quasars, will end up holding some weird attitudes, some quaint, some harmful, some intriguing, others flat-out insane. "Outcasts, left far and few like southpaws" Deal with it. If you had ever held any hope for human progress, it would have had to entail the mental fortitude to live with uncomfortable details, to admire a person for something you agree with while at the same time admitting a point of disagreement, and not allowing either to erase the other. If I can live with her feminist crap, you can live with the false flag operation nonsense.
Those thoughts can coexist in your skull.
Call it memetic symbiosis.
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* Not inventing; it had been proposed since the early 20th century years of the modern synthesis of biological thought but was ignored until molecular biology demonstrated ribosomal disparities and other confirming evidence.
