A portrait of James Lovelock, originator of the theory that the earth…
Symbiotic Earth
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- Transcript
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SYMBIOTIC EARTH explores the life and ideas of Lynn Margulis, a brilliant and radical scientist, whose unconventional theories challenged the male-dominated scientific community and are today fundamentally changing how we look at our selves, evolution, and the environment.
As a young scientist in the 1960s, Margulis was ridiculed when she first proposed that symbiosis was a key driver of evolution, but she persisted. Instead of the mechanistic view that life evolved through random genetic mutations and competition, she presented a symbiotic narrative in which bacteria joined together to create the complex cells that formed animals, plants and all other organisms - which together form a multi-dimensional living entity that covers the Earth. Humans are not the pinnacle of life with the right to exploit nature, but part of this complex cognitive system in which each of our actions has repercussions.
Filmmaker John Feldman traveled globally to meet Margulis' cutting-edge colleagues and continually asked: What happens when the truth changes? SYMBIOTIC EARTH examines the worldview that has led to climate change and extreme capitalism and offers a new approach to understanding life that encourages a sustainable and symbiotic lifestyle.
A comprehensive 86-page Study Guide by Dorion Sagan and John Feldman is available, and includes for each film essay:
- Detailed Synopsis
- Questions for Discussion and Reflection
- Expanded Glossary, an extensive list of key words which can be read as a map of the concepts in the film
- Bibliography for further reading listing books, articles and links to online materials
PLUS
- Ideas for how to present the film in different contexts, e.g. classroom, community screening
- Still images and graphics from the film
'Symbiotic Earth offers a fascinating and rewarding educational experience while conveying a key conceptual breakthrough in the life sciences. It will enrich and enliven college and AP high school courses, as well as all of us with an appetite for discovery about life in Earth. This film is of singular importance at this historical moment because it features both a paradigm shift in evolutionary science and the woman scientist whose work made it possible.' Joanna Macy, deep ecologist, Buddhist scholar, Author, Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World
'This is an extraordinary film about a remarkable scientist. Lynn Margulis deserves to be recognized for her many contributions to evolutionary biology, especially in her insightful discussions of symbiosis. We hope this film will be watched by many people - in classrooms across the country and well beyond.' Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, Co-Directors, Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, Yale University
'Wonderful film. Informative, engaging, moving and inspiring. Just what a film about a powerful new way of thinking should be.' James Shapiro, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Chicago, Author, Evolution: A View from the 21st Century
'Riveting. A wonderful achievement.' Dr. Douglas Zook, Professor of Ecology, Boston University
'A wonderful film - Symbiotic Earth brings biology to life! This documentary is a concise history of evolutionary biology, a fascinating case study in shifting scientific paradigms, and an informative portrait of the remarkable Lynn Margulis. Clearly presented and accessible, it will appeal to a broad range of viewers, and especially to students and educators in the biological and environmental sciences.' Curt Meine, Senior Fellow, Center for Humans and Nature, The Aldo Leopold Foundation, Author, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work
'Thoughtful and moving...This film should be required of many introductory college courses, from the physical and life sciences to the social sciences.' R. Mark Leckie, Professor of Geology and Earth Systems, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
'Symbiotic Earth conveys one of the most important biographies of the last 50 years. It's no exaggeration to say that Lynn Margulis' contribution to science is in the same league as Jim Watson, Francis Crick, Stephen Hawking and Barbara McClintock...Everyone who is interested in living things, evolution, or the environment must watch this.' Perry Marshall, Author, Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design
'Symbiotic Earth chronicles the brilliant conceptual achievements and exuberant life of Lynn Margulis, the thinker who revolutionized evolutionary biology with her theories of symbiogenesis and Gaia. The documentary footage and first-hand accounts of Margulis's vibrant personality and ideas alone make this a must-watch film for students of both the life sciences and the history of science.' Dr. Sophia Roosth, Associate Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University, Author, Synthetic: How Life Got Made
'It was a wonderful experience to watch and feel its message. The film celebrates the scientific mind the passion of the individual and the bumpy roads that science sometimes requires us to navigate. Your film is just brilliant - like Lynn!' Julie Brigham-Grette, Professor of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst
'Beautiful and powerful film...The film not only captures Margulis' work so vividly and elegantly, it also left room for some fascinating and nuanced disagreements.' Yarden Katz, Fellow in Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School
'Symbiotic Earth leaves us looking at the world in a new light, understanding it better and yet more than ever aware of its essential mystery.' Dr. Robert Sternberg, Science Communication Unit, Imperial College London
'The film bursts with footage of one of the most important biologists since Darwin...We have from Lynn, so vividly present in this film, an account of how evolutionary novelty emerges in the drama of cellular symbiosis. This is the drama of life's history and the narrative of its ongoing possibilities.' Dr. Donna Haraway, Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, University of California - Santa Cruz
'An astonishingly important, deeply transformative, and original film - historic in fact. Its momentous news that all biological life (including ours) succeeds not by competition but by collaboration offers ways to resolve even our devastating global climate emergency.' Bill Blakemore, Veteran foreign and domestic correspondent, ABC News
'This splendid film gives us insights into Margulis' prolific career; and into the woman, whose vitality explodes across the screen with the force of a slow-motion supernova.' Margaret Wertheim, Author, Physics on the Fringe, Founder, Institute For Figuring
'Important, thought provoking, and beautifully shot.' Martin Ping, Executive Director, Hawthorne Valley Association
'Captivating...Absolutely riveting...It creates a whole new way of thinking about the beginnings of and development of life.' Ross Gelbspan, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Author, The Heat Is On and Boiling Point
'Symbiotic Earth highlights the importance of Lynn's thought for our understanding of evolutionary change. Considering these two aspects of her work, symbiogenesis and critique of Neodarwinism, there is little doubt that Lynn Margulis was the greatest natural scientist of the last century. Symbiotic Earth does a superb job explaining and celebrating the scientific impact of the Lynn Margulis legacy.' Mark McMenamin, Professor of Geology, Mount Holyoke College, Author, The Garden of Ediacara: Discovering the First Complex Life
Citation
Main credits
Feldman, John (filmmaker)
Feldman, John (screenwriter)
Feldman, John (narrator)
Feldman, John (cinematographer)
Feldman, John (editor of moving image work)
Davies, Susan (film producer)
Other credits
Camera, editor, John Feldman; music, Sheila Silver.
Distributor subjects
Anthropology; Biochemistry; Biology; Earth Science; Ecology; Environmental Ethics; Evolution; Genetics; Geology; History of Science; Microbiology; Philosophy of Science; Religion; STEM; Women's StudiesKeywords
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(gentle instrumental music)
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- [John] This is a film about the natural world.
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And a film about a scientist, Lynn Margulis.
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Feisty, rebellious, and brilliant,
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she tirelessly challenged conventional theories
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and ushered in a scientific revolution for the 21st century.
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Turning upside down our ideas about evolution,
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the environment, and life itself.
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Ridiculed at first, Margulis\' radical theories
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are providing the opportunity for a shift
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in global thinking.
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This may prove helpful as we tackle environmental
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and social problems caused by the old way of thinking.
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- What I want to share with you
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is why a biologist interested in genetics and microbiology,
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which is certainly my training, is interested in NASA
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and is interested in the Earth as a planet.
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And I want to give you a sense of a massive revolution
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in our thinking that has come across
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during the last about 20 years.
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- We\'ve got Lynn
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doing scientific work that shakes people up,
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that they resist,
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because it\'s not the way they\'re used to thinking
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- Lynn looks at the natural world
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and sees symbiosis, interdependence.
