Acquiring Genomes: A Theory Of The Origins Of Species [Hardcover]

Lynn Margulis (Author), Dorion Sagan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 18, 2002

In this groundbreaking book, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan present an answer to one of the enduring mysteries of evolution--the source of inherited variation that gives rise to new species. Random genetic mutation, long believed to be the main source of variation, is only a marginal factor. As the authors demonstrate in this book, the more important source of speciation, by far, is the acquisition of new genomes by symbiotic merger. The result of thirty years of delving into a vast, mostly arcane literature, this is the first book to go beyond--and reveal the severe limitations of--the "Modern Synthesis" that has dominated evolutionary biology for almost three generations. Lynn Margulis, whom E. O. Wilson called "one of the most successful synthetic thinkers in modern biology," and her co-author Dorion Sagan have written a comprehensive and scientifically supported presentation of a theory that directly challenges the assumptions we hold about the variety of the living world.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

A challenger of the orthodox "neo-Darwinist" interpretation of evolution, microbiologist Margulis has made her professional mark touting an alternative: symbiogenesis. She and coauthor (and son) Sagan have presented their ideas in earlier popular works (What Is Life?, 1995), but never as vigorously as in this volume. Essentially, the debate between neo-Darwinists and Margulis hinges on the definition of a species, and the manner in which a new one appears. To Margulis and Sagan, the neo-Darwinist model, which asserts random gene mutation as the source of inherited variations, is "wildly overemphasized," and to support their view, they delve deeply into the world of microbes. They detail the anatomy of cells with and without nuclei, positing a process of genome ingestion that creates a new species. Surprisingly, the upshot of Margulis' theories is the rehabilitation of Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, whose theory that supposedly acquired traits are hereditary has been ridiculed for 150 years. Polemical and provocative, Margulis and Sagan's work should set many to thinking that evolution has not yet been completely figured out. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"One of the most stimulating and provocative books that I have read for a long while." -- Nature

"Polemical and provocative." -- Booklist --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1st edition (June 18, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465043917
• ISBN-13: 978-0465043910
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #738,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

75 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Radical New View of Evolution, January 6, 2003

By 

Robert Adler "science writer & author" (Santa Rosa, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Acquiring Genomes: A Theory Of The Origins Of Species (Hardcover)

Lynn Margulis has been a maverick all her life. Early in her career she shocked her biological colleagues by arguing that the mitochondria that power our cells and the chloroplasts that let plants transform solar into chemical energy once were free-living bacteria. As soon as scientists could isolate and decode the scraps of DNA in those vital organelles, they found that she was right. Margulis went on to develop her Serial Endosymbiosis Theory, which attempted to trace the development of all creatures with nucleated cells, from yeasts to humans, to a series of genetic mergers between different kinds of organisms. According to Margulis, all the familiar family trees of life, which show only diverging branches, are wrong. Ancient roots and current branches cross and merge to produce new species. To Margulis, nature is far more promiscuous and much more creative than most biologists dream.

Her new book, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species, extends and deepens that argument. Margulis sets out to prove that new species rarely if ever appear as the result of mutation, isolation, genetic drift, or population bottlenecks--the meat and potatoes of neo-Darwinism. Instead she maintains that the major engine of evolutionary change, the source of most of the new forms that natural selection edits, is symbiogenesis--the acquisition of whole genomes as the result of symbiotic associations between different kinds of organisms. (Knowing that some people will seize on her thesis as an attack on the theory of evolution as a whole, Margulis makes it clear that she fully supports Darwin's great discovery of the mechanism of natural selection. She simply thinks that neo-Darwinists have failed to recognize the enormous creative power of genomic mergers.)

Readers who are familiar with Margulis' earlier works will recognize her vivid, personal and sometimes impressionistic writing style. I found this book, co-authored by her son, Dorion Sagan, to be clear and accessible. Starting with Chapter 9, where Margulis presents her latest ideas on the symbiotic origin of the nucleus itself, things get a bit more technical. Margulis makes every effort to help readers through the thicket of important, but at times tongue-twisting terms, and supplements explanations in the text with an excellent glossary. Margulis also presents the findings of several other researchers whose work supports or relates closely to her own.

Readers may or may not close the book convinced that Margulis is right and the neo-Darwinists are wrong. But they will come away with a vastly deeper understanding of the pervasive nature and power of the microbial world, and of symbiosis. Margulis reveals a hidden side of nature, in which microbes have generated most if not all of life's metabolic machinery, in which vastly different life-forms consort in a myriad of ways, and in which the acquisition of entire genomes provides the raw material for great evolutionary leaps. Anyone with a deep interest in biology will gain important insights from "Acquiring Genomes."

Robert Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley & Sons, 2002).

83 of 89 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Coauthorial Critique, December 5, 2002

By 

Dorion Sagan (East Coast, USA and Toronto) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Acquiring Genomes: A Theory Of The Origins Of Species (Hardcover)

First of all let me apologize for criticizing this work, not only because I wrote part of it and don't want to hurt my own feelings (any more than is absolutely necessary), but to you for any appearance of arrogance or impropriety. However, some more evidence in its favor has come to light since this book was written; in addition, there are a few mistakes (some corrected in proof which somehow Basic Books neglected to fix) and, more importantly, a basic potential misunderstanding about what the book does and does not say, which I see no reason not to address.

