Serial Endosymbiosis Theory

= Thesis on biological evolution by Lynn Margulis: qualitative jumps in evolution depends on symbiosis with other living beings

Discussion

(from an interview conducted by Caroline Picard)

Graham Harman:

"The usual pseudo-cutting edge model in which everything is in a constant flux of becoming. This merely levels out everything in such a way that all moments become equal, which does not match what experience teaches us. In Immaterialism I try to identify five or six particular moments that were crucial for the life of the Dutch East India Company. My major source here is the Serial Endosymbiosis Theory (SET) of the biologist Lynn Margulis, who is only just starting to catch on in the humanities: Luciana Parisi at Goldsmiths in London and Myra Hird at Queen’s University in Canada come to mind as two authors working in neighboring areas to my own who have grasped the importance of Margulis for all of us. For those who haven’t read her but are interested, the book Symbiotic Planet is a good starting point.

Margulis had an important idea in the 1960s, during her years as a graduate student and assistant professor, that life forms evolve primarily not through a gradual process of survival of the fittest, but through intermittent symbiosis with other life forms. Consider the human cell and its numerous organelles. Her theory was that these organelles did not originally belong to the human cell, but came from the outside. Originally, there was the prokaryotic cell, which has no nucleus or internal membranes. According to Margulis, these organisms were probably infected by cellular parasites that fed on the nutrients inside the cell. Eventually, the parasites became important for our cells to survive when atmospheric oxygen drastically increased.

Margulis hypothesized that if we were ever able to run adequate tests to analyze the DNA in the nuclei of human cells, we would find that the cellular DNA does not code for all the organelles, thereby proving their extra-cellular origin. In the 1980’s those tests became possible and it turned out that Margulis was right. What she had proposed went from being a laughingstock of a theory to standard textbook biology.

* CP: Is there another example of how that would work?

GH: Yes. Around the same time, Margulis asked, “Have we ever seen evolution happen in a laboratory?” They told her there was one such case, and it involved fruit flies in a tank, if that’s the proper term. Researchers split the tank down the middle, slowly turning the heat up on one side and down on the other. After however many generations, the two sets of fruit flies could no longer mate., and thus had effectively become different species. After dissecting them, they found that there was a virus in the hot fruit flies. The orthodox reaction to this might have been: “Damn it. The experiment is contaminated by a virus. It’s useless.” But the reaction of Margulis was different: “No. That’s the whole point. The point is that the virus allowed the fruit flies to survive in the heat.”

(https://badatsports.com/2016/in-the-late-afternoon-of-modernism-an-interview-with-graham-harman/)