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What Lynn was saying about the cell
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encourages me in thinking about what we can do
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in human society
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and with our lives on this planet.
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(dramatic instrumental music)
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- You tell me we\'re rolling.
- Look at John.
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- I don\'t want to look at John, you\'re cuter.
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No, I\'m teasing.
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- [John] I met Lynn Margulis in 2005
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when I was making my film
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Evo: Ten Questions Everyone Should Ask About Evolution.
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After Evo was finished I sent her a DVD
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and soon I got an email from Lynn.
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I still carry this email around in my pocket.
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She praised the film
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and then went on to say that Evo adhered far too closely
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to the neo-Darwinian party line
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in its capitalistic zeitgeist
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and that unless I made a sequel it would be recognized
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as quaint American-Empire political propaganda
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in a few years.
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She was accusing me of being a puppet
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for the neo-Darwinian capitalistic zeitgeist.
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- You know, she never pulled punches.
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She was always, you know,
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This is the way I think about things
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- [John] I plead guilty as charged.
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I didn\'t even know the difference
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between Darwinism and neo-Darwinism.
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So Lynn Margulis and I
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started to talk about making a documentary
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that would explore the idea that symbiosis,
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when organisms of different species live together,
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is the fundamental driver of evolutionary change.
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And then, quite unexpectedly, she died of a stroke.
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(somber instrumental music)
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- I would rather not be here today
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honoring the memory of Lynn.
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It\'s very sad for me to speak in the past tense
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of Lynn Margulis, my friend and my mentor in many ways.
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- Lynn was no trendy postmodernist.
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She was a big thinker.
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And the academics and funding bureaucrats
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didn\'t like her for it.
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She never received the major NSF funding,
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a MacArthur, or the Nobel Prize that she deserved.
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Lynn\'s narrative was no longer simply a footnote to Darwin,
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but a new grand narrative.
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- I consider her, I hesitate to say it,
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as a herald of a new world view.
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Shall we call it the symbiotic world view?
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- [John] When I decided to make a film about Lynn Margulis
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and her grand narrative,
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I realized that I had to change my world view,
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but how do I do that?
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(gentle instrumental music)
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So I turned to Lynn for help.
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I immersed myself in her books,
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articles, and scientific papers.
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Lynn was incredibly prolific.
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She wrote complex science books about evolution
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as well as popular books for laymen, even a coloring book.
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She wanted to communicate with everybody.
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- If you do it too fast, if you change anything--
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(speaking in foreign language)
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Oh, you pick a card, any card.
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- [John] She was a beloved and dedicated teacher.
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I watched many of her teaching videos.
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It was as if I was taking
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her famous environmental evolution course.
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I hosted a picnic
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with some of Lynn\'s former graduate students
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at her favorite Amherst swimming hole, Puffer\'s Pond.
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I learned that while the old guard scientists
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continue to dismiss Lynn Margulis\'s theories
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about symbiosis driving evolution and the Gaia theory,
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that life on Earth regulates its own environment,
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which she developed with Jim Lovelock,
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many of her colleagues share her vision
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and are today advancing ideas
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that will re-shape our understanding of life.
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So I set out on a journey
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to visit these forward thinking scientists and scholars
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around the world.
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What advice do you think Lynn would give me
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about making this film trying to explain her ideas?
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- Yeah.
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- There\'s a number of us working at the frontier,
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if you like,
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knowing that the main structure of the certainties
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of the 20th century,
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I call them certainties,
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they were never certainties, of course,
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but the certainties so-called of the 20th century
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are now crumbling.
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(gentle instrumental music)
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- [John] So if I am to change my world view,
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I\'m going to have to give up many of the ideas
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I once thought were true forever.
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Only then can I build a new way of looking at life.
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As it turns out, the first truth I must give up is that,
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in science, we can ever really know the truth,
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because our knowledge is always biased and incomplete.
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- As scientists we don\'t deal with truth.
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We deal with approximations, with approximate theories.
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- This has not really percolated into general knowledge
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because people in government,
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in law courts for instance,
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bring in scientists as experts
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and they believe scientists prove things,
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but proof belongs to the realm of logic and mathematics,
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not to science.
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- [Lynn] Tell all the truth but tell it slant,
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success in circuit lies
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too bright for our infirm delight,
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the truth\'s superb surprise
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as lightning to the children eased
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by explanation kind,
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the truth must dazzle gradually
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or every man be blind.
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(gentle instrumental music)
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(gentle instrumental music)
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The belief that the world is made for man
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and that nature is out there to be exploited
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and that man is somehow,
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evolution has stopped because we have gotten here,
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a lot of people believe that.
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That there\'s no evolution after man
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because we are already here,
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and we are the pinnacle, we are the top, we are the summit.
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This kind of notion, which is prevailing in fact even,
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I am sad to say, amongst biological colleagues,
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is obviously got to be debunked.
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- We are very anthropocentric
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and so we have a tendency to think of man
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at the pinnacle and so on.
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The biosphere is entirely dominated by the microbial world
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and animals and plants find themselves embedded
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in that world and dramatically affected by that world
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and Lynn began to teach us that.
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And she knew and could help you see
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that to understand life,
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you have to see it embedded.
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Nature is life.
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We\'re embedded in it.
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Just as the environment modulates beings,
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beings modulate the environment.
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- [Lynn] There\'s that great bacterial scum.
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I\'m anxious to look at it.
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Now it may be diatom scum too
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because diatoms produce.
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Yeah, we\'ll have to see what\'s in there
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- So Lynn loved to go down to the Marine Biological Lab
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in Woods Hole.
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She took a lot of students there.
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She would come in the summer
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and participate in teacher workshops that we had there
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and she had a lot of friends that she liked to stay with.
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She would always bring the students to the library.
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There\'s a sign in the library
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that says study nature, not books.
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And so she would always point that out.
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I think that was, for her, a very important idea
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and she exemplified that in her teaching.
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- And here, too, with the vegetation.
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Yeah, come and look at the convoluta with the diatoms in it.
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Have you seen them?
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Here, here, here.
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See, that\'s why next time we have a screen...
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- I think the Study nature, not books is Louis Agassiz.
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I think her motto would have been study nature and books.
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When it\'s too dark, then study books.
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Her friend Lois told me she once said to Lynn,
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you know what sleeping is don\'t you?
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It\'s lying in bed, not reading.
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- And she often as part of her own learning
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would come across these books
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that she felt were really important.
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And so she would have to pass them on to everybody.
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And I just came across one on my bookshelf the other day,
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the Ludwik Fleck,
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Genesis and Development of Scientific Fact.
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- [John] Lynn also spoke to me about this book.
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Fleck explores the idea that scientific facts
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are the product of thought collectives
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and can change as the culture changes.
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- She was fascinated with the notion
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of the thought collective and it was basically
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that you can get stuck in a current thought collective
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and not be able to escape it.
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I think it was Whitehead
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who called them trained incapacities,
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that you don\'t see things
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because you\'re taught not to see them.
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- And this was on her refrigerator.
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If everybody is thinking alike,
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then somebody isn\'t thinking.
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That\'s part of her algorithm.
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If everybody is agreeing
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then it\'s time to go and look somewhere else.
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- So she was always open in that way.
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I think the Fleck thing was,
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don\'t let them put blinders on you.
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(gentle instrumental music)
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- We are at war with nature.
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We don\'t really intend to be at war,
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but that\'s the emergent property of our culture.
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- Now, our view of man apart from nature,
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man exploiting nature,
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man taking a forest for cash value of crops,
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has got to change because that is, of course,
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the basis of the environmental crisis.
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- That\'s the old mechanistic understanding
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of our relationship to the Earth.
