Customer Reviews

Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature

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This is a great book if you are interested in the life sciences. It definitively presents some topics that we, unfortunately, don't find in high school or college class rooms. That makes it a great read for anyone in the life/Earth sciences, since it will present new ideas about 'well known' phenomena in nature.

It is a collection of essays, both scientific and personal.

An amazing recounting of the microscopic living world. And we thought we were the important species. Bacteria started it all and are still here keeping it going. Read this and you will think twice about how we should live in this world.

This is an exceptionally informative, entertaining, and enlightening book, but there is no better way to illustrate this, than by quoting a sample of the editorial reviewers' comments, since their views mirror my own views (see these particular reviewers' comments, below):

"This is a ripsnorting intellectual barnstorm of a book, a sort of chimeric hybrid of mental genes from Dorion Sagan, his genius mother Lynn Margulis, and his dead father Carl Sagan--surely one of the smartest families on the planet. The result is a remarkably coherent and blazingly original proposal for the next grand narrative of our civilization (now that we have pretty much burned out the Cartesian one)." --Frederick Turner, author of Natural Classicism and The Culture of Hope

"Brilliant and fascinating, Dazzle Gradually unrolls for us the scroll of life on earth. These essays show us the intricate complexities of microbes; an atmosphere that performs self-maintenance; our own minds. Margulis and Sagan do not blink at the big questions or hard answers, and their writing is lively, precise, entertaining, and provocative, their passion for science everywhere evident and persuasive. Anyone who has ever wondered where we came from, who we are, and where we may be headed will delight in this extraordinarily exciting book." --Kelly Cherry, author of Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems

"Deeply personal, humorous, and brilliant...reading Dazzle is like journeying into two of the most original and creative scientific minds of our time. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan discuss their most revelatory and complex ideas in concise essays with accessible language, making this book a must-read primer to foraying their broad academic and intellectual interests." --Alan Berger, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

This book lit a real fire in my brain. Not because I can claim to have understood and instantly assumed a new and explosive philosophy of biology, but because one seems so tantalisingly close and yet so hard to grasp. This pair are definitely onto something. It is now widely recognised that mitochondria represent "fossil" bacteria that at some stage gave up their individuality for the sake of a larger aggregate organism. Nature is teeming with commensal organisms like corals, kelp and lichens in which disparate species meld to create a higher level of superorganism. We ourselves could not live without our gut flora. Kefir, a living dairy drink from the Caucasus, provides a striking further illustration of "individuals" forming out of a commune of 30-odd wildly different organisms and apparently thereby acquiring the need to grow old, die and reproduce. Metamorphosis may have arisen out of symbiogenesis, as in a way may sex have arisen out of unsuccessful cannibalism. Then there is Lovelock's Gaia, on which he contributes a chapter with Margulis, still controversial but with some interesting successes now behind it.

What all this adds up to is that Margulis sees a Commensal Principle in nature - a strong tendency for life to self-organise into higher-level self-regulating systems from biofilms right up to the global climate. And there are so many cases of this happening it is hard to deny that she must be right. But can she state this principle in a single, necessary phrase that fits on a tee-shirt and makes the whole picture inevitable? Can she, hell. There is no "Selfish Gene" or "E=mc˛" which says, "Gaia will come," much less why. What is this universal organising principle, and how can I write it out in software language so as to play with it myself? It looks like a generalisation without an explanatory hypothesis, and that has provoked a ferment between my ears as I can't help feeling it's within reach. If this is what you live for then you should read this book!

Margulis requires no introduction for the student of biology and evolution, as hers is the name most usually associated with the idea of symbiogenesis. Sagan's name is equally well known, but what I did not realise is that the two are a mother and son team. The great Carl Sagan was Dorion's father. With a pedigree like that, this little branch of the evolutionary tree must have a fair subset of the genes associated with intellectual gifts, and so it appears to have turned out. Margulis' passages are very readable and no less solid than you would expect from a giant of modern biology. The odd crashing solecism and an unpleasantly poststructuralist-sounding turn of phrase seem to be attributable to Sagan. I would not go so far as to say that he spoiled the book, but I think I have to read it again to pin down all of the ideas and that is more down to Sagan's florid language than the intractability of the ideas.

One picks up undercurrents of conflict in this book, especially with the gene-selectionists in biology championed by Dawkins. Coming from outside the field, I can only hazard that Dawkins has his t-shirt and knows how to tell you clearly, while Margulis' ideas don't seem to be pinned down with the same precision yet. I hope this will change, as Margulis is clearly onto something at a systems level that we urgently need to understand. Are we Gaia's reproductive organs, the phallic Soyuz rockets Earth's way of penetrating space to inseminate neighbouring planets? Or are we its latest itch, now due a catastrophic scratch? Or is the whole idea of Gaia really gratuitous personification, Lovelock's mechanistic Daisyworld notwithstanding? Who can say. We can only say that we as yet lack even a mathematical language in which to formulate the questions with sufficient precision to be wrong, and that with anthropogenic warming now toasting its feet by our fire we need that language right now so we can at least pose precise questions. Margulis does not give us this language, but she can point to the reasons why it must be available.

A brilliant collection of essays, simultaneously irritating and challenging.

Profound science combined with wit and the subtlety of Dickinson. Not to be missed..Nature loves this book!

"Dazzle gradually" is another great book by Margulis and Sagan. It engages your intellect and emotions in bringing together and taking apart myriads of the living world's dazzling puzzles, or (quoting the famous Russian poet Nikolay Gumilev) "as if not all stars are yet counted, as if our world is not yet all discovered".

Let me add to one of those dazzles by commenting on kefir, the Caucasian drink and a wonderful symbiotic consortium of yeast and bacteria.

There indeed is a Caucasian legend about "Muhammad pellets" (or "Prophet's grain") but it talks about the Prophet bringing it (in his hollowed staff) to Muslim people of Caucasus - definitely not to the Christians!

The legend comes from the Karachay, a Sunni Muslim people still inhabiting the valleys of northern Caucasus north of the (Orthodox Christian) Georgia, indeed near Mt Elbrus.
In fact, the legend said explicitly that the secret of kefir has to be hidden from the infidels, and its disclosure will bring Allah's anger and the destruction of Karachay people.
The kefir secret was held so tightly that it became known outside of Caucasus only in early 20th century through Russian dairy producers.

We even know exactly how this happened: Ten pounds of kefir culture were given by a Karachay nobleman Bekmurza Baichorov to a young Russian dairy researcher Irina Sakharova in 1906. The story of their love can be now read on every packet of kefir in Russia!

The entire Karachay people (80,000), along with a number of other ethnic groups, were exiled by Stalin to Central Asia in 1943. Out of 28,000 exiled children, 22,000 died. The Karachay were allowed to return to the Caucasus in 1957. The world never noticed.

Victor Fet,
Marshall University,
Huntington, West Virginia