The main point of this book, which I cowrote, is that, although mutation leads to evolutionary change, all the best examples of speciation, including all that have actually been observed, have been through symbiosis. The greatest amount of biodiversity, including all basic metabolic modes from photosynthesis to oxygen respiration, evolved in the bacteria via mutation and gene transfer. But although given Linnean species names for the sake of convenience and via convention, speciation does not really apply to bacteria, which trade genes (via techniques borrowed by human beings practicing biotechnology) with little regard for species barriers. True speciation only evolved in the eukaryotes--protists, fungi, plants, and animals. These largely sexed beings pose the Darwinian problem of speciation proper. And here all the best examples of speciation involve symbiosis, the coming together of different kinds of organisms. Since Acquiring Genomes was written, more evidence has come to the fore to show that its central thesis--that the presence or absence of genomes, particularly those of microbes, can lead to speciation--is correct. In a recent Montreal conference on molecular biology and phylogeny, for example, John Werren from the University of Rochester in New York showed a picture of a chromosome of a sperm cell from a parasitic wasp: rod-shaped bacteria, Wolbachia, were nestled in the chromosome. Wasps can have their sex change due to the presence of bacteria, and antibiotics can make separate species of jewel wasps interbreed again. At this same meeting Professor Harold Morowitz (who is developing a Universal Metabolic Chart, on the model of the Periodic Table of the Elements) was impressed by the plasticity of ever-changing gene formations--emphasizing the need to look for metabolic pathways shared by most or all organisms to understand life's origins. Because life is an open thermodynamic system, as well as an open informational one, genomic transfer is rampant.

It is important to realize two things that Acquiring Genomes does not say. The book does not say that all bacterial diversity is the result of genome acquisition. As suggested above, and by Canadian biologist Sorin Sonea and others, despite the bacteriological convenience of their species names, bacteria arguably do not have species due both to rampant genetic transfer as well as the premier, zoological definition of species as an interbreeding population; since all bacteria can theoretically trade genes with each other either directly or through through vectors (and do not need to reproduce to do so), the animal definition of species does not really apply to them. The original genetic and metabolic diversity in bacteria must owe significantly to neodarwinian-style mutations but, since bacteria arguably do not possess species, such mutations do not occur for speciation.

As Ernst Mayr suggests in his Foreword, the evidence for speciation by genome acquisition in birds and mammals is not compelling. The argument for genome acquisition here depends on the possible symbiotic status of the ends of chromosomes, called kinetochores. (Bacteria don't have true chromosomes, they have chromonemes.) Because chromosome arrangements differ slightly in closely related mammal species (e.g., dogs and wolves) that no longer breed with each other, and because the spontaneous splitting of these chromosomes may owe to their separate bacterial origin, we make the argument that even vertebrate speciation may owe to the symbiotic aftershocks of microbial genome acquisition. The main point to remember is for every example of speciation for which there is actual evidence, genome acquisition is the causative factor; and that, despite mountains of theory, this is not the case for mutations.

Finally, the thermodynamics section is only an at best tantalizing foretaste of a much more comprehensive argument and regrettably contains a couple of mistakes, such as the characterization of Benard cells as octagonal (they're hexagonal) and appearing from a chemical gradient (they don't; they appear in a temperature gradient). And one final comment: both Lynn and I read Stephen King's On Writing after A.G.'s composition and realized belatedly how much it could have been improved, despite the complexity of some of the arguments, by eliminating further needless words.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species, November 13, 2002

By 

Joe Zika "Khemprof" (Cincinnati, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Acquiring Genomes: A Theory Of The Origins Of Species (Hardcover)

Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species written by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan will definitly open your eyes and is on the cutting edge of how species are formed.

This is one of those groundbreaking books that trys to answer one of Charles Darwin's long standing mysteries... how do species originate. Darwin could never quit put his finger on the answer, he was close and I'm sure with time and the right equipment, like what is available today, he might have even solved this nagging question.

Margulis has been working on this same question for the last thirty years and she makes a very convincing argument, symbiotic merger is the main thrust of her thesis in this book. This book has some real mind-spinning ideas and you'll have to know some biochemistry, biology, chemistry, cell-biology to prepare yourself for a provocative wild ride through this book as some of the material directly challenges the assumptions that we hold about diversity in the living world.

Margulis has for many years been the leader in the interpretation of evolutionary entities as the products of symbiogenesis. Symbiogenesis is the major theme of this book. The authors show convinvingly that an unexpectedly large proportion of the evolutionary lineages had their origins in symbiogenesis. Ok, I know some of you are saying what is symbiogenesis, well it's the combination of two totally different genomes form a symbiotic consortium which becomes the target of selection as a single entity. This is achieved by the mutual stability of the relationship, symbiosis differs from other cases of interaction such as carnivory, herbivory, and parasitism.

Now, that I've said all of that, you realize that this book can get pretty deep at times, but the author has a pleasent styled narrative, always keeping the reader involved. Prehaps the greatest merit of this book is that it introduces the reader to the fascinating world of microbes, delving into providing an enthralling description of protists and bacteria.

I found this book to be most enlightening about the enigma of evolutionary biology and how species are formed, comprehensive in scope and supported by scientific theory. This book will make you think. If you want to know about the cutting edge of evolutionary thinking then this is the book for you. To realize that everything on earth is inter-related and that life will carry on when faced with tragedy.