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The Earth is this dead object, we\'re on it, we dominate it,
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we can control it using mechanistic science,
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we extract minerals, convert them into materials,
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stick all the waste into landfill.
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That\'s the mainstream suicidal growth model.
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- [John] This mechanistic view
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that separates man from nature
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and allows us to exploit the environment
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is the thought collective which Lynn Margulis fought against
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and which dominates science today.
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I asked Stephan Harding how this view came about.
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- The current mode of science
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developed during the Scientific Revolution
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in the 16th and 17th centuries
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when great geniuses like Galileo and Descartes and others
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discovered that one could study the world mathematically,
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that you could look for mathematical regularities
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in the world that would allow you
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to predict what would happen in nature
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and therefore to control it.
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But unfortunately, those scientists
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also developed the notion that firstly the whole universe
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is nothing more than a machine.
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And when the followers of Descartes cut open live dogs
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and the dogs screamed in pain,
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the followers of Descartes were supposed to think
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that the screams were nothing more
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than the creakings of machines.
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When you\'re trained to be a scientist,
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you\'re told that you
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have to develop some kind of detached objectivity.
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You mustn\'t allow your emotions to get involved,
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your feelings to get involved.
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They\'re not part of science.
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What happened with science at the beginning
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was that it distanced us from the world.
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Of course, the machine idea was very powerful
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at the time of Descartes
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because clockworks had become very sophisticated.
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Everyone was in love with clockworks.
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They were like the computers of that time.
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They were amazing.
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What they could do was fantastic.
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It\'s natural that people thought the universe
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is a clockwork.
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We tend to think of nature
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in terms of our most advanced technology.
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One can understand why the machine metaphor was so powerful.
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The problem was that people didn\'t realize
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that it was only a metaphor.
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It was taken as a reality.
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Also, if you wanted
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to understand how a complex system works,
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let\'s say an organism, what you have to do is break it down
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into its component parts.
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This is reductionism.
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By understanding the parts in isolation
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you\'ll understand how the whole works.
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So gradually, this new mathematical, reductionist,
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mechanistic science took hold.
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But unfortunately, it\'s limited.
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It\'s a powerful way of knowing
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but ignores other ways of knowing.
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For example, we know very well now in science
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that when different actors in a system
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start interacting together,
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and they could be species in an ecosystem
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or they could be consumers in the marketplace.
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It doesn\'t matter what the actors are,
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but when they start interacting together
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we often get emergent properties
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coming out of those interactions
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that you couldn\'t have predicted
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from a knowledge of the parts in isolation.
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And the emergent properties
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are now recognized quite well in science.
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So this brings us into a more holistic style of science
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where we focus on the properties of whole systems
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rather than exclusively on the parts.
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- The major problems of our time are all interconnected.
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Whether you talk about energy, climate change, poverty,
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technology, economics, management, in all these areas
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and all the problems in them
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are interdependent and interconnected.
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None of them can be understood in an isolated way.
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This is why we need to think in terms of patterns,
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in terms of relationships
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and that\'s what systems thinking is.
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- Most of us are brought up to think linearly,
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cause effect logic.
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Systems thinking is all about feedback loops
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where the chain of causality swallows its own tail.
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The dynamics become much more interesting
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and hard to rationalize in a pure linear cause effect sense.
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- We also shift the emphasis from isolated objects
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interacting with each other
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to the relationships between the objects.
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- So that life is a connected phenomenon through space.
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There is no such thing as a fully independent organism
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because every organism requires food to be delivered
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and waste to be removed
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so that it\'s a system on the surface of the Earth.
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(gentle instrumental music)
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- [Fritjof] I do believe there is a revolution happening
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in the life sciences from a mechanistic view of life
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to a systemic view of life.
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And that\'s really a profound change.
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From a systems point of view
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there can only be interdependence,
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every part is dependent on other parts.
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That\'s the core of systems thinking.
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(gentle instrumental music)
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- Neo-Darwinism is very bad.
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It is very limited, it\'s reductive,
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and you cannot even study life.
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The way to say it is,
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neo-Darwinism took the life out of biology.
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Somebody translate that please.
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Please translate that.
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I want to say that in public.
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- She liked to start trouble.
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But it wasn\'t trouble without a purpose.
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- Darwin was completely right
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that all life on Earth has common ancestry.
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- She was a Darwinian
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and she totally believed in natural selection.
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- All organisms, populations of organisms grow at rates
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that cannot be sustained by their environment.
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There are more born, there are more hatched,
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there are more seeds that sprout,
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there are more spores in the air.
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- [John] These young swallows, most of them born this year,
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are gathering here in preparation for their migration south.
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- [Lynn] Now since there are more than can ever survive,
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and only a few survive, that\'s what natural selection is.
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It\'s an elimination process.
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- [John] Each bird is slightly different from its neighbor.
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The ones that survive long enough to reproduce
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pass on their characteristics to the next generation.
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Darwin took this metaphor of natural selection further.
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He said that each slight variation, if useful, is preserved.
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And gradually this results in evolutionary change.
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That\'s Darwinism, so what is neo-Darwinism?
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In the 1930s and 1940s, a group of scientists
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combined Darwin\'s theory of evolution by natural selection
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with Gregor Mendel\'s laws of inheritance,
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which has become genetics.
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And the resulting theory
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became known as the modern synthesis or neo-Darwinism.
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The essence of neo-Darwinism
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is that the variations from one individual to another
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that lead to evolutionary change
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are caused by differences in their genes,
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and that these differences are the result of mistakes
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that happen when the genes are copied during reproduction,
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these are called: random genetic mutations.
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During the 20 century,
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powerful neo-Darwinists dominated academia,
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controlling scientific research, funding and publishing.
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- They have control of the dialogue,
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they have control of the texts,
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they have control of the money,
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but that doesn\'t make them correct.
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- [John] By the time I studied biology in the 1970s,
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there was one theory of evolution
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which we thought was Darwinism, but it was neo-Darwinism.
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The neo-Darwinists simplified Darwin and squashed,
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even ridiculed, ideas that didn\'t fit their theory.
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We were taught to laugh at the idea of Darwin\'s forerunner,
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the equally brilliant evolutionist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,
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that characteristics which an organism developed or acquired
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during its lifetime could be passed down
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to the next generation.
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- The idea that Darwin was not a Lamarckian
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and didn\'t believe in the inheritance
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of acquired characteristics,
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extraordinary myth made up by the neo-Darwinians
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who wanted to clean Darwin up
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and to make him appear this way.
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- [John] All this got me thinking
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about how science and politics are inextricably intertwined.
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- If you believed in the inheritance
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of acquired characteristics in the Cold War,
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oh, you\'re supporting the Soviet Union,
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because the United States and capitalism
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was based on gene theory and natural selection
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and inheritance of acquired characteristics,
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that\'s associated with frauds or Communists.
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Which one are you?
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- [John] Lynn differed from the neo-Darwinists
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on almost every point of their theory.
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- The idea that the accumulation of random mutations
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is the way species change, one species to another,
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there\'s very little evidence for it.
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- [John] Lynn championed the symbiotic view of evolution.
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For her, new species come primarily
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from organisms joining with one another.
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And evolution can happen in big leaps.
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Her ideas were scorned by the neo-Darwinists.
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And because she didn\'t agree with them,
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they accused her of siding with Creationists.
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- What that does to evolution is very, very dangerous
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because if you think outside the box
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and you start thinking of symbiosis
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and lateral gene transfer.
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You\'re feeding the Creationists.
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You\'re feeding the Creationists.
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So you\'re caught in this weird dialectic.
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- [John] But Lynn fought back,
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she called neo-Darwinism a minor 20th century religious sect
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because in their efforts to fight Creationism
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they promoted their own dogmatic belief system.
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- Nowadays, when symbiosis is accepted, they all said,
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oh, that\'s part of Darwinism, too.
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No, it isn\'t.
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You can\'t have it both ways.
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Just get rid of the word.
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You can talk about relativity theory
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without calling it Einsteinian relativity theory.
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Why are we tattooing the word Darwinism
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to the word evolution.
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Let\'s just call it evolution and let\'s get on with it.
463
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It\'s common to equate the neo-Darwinist view of evolution
464
00:27:03.706 --> 00:27:06.530
with the word competition
465
00:27:06.530 --> 00:27:10.260
and the symbiotic view with cooperation
466
00:27:10.260 --> 00:27:13.580
but these words are so anthropocentric
467
00:27:13.580 --> 00:27:16.920
that Lynn advised not to use them at all
468
00:27:16.920 --> 00:27:18.600
when describing nature.
469
00:27:18.600 --> 00:27:20.510
- [Lynn] Can\'t talk about cost benefit
470
00:27:20.510 --> 00:27:23.120
or cooperation or competition,
471
00:27:23.120 --> 00:27:25.200
because those words are proper for the banks
472
00:27:25.200 --> 00:27:27.010
and the basketball courts,
473
00:27:27.010 --> 00:27:30.550
but they are not proper for the scientific explanation.
474
00:27:30.550 --> 00:27:32.730
- [John] Lynn also cautioned us
475
00:27:32.730 --> 00:27:35.520
about the use of metaphors in science.
476
00:27:37.640 --> 00:27:39.650
Somewhere along the line,
477
00:27:39.650 --> 00:27:42.999
I learned that the most aggressive baby bird,
478
00:27:42.999 --> 00:27:44.940
the one that sticks its neck out furthest
479
00:27:44.940 --> 00:27:47.210
and opens its mouth widest
480
00:27:47.210 --> 00:27:49.650
will get more food than its siblings
481
00:27:49.650 --> 00:27:52.630
and win in the competitive struggle for existence.
482
00:27:54.590 --> 00:27:59.500
I have filmed robins at their nests for almost 40 years.
483
00:27:59.500 --> 00:28:01.870
It appears to me that the parents
484
00:28:01.870 --> 00:28:04.660
try to feed each baby equally.
485
00:28:06.531 --> 00:28:08.180
So this made me wonder.
486
00:28:08.180 --> 00:28:12.550
Where did the idea that organisms compete for survival,
487
00:28:12.550 --> 00:28:16.110
and the metaphor survival of the fittest come from?
488
00:28:17.998 --> 00:28:22.488 line:15%
- Darwin got his emphasis
489
00:28:23.590 --> 00:28:28.480
on competition from what he was reading
490
00:28:28.480 --> 00:28:33.480
about social life in that Victorian era of early capitalism,
491
00:28:34.110 --> 00:28:38.390
early industrialization, which was so exploitative
492
00:28:40.320 --> 00:28:42.930
- So Darwin was a great,
493
00:28:42.930 --> 00:28:44.400
one of the greatest scientists ever.
494
00:28:44.400 --> 00:28:45.800
There\'s no doubt about that.
495
00:28:47.675 --> 00:28:50.820 line:15%
But his social context was Victorian capitalism
496
00:28:51.970 --> 00:28:53.270 line:15%
and he was a very wealthy man.
497
00:28:53.270 --> 00:28:55.540 line:15%
He was connected with the Wedgwood family.
498
00:28:55.540 --> 00:28:57.120
They were very wealthy.
499
00:28:57.120 --> 00:29:01.180
He was absorbing these competitive ideas
500
00:29:01.180 --> 00:29:04.250
from the society around him at the time.
501
00:29:04.250 --> 00:29:07.580
- Darwinian theory of natural selection
502
00:29:07.580 --> 00:29:08.990
based on the struggle for existence
503
00:29:08.990 --> 00:29:13.390
is nothing more than laissez-faire socioeconomic theory
504
00:29:13.390 --> 00:29:15.490
applied to nature.
505
00:29:15.490 --> 00:29:18.330
The reason we see so much struggle and conflict out there
506
00:29:18.330 --> 00:29:20.778
is because it\'s a reflection of our social world.
507
00:29:20.820 --> 00:29:22.170
- You have Hobbes
508
00:29:23.690 --> 00:29:28.690
talking about the natural state of war in nature.
509
00:29:30.360 --> 00:29:32.760
You have Tennyson talking about nature,
510
00:29:32.760 --> 00:29:34.330
red in tooth and claw.
511
00:29:35.470 --> 00:29:40.470
Herbert Spencer originates the phrase,
512
00:29:41.220 --> 00:29:43.553
the survival of the fittest, not Darwin.
513
00:29:45.281 --> 00:29:46.340
- And the survival of the fittest
514
00:29:46.340 --> 00:29:49.510
in the sense of warring people and the best man winning,
515
00:29:49.510 --> 00:29:51.920
or wedges, all of these are metaphors
516
00:29:51.920 --> 00:29:54.710
that I think are beyond even what Darwin meant.
517
00:29:54.710 --> 00:29:56.610
- The thing about a metaphor, you see,
518
00:29:58.729 --> 00:30:03.729
is it\'s based on comparing this to this.
519
00:30:04.190 --> 00:30:06.540
Well, they have to have some similarities
520
00:30:07.860 --> 00:30:09.480
but they\'re not identical.
521
00:30:11.730 --> 00:30:16.280
But the metaphor may make you assume a similarity
522
00:30:16.280 --> 00:30:18.070
that isn\'t there.
523
00:30:18.070 --> 00:30:20.550
- [John] In the hands of the neo-Darwinists,
524
00:30:20.550 --> 00:30:23.610
fitness became a quantifiable attribute
525
00:30:23.610 --> 00:30:28.250
based on how many offspring an organism has.
526
00:30:28.250 --> 00:30:31.360
- Your maiden aunt is not fit no matter what,
527
00:30:31.360 --> 00:30:32.440
no matter how much money
528
00:30:32.440 --> 00:30:35.200
she gives to the New York public library.
529
00:30:35.200 --> 00:30:36.720 line:15%
Yet the slob down the street
530
00:30:36.720 --> 00:30:40.270 line:15%
who has 10 kids is more fit by definition.
531
00:30:40.270 --> 00:30:42.190
And we\'ve moved,
532
00:30:42.190 --> 00:30:44.290
that is, the popular vernacular culture
533
00:30:44.290 --> 00:30:46.430
has picked up survival of the fittest
534
00:30:46.430 --> 00:30:48.940
as a term with political implications
535
00:30:48.940 --> 00:30:51.970
that has moved away from its original biological meaning.
536
00:30:51.970 --> 00:30:55.220
- So what we have to say about Darwin
537
00:30:57.720 --> 00:31:02.340
is that in accounting for the phenomena that he observed,
538
00:31:04.410 --> 00:31:08.340
he used a metaphor that he had been exposed to
539
00:31:08.340 --> 00:31:10.360
in other contexts.
540
00:31:10.360 --> 00:31:12.540
That doesn\'t make it right or wrong.
541
00:31:14.910 --> 00:31:16.200
But it does mean
542
00:31:17.900 --> 00:31:19.310
that you have to check
543
00:31:20.620 --> 00:31:24.350
where that metaphor is taking you next.
544
00:31:24.350 --> 00:31:27.520
- [John] The full title of Darwin\'s famous book is:
545
00:31:27.520 --> 00:31:31.900
On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection,
546
00:31:31.900 --> 00:31:35.190
or the Preservation of Favored Races
547
00:31:35.190 --> 00:31:37.020
in the Struggle for Life.
548
00:31:42.070 --> 00:31:45.980
Since its publication, the theory it proposed
549
00:31:45.980 --> 00:31:50.420
has been turned into an inescapable law of nature
550
00:31:51.330 --> 00:31:53.870
and used to justify everything
551
00:31:53.870 --> 00:31:58.870
from brutal competition in schools and business
552
00:32:00.520 --> 00:32:04.140 line:15%
to global economic exploitation of people
553
00:32:04.173 --> 00:32:05.243
and the environment,
554
00:32:07.790 --> 00:32:08.623
racism...
555
00:32:14.030 --> 00:32:15.576
and genocide.
556
00:32:15.576 --> 00:32:19.430
(gentle instrumental music)
557
00:32:19.430 --> 00:32:22.460
- Look, you have got to drop this incessant innocence.
558
00:32:22.460 --> 00:32:25.690
Life is harsh and ugly and only the strong survive,
559
00:32:26.580 --> 00:32:28.590
or didn\'t they teach you that at Harvard?
560
00:32:29.950 --> 00:32:34.760
- [John] Another dangerous metaphor is the selfish gene
561
00:32:34.760 --> 00:32:37.370
which was coined by Richard Dawkins,
562
00:32:37.370 --> 00:32:40.410
an outspoken neo-Darwinist.
563
00:32:40.410 --> 00:32:45.100
In this book he writes that we are survival machines,
564
00:32:45.100 --> 00:32:48.280
robot vehicles blindly programmed
565
00:32:48.280 --> 00:32:53.280
to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes
566
00:32:53.770 --> 00:32:58.049 line:15%
- What I think we misunderstood in science
567
00:32:58.049 --> 00:33:01.710 line:15%
is the idea that, first of all,
568
00:33:01.710 --> 00:33:06.640
many of our theories were metaphorical, using metaphors.
569
00:33:06.640 --> 00:33:09.330
Second, in doing that,
570
00:33:09.330 --> 00:33:12.733
we are distancing ourselves from the facts
571
00:33:12.733 --> 00:33:16.410
to the extent that if we take them too seriously,
572
00:33:16.410 --> 00:33:18.650
we actually distort the facts.
573
00:33:18.650 --> 00:33:22.360
Or we actually forget what the original observations were.
574
00:33:22.360 --> 00:33:25.200
To my mind, to come back to the selfish gene,
575
00:33:25.200 --> 00:33:28.770
there is no way in which a strip of DNA can be selfish.
576
00:33:29.760 --> 00:33:31.640
- But of course it\'s just a metaphor,
577
00:33:31.640 --> 00:33:35.820
because a gene doesn\'t have a self, a gene is not a self.
578
00:33:35.820 --> 00:33:38.170
How can something be selfish if it has no self?
579
00:33:39.230 --> 00:33:42.480
- [John] I see now that Richard Dawkins\' metaphor
580
00:33:42.480 --> 00:33:46.700
of the selfish gene came out of his western culture
581
00:33:46.700 --> 00:33:49.510
that promoted the power of the individual
582
00:33:49.510 --> 00:33:51.030
over the community,
583
00:33:51.030 --> 00:33:55.240
one that was opposed to socialism and communism.
584
00:33:55.240 --> 00:33:58.170
Because it is presented as science,
585
00:33:58.170 --> 00:34:00.120
people take it as a truth.
586
00:34:01.020 --> 00:34:03.790
So it further contributes to a culture
587
00:34:03.790 --> 00:34:06.170
of greed and selfishness.
588
00:34:09.260 --> 00:34:13.710
So these two metaphors, survival of the fittest,
589
00:34:13.710 --> 00:34:15.640
and the selfish gene,
590
00:34:15.640 --> 00:34:20.640
are the basis of the neo-Darwinian capitalistic zeitgeist,
591
00:34:20.740 --> 00:34:23.190
which is the pervasive belief
592
00:34:23.190 --> 00:34:26.470
that humans are genetically selfish
593
00:34:26.470 --> 00:34:29.390
and that success comes only by winning
594
00:34:29.390 --> 00:34:31.580
in competitive struggles.
595
00:34:31.580 --> 00:34:34.490
All else is childish sentimentality.
596
00:34:35.730 --> 00:34:38.880
- You\'ve got to help people when they need help.
597
00:34:38.880 --> 00:34:39.713
- Why?
598
00:34:40.600 --> 00:34:41.800
- Don\'t you?
599
00:34:41.800 --> 00:34:43.420
- I take care of me.
600
00:34:43.420 --> 00:34:45.680
When you\'re older you\'ll find that\'s the only way.
601
00:34:47.340 --> 00:34:48.173
Bye.
602
00:34:52.250 --> 00:34:54.850
- [John] The neo-Darwinists see in nature
603
00:34:54.850 --> 00:34:58.910 line:15%
independent selfish individuals struggling for existence.
604
00:34:59.860 --> 00:35:01.940 line:15%
While Lynn and other scientists
605
00:35:01.940 --> 00:35:05.260 line:15%
see in nature interdependent communities of organisms.
606
00:35:07.190 --> 00:35:10.570 line:15%
- Once you realize that you have a choice,
607
00:35:10.570 --> 00:35:15.330 line:15%
you still have to say how will adopting the new paradigm
608
00:35:17.220 --> 00:35:20.650
change the way I behave, we behave.
609
00:35:22.760 --> 00:35:25.760
- [John] I was curious about how Lynn\'s ideas
610
00:35:25.760 --> 00:35:28.570
could change the way we behave
611
00:35:28.570 --> 00:35:30.340
and impact the political realm,
612
00:35:31.300 --> 00:35:36.230
so I traveled to Madrid to talk to Federico Mayor Zaragoza,
613
00:35:36.230 --> 00:35:38.500
a scientist and politician,
614
00:35:38.500 --> 00:35:41.080
former director general of UNESCO,
615
00:35:41.080 --> 00:35:44.250
who has chosen to base his life\'s work
616
00:35:44.250 --> 00:35:46.283
on a symbiotic world view
617
00:35:46.283 --> 00:35:49.200
that Lynn, his colleague, inspired.
618
00:36:17.660 --> 00:36:22.660
- I hope there\'s a scientific revolution going on
619
00:36:25.960 --> 00:36:27.080
because...
620
00:36:31.210 --> 00:36:34.690
I suspect that the competition model
621
00:36:36.880 --> 00:36:40.363
is eventually going to be lethal.
622
00:37:04.658 --> 00:37:06.142
- So at a certain point,
623
00:37:06.142 --> 00:37:09.164
it\'s a matter of choosing your metaphor.
624
00:37:28.792 --> 00:37:32.459
(gentle instrumental music)
625
00:37:51.140 --> 00:37:54.670
- [John] Lynn started college at the University of Chicago
626
00:37:54.670 --> 00:37:59.010
when she was 16 and soon met Carl Sagan,
627
00:37:59.010 --> 00:38:01.210
who would become a well-known astronomer.
628
00:38:02.100 --> 00:38:06.590
They married when Lynn was 19 and had their first son,
629
00:38:06.590 --> 00:38:09.280
Dorion Sagan, when she was 21.
630
00:38:10.270 --> 00:38:12.710
- [Lynn] So I owe my education to two things,
631
00:38:12.710 --> 00:38:13.700
the University of Chicago
632
00:38:13.700 --> 00:38:14.920
and the fact that I met Sagan
633
00:38:14.920 --> 00:38:16.720
on the steps of the math department.
