Lynn Margulis

Lynn Margulis

Lynn Margulis (born Lynn Petra Alexander; March 5, 1938 – December 22, 2011) was an American evolutionary biologist, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has said that "Lynn Margulis's name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution." In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei – an event Ernst Mayr called "perhaps the most important and dramatic event in the history of life" – by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Lynn Margulis has received more than 1,221,051 page views. Her biography is available in 42 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 41 in 2019). Lynn Margulis is the 70th most popular biologist (up from 76th in 2019), the 858th most popular biography from United States (up from 908th in 2019) and the 11th most popular American Biologist.

Lynn Margulis is most famous for her work in helping to develop the theory of symbiogenesis, which states that the organelles in cells are actually the descendants of bacteria that were engulfed by a cell and became symbiotic with it.