634
00:38:17.820 --> 00:38:21.400 line:15%
- She turned to science, and my father was a part of that,
635
00:38:23.070 --> 00:38:28.070 line:15%
in order to escape the sort of clamor of suburbia.
636
00:38:30.790 --> 00:38:34.650
And then of course, my father was the typical \'50s,
637
00:38:35.518 --> 00:38:36.351
I won\'t say typical,
638
00:38:36.351 --> 00:38:41.351
but in the sense that his husband-type behavior was typical
639
00:38:41.820 --> 00:38:45.050
for \'50s generation males
640
00:38:45.050 --> 00:38:48.100
and expected her to do the cooking and the cleaning
641
00:38:48.100 --> 00:38:49.170
and take care of the kids
642
00:38:49.170 --> 00:38:51.450
and he needed a lot of attention,
643
00:38:51.450 --> 00:38:55.060
but she had huge ambitions of her own.
644
00:38:55.060 --> 00:38:58.727
(gentle instrumental music)
645
00:39:09.162 --> 00:39:12.829
(gentle instrumental music)
646
00:39:22.110 --> 00:39:23.930
- [John] Science is always changing
647
00:39:24.940 --> 00:39:27.180
and often Lynn Margulis led the way.
648
00:39:28.150 --> 00:39:30.030 line:15%
- When I went to school,
649
00:39:30.030 --> 00:39:33.830 line:15%
and probably even for my daughter in school today,
650
00:39:33.830 --> 00:39:37.040 line:15%
all of life is divided into two great kingdoms:
651
00:39:37.040 --> 00:39:38.450
animals and plants.
652
00:39:38.450 --> 00:39:41.770
- So in the very beginning, Karlene Swartz and I realized
653
00:39:41.770 --> 00:39:44.500
we needed a book that had all the organisms in it,
654
00:39:44.500 --> 00:39:45.480
all the higher taxa,
655
00:39:45.480 --> 00:39:48.030
which means all the larger groups of organisms,
656
00:39:48.030 --> 00:39:51.720
- [John] Their book divides life into five kingdoms.
657
00:39:51.720 --> 00:39:55.560
It was instrumental in getting this new way to classify life
658
00:39:55.560 --> 00:39:57.350
into schools around the world.
659
00:39:59.080 --> 00:40:04.080
The five kingdoms are bacteria, protoctists,
660
00:40:04.180 --> 00:40:07.890
fungi, animals, and plants.
661
00:40:09.210 --> 00:40:12.410
So that I could actually see the microorganisms
662
00:40:12.410 --> 00:40:16.260
in the first two kingdoms, I was donated a microscope
663
00:40:16.260 --> 00:40:18.300
by Swift Optical Instruments.
664
00:40:19.360 --> 00:40:23.230
The tiny dark oval moving around there is a bacterium.
665
00:40:24.410 --> 00:40:26.940
There are many bacteria in this drop of water,
666
00:40:27.840 --> 00:40:31.860
but they are hard to see because they are so small,
667
00:40:31.860 --> 00:40:33.950
about 1/1000th of a millimeter.
668
00:40:36.180 --> 00:40:40.100
The much bigger dark creature is a protoctist.
669
00:40:40.100 --> 00:40:44.820
Here\'s a better view of it.
670
00:40:44.820 --> 00:40:48.690
Lynn co-authored a handbook of protoctists.
671
00:40:48.690 --> 00:40:51.030
Called protists, when they are single celled,
672
00:40:51.030 --> 00:40:52.480
the protoctist kingdom
673
00:40:52.480 --> 00:40:55.820
includes an incredible variety of microorganisms
674
00:40:58.540 --> 00:41:00.930
like amoeba and paramecium
675
00:41:01.870 --> 00:41:04.620
as well as larger organisms like kelp.
676
00:41:07.880 --> 00:41:11.800 line:15%
Here I need to add a footnote about viruses.
677
00:41:11.800 --> 00:41:14.370 line:15%
Much smaller than even bacteria,
678
00:41:14.370 --> 00:41:19.370 line:15%
viruses are contagious particles which contain DNA or RNA,
679
00:41:20.620 --> 00:41:24.230
but which cannot reproduce by themselves,
680
00:41:24.230 --> 00:41:26.660
so they are not usually considered to be alive.
681
00:41:27.540 --> 00:41:31.080
- There\'s nothing food or energy that you can give a virus
682
00:41:31.080 --> 00:41:33.160
to make it show the minimal properties of life.
683
00:41:33.160 --> 00:41:36.390 line:15%
- Viruses that maybe we should view as not living
684
00:41:36.390 --> 00:41:38.120 line:15%
but conditionally living.
685
00:41:38.120 --> 00:41:40.720 line:15%
They live conditionally within the host,
686
00:41:40.720 --> 00:41:42.150
but not just as parasites,
687
00:41:42.150 --> 00:41:46.950
but also as forces which are shaping content, mechanism
688
00:41:46.950 --> 00:41:49.040
and overall complexity of genomes.
689
00:41:53.160 --> 00:41:55.680
- [John] The genome is the complete collection
690
00:41:55.680 --> 00:41:59.410
of DNA molecules within a cell.
691
00:41:59.410 --> 00:42:03.900
DNA is a long double-helix shaped molecule
692
00:42:03.900 --> 00:42:05.140
made up of sequences
693
00:42:05.140 --> 00:42:10.080
of four different smaller molecules called nucleotides.
694
00:42:10.080 --> 00:42:13.120
How these nucleotides are arranged
695
00:42:13.120 --> 00:42:16.690
along the two twisted strands of the DNA
696
00:42:16.690 --> 00:42:20.850
is a vital information storage system of the cell.
697
00:42:23.830 --> 00:42:26.720
- The unit of life on Earth is the cell
698
00:42:27.570 --> 00:42:29.280
and there are two kinds of cells,
699
00:42:29.280 --> 00:42:32.440 line:15%
prokaryotic and eukaryotic, but just think this way:
700
00:42:32.524 --> 00:42:34.265
bacteria like cells
701
00:42:34.282 --> 00:42:36.865
and animal, plant, fungal
702
00:42:36.890 --> 00:42:38.700
and so called nucleated cells,
703
00:42:38.700 --> 00:42:41.190
those are the two kinds of life.
704
00:42:41.190 --> 00:42:43.820
- [John] All organisms have DNA.
705
00:42:44.860 --> 00:42:49.860
Bacteria have DNA, but they do not have a nucleus.
706
00:42:49.980 --> 00:42:52.920
All other organisms have a nucleus,
707
00:42:52.920 --> 00:42:57.710
which contains DNA arranged into chromosomes.
708
00:42:57.710 --> 00:43:00.030 line:15%
The chromosomes can be seen here
709
00:43:00.030 --> 00:43:05.000 line:15%
during the process of mitosis as a cell divides.
710
00:43:05.000 --> 00:43:09.100
Lynn studied mitosis in great detail
711
00:43:09.100 --> 00:43:12.800
because she was interested in how it evolved.
712
00:43:17.260 --> 00:43:19.800
- One sees that the origin of life
713
00:43:19.800 --> 00:43:22.950
occurs over three billion years ago,
714
00:43:22.950 --> 00:43:24.460
and you don\'t get a nucleated cell
715
00:43:24.460 --> 00:43:26.510
until something like two billion years ago.
716
00:43:26.510 --> 00:43:29.080
We have a billion and a half years.
717
00:43:29.080 --> 00:43:31.538
Some people, even Steve Gould say,
718
00:43:31.538 --> 00:43:34.650
well, it took so long for anything to happen.
719
00:43:34.650 --> 00:43:38.220
But what he means is that it took so long for my relatives
720
00:43:38.220 --> 00:43:41.260
to show up on the scene, because in fact
721
00:43:41.260 --> 00:43:43.870
in that 1.5 billion years everything happened.
722
00:43:43.870 --> 00:43:45.100
What do I mean?
723
00:43:45.100 --> 00:43:47.900
Photosynthesis evolved, movement evolved,
724
00:43:47.900 --> 00:43:50.960
nitrogen fixation evolved, methanogenesis evolved,
725
00:43:51.800 --> 00:43:53.530
carbon dioxide fixation evolved,
726
00:43:53.530 --> 00:43:56.960
in fact five different kinds of carbon dioxide fixation,
727
00:43:56.960 --> 00:44:01.110
everything evolved, but on a very small scale
728
00:44:01.110 --> 00:44:02.258
and in the water.
729
00:44:02.258 --> 00:44:05.925
(gentle instrumental music)
730
00:44:12.630 --> 00:44:14.030 line:15%
- [John] That\'s the question
731
00:44:14.030 --> 00:44:16.660 line:15%
that propelled Lynn\'s entire career.
732
00:44:17.910 --> 00:44:21.450
How did bacteria, which do not have a nucleus,
733
00:44:21.450 --> 00:44:26.030
evolve into nucleated cells, like the ones in our bodies?
734
00:44:30.890 --> 00:44:33.810
Her quest began in 1959,
735
00:44:34.770 --> 00:44:37.990
when Lynn, then married to Carl Sagan,
736
00:44:37.990 --> 00:44:42.200
was a student of Hans Ris at the University of Wisconsin
737
00:44:42.200 --> 00:44:47.060
getting her masters degree in zoology and genetics.
738
00:44:47.060 --> 00:44:50.200
Ris used to read aloud to his graduate students
739
00:44:50.200 --> 00:44:52.300
from Edmund Wilson\'s book,
740
00:44:52.300 --> 00:44:55.030
The Cell in Development and Heredity.
741
00:44:55.900 --> 00:44:59.000
Lynn writes that when Ris read to us that
742
00:44:59.000 --> 00:45:04.000
more recently Wallin has maintained that mitochondria
743
00:45:04.010 --> 00:45:07.530
may be regarded as symbiotic bacteria,
744
00:45:08.970 --> 00:45:13.345
the course of my professional life was set forever.
745
00:45:13.345 --> 00:45:17.095
(gentle instrumental music)
746
00:45:23.850 --> 00:45:28.150 line:15%
Mitochondria are organelles in eukaryotic cells
747
00:45:28.150 --> 00:45:29.600
that have their own DNA.
748
00:45:31.660 --> 00:45:34.999
Eight years after hearing of Wallin\'s speculation
749
00:45:34.999 --> 00:45:39.050
about mitochondria being symbiotic bacteria,
750
00:45:39.050 --> 00:45:42.390
after getting her masters degree in zoology and genetics
751
00:45:42.390 --> 00:45:45.890
from the University of Wisconsin in 1960,
752
00:45:45.890 --> 00:45:47.730
her PhD in genetics
753
00:45:47.730 --> 00:45:51.700
from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965,
754
00:45:52.860 --> 00:45:56.280
starting her teaching career at Boston University
755
00:45:56.280 --> 00:46:00.370 line:15%
raising two boys, Dorion Sagan and Jeremy Sagan,
756
00:46:01.850 --> 00:46:04.350 line:15%
and divorcing Carl Sagan,
757
00:46:04.350 --> 00:46:09.350 line:15%
Lynn in 1967 published her landmark paper,
758
00:46:09.900 --> 00:46:13.210
On the Origin of Mitosing Cells.
759
00:46:13.210 --> 00:46:17.180
This paper proposed that the nucleated cell
760
00:46:17.180 --> 00:46:21.950
originated through a series of symbiotic mergers
761
00:46:21.950 --> 00:46:24.640
between already existing bacteria.
762
00:46:25.970 --> 00:46:27.984
This was the first statement
763
00:46:27.984 --> 00:46:32.680
of Margulis\' serial endosymbiotic theory
764
00:46:32.680 --> 00:46:35.310
that she worked on for the rest of her life.
765
00:46:36.970 --> 00:46:41.970
I asked historian Jan Saap what makes this paper so special
766
00:46:42.370 --> 00:46:44.720
considering that other scientists
767
00:46:44.720 --> 00:46:47.620
had already proposed similar ideas.
768
00:46:49.120 --> 00:46:52.320
- If you look at Lynn\'s 1967 paper,
769
00:46:52.320 --> 00:46:56.080 line:15%
what was important about that was not the idea
770
00:46:56.080 --> 00:46:57.750 line:15%
that these things might be symbionts,
771
00:46:57.750 --> 00:47:00.130 line:15%
the chloroplasts and mitochondrial symbionts,
772
00:47:00.130 --> 00:47:02.920
but it\'s the putting of it in a geochemical context
773
00:47:05.470 --> 00:47:07.320
- [Narrator] Professor Lynn Margulis.
774
00:47:09.998 --> 00:47:12.070
- The blue-green algae are still here.
775
00:47:12.070 --> 00:47:13.620
Even though now they are relegated
776
00:47:13.620 --> 00:47:16.230
to a position of relative inconspicuousness,
777
00:47:16.230 --> 00:47:17.260
in fact you can just see them
778
00:47:17.260 --> 00:47:19.530
as a kind of scum on the rocks there,
779
00:47:19.530 --> 00:47:21.060
they are still around.
780
00:47:21.060 --> 00:47:22.290
If you look carefully down there,
781
00:47:22.290 --> 00:47:24.760
you can see that there are bubbles coming up
782
00:47:24.760 --> 00:47:25.930
out of the water.
783
00:47:25.930 --> 00:47:27.760
Well the bubbles are just the oxygen.
784
00:47:27.760 --> 00:47:30.930
And that\'s just the oxygen that was responsible,
785
00:47:30.930 --> 00:47:32.680
that is oxygen given off by blue-green algae
786
00:47:32.680 --> 00:47:34.220
was the oxygen that was responsible
787
00:47:34.220 --> 00:47:37.430
for the transition of the entire atmosphere.
788
00:47:37.430 --> 00:47:40.170
The atmosphere went from something very anaerobic,
789
00:47:40.170 --> 00:47:44.890
no oxygen at all, to the present level about 20% oxygen
790
00:47:44.890 --> 00:47:48.020
something like 2,000 million years ago,
791
00:47:48.020 --> 00:47:50.200
plus or minus a hundred million years.
792
00:47:50.200 --> 00:47:51.970
And it\'s just those blue-green algae,
793
00:47:51.970 --> 00:47:53.960
that is, their ancestors of course,
794
00:47:53.960 --> 00:47:55.790
that led to that transition.
795
00:47:58.910 --> 00:48:02.300
So one can imagine that early scene
796
00:48:02.300 --> 00:48:03.880
where blue-green algae
797
00:48:03.880 --> 00:48:07.180
were giving off this enormous pollutant, that is oxygen,
798
00:48:07.180 --> 00:48:08.440
into the atmosphere
799
00:48:08.440 --> 00:48:10.840
and poisoning just about everything around them.
800
00:48:12.420 --> 00:48:14.090
One of the ways of coping
801
00:48:14.090 --> 00:48:16.750
with the increased oxygen back then,
802
00:48:16.750 --> 00:48:18.470
and a way I think that was very important
803
00:48:18.470 --> 00:48:22.810
in the origin of the complex cells was by symbiosis.
804
00:48:22.810 --> 00:48:23.938
Now what do we mean?
805
00:48:23.938 --> 00:48:26.730
Two bacteria, very different kinds of bacteria
806
00:48:26.730 --> 00:48:30.400
probably got together and ended up using the oxygen.
807
00:48:30.400 --> 00:48:33.470
The first of these bacteria simply broke down sugars
808
00:48:33.470 --> 00:48:35.790
and in fact couldn\'t use the oxygen at all,
809
00:48:35.790 --> 00:48:38.090
the second took the breakdown products
810
00:48:38.090 --> 00:48:41.520
and with oxygen burnt them essentially
811
00:48:41.520 --> 00:48:43.440
and derived a lot of energy from that
812
00:48:43.440 --> 00:48:45.950
and the two together made a complex.
813
00:48:45.950 --> 00:48:48.130
And this complex after a long period of time
814
00:48:48.130 --> 00:48:49.710
and many, many changes
815
00:48:49.710 --> 00:48:51.840
became a very successful kind of organism.
816
00:48:51.840 --> 00:48:54.170
And in fact it\'s that kind of organism
817
00:48:54.170 --> 00:48:57.280
that is the ancestor to all the higher cells.
818
00:48:57.280 --> 00:48:59.060
- Wow, we now have a story.
819
00:48:59.060 --> 00:49:03.190
We try to tell a narrative about what happened here, right?
820
00:49:03.190 --> 00:49:05.550
And that was completely novel.
821
00:49:05.550 --> 00:49:07.590
And Lynn was completely synthetic.
822
00:49:07.590 --> 00:49:10.950
And her 1970s book called The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells,
823
00:49:10.950 --> 00:49:12.120
it\'s a masterpiece.
824
00:49:12.120 --> 00:49:16.250
Her book Symbiosis in Cell Evolution of 1981,
825
00:49:16.250 --> 00:49:19.340
these things, she was drawing on cytology,
826
00:49:19.340 --> 00:49:22.550
and on molecular biology, and on geo-chemistry,
827
00:49:23.680 --> 00:49:26.860
putting things in context and telling a story.
828
00:49:26.860 --> 00:49:28.960
- The things that were once bacteria
829
00:49:28.960 --> 00:49:31.620
after time became the mitochondria
830
00:49:31.620 --> 00:49:34.470
that we find in all of our cells, all the plant cells,
831
00:49:34.470 --> 00:49:37.130
all the animal cells, and even all the fungal cells.
832
00:49:38.210 --> 00:49:41.260 line:15%
- In other words, we are made up
833
00:49:41.260 --> 00:49:44.970 line:15%
out of deeply collaborative bacteria.
834
00:49:46.950 --> 00:49:49.210
She was absolutely spot on
835
00:49:49.210 --> 00:49:52.600
at least about mitochondria and chloroplasts
836
00:49:52.600 --> 00:49:55.160
and that made her a huge name in science.
837
00:49:55.160 --> 00:49:58.620
That hit the bull\'s eye, and she had to have tenacity
838
00:49:58.620 --> 00:50:01.290
and daring to push that idea through
839
00:50:01.290 --> 00:50:03.270
because it was ridiculed to begin with.
840
00:50:03.270 --> 00:50:08.270 line:15%
- It got the regular academic scientists rather upset.
841
00:50:09.710 --> 00:50:10.543
They didn\'t like it.
842
00:50:10.543 --> 00:50:12.930
It changed the rules of the game
843
00:50:12.930 --> 00:50:14.550
and this is not popular ever.
844
00:50:15.390 --> 00:50:19.080 line:15%
- At that time, I was lecturing to first year students
845
00:50:19.080 --> 00:50:21.070
in Oxford University,
846
00:50:21.070 --> 00:50:24.270
and I spent about half a lecture on Lynn\'s ideas,
847
00:50:25.700 --> 00:50:30.700
and a few weeks later, a senior colleague of mine said,
848
00:50:30.860 --> 00:50:34.740
my students tell me you\'ve been teaching them this.
849
00:50:34.740 --> 00:50:39.740
Oh, that\'s rubbish, he said, you can\'t do that.
850
00:50:40.110 --> 00:50:42.710
I persisted, and what is remarkable,
851
00:50:42.710 --> 00:50:45.788
is how 10 or 15 years later,
852
00:50:45.788 --> 00:50:48.200
it would be automatic to lecture about this.
853
00:50:48.200 --> 00:50:49.680
- But eventually the evidence came in
854
00:50:49.680 --> 00:50:50.920
and she was vindicated.
855
00:50:50.920 --> 00:50:54.490 line:15%
- Using genetic analyses, the plastids,
856
00:50:54.490 --> 00:50:59.040 line:15%
the green parts of plants, were definitively traced
857
00:50:59.040 --> 00:51:03.190 line:15%
to bacterial ancestors and also of course the mitochondria,
858
00:51:03.190 --> 00:51:06.070 line:15%
the oxygen using organelles in our cells
859
00:51:06.070 --> 00:51:09.328 line:15%
and the cells of plants and fungi and protists
860
00:51:09.328 --> 00:51:11.940 line:15%
also have been traced to bacteria.
861
00:51:11.940 --> 00:51:15.670
- That really closes that particular controversy in a sense.
862
00:51:15.670 --> 00:51:19.700
Now we have definitive evidence and we can investigate this.
863
00:51:23.931 --> 00:51:27.598
(gentle instrumental music)
864
00:51:36.660 --> 00:51:38.830 line:15%
Lynn Margulis discovered symbiosis.
865
00:51:38.830 --> 00:51:39.890
No, she didn\'t.
866
00:51:39.890 --> 00:51:41.940
Lynn Margulis discovered that chloroplasts are symbionts.
867
00:51:41.940 --> 00:51:42.773
No, she didn\'t.
868
00:51:42.773 --> 00:51:43.890
Didn\'t discover anything.
869
00:51:43.890 --> 00:51:45.060
Nothing like that happened.
870
00:51:45.060 --> 00:51:45.893
- And the reason you say that she did--
871
00:51:45.893 --> 00:51:47.000
- [John] Then what did she do?
872
00:51:50.820 --> 00:51:53.930
- She promoted and championed symbiosis
873
00:51:53.930 --> 00:51:56.320
as a source of evolutionary innovation,
874
00:51:56.320 --> 00:51:59.160
put the idea that we can study cells
875
00:51:59.160 --> 00:52:01.310 line:15%
in an evolutionary context,
876
00:52:01.310 --> 00:52:04.620 line:15%
in a paleo-ecological context.
877
00:52:04.620 --> 00:52:07.439
Understood that symbiosis is a primary driver
878
00:52:07.439 --> 00:52:11.840
of early evolution, was extremely important.
879
00:52:11.840 --> 00:52:15.370
Putting microbes back into biology as life giving forces,
880
00:52:15.370 --> 00:52:18.720
look at the diversity of microbes, especially protists.
881
00:52:18.720 --> 00:52:19.553
She did a lot.
882
00:52:19.553 --> 00:52:20.386
She did a lot.
883
00:52:21.360 --> 00:52:22.193
- [John] And Gaia.
884
00:52:22.326 --> 00:52:23.159
- And Gaia.
885
00:52:23.510 --> 00:52:26.110
The reason why people make up these myths
886
00:52:26.110 --> 00:52:30.020
is because the myths are embedded in a bad narrative
887
00:52:30.020 --> 00:52:33.290
that begins with bad assumptions about what discovery is.
888
00:52:33.290 --> 00:52:34.380
Discovery is not a thing.
889
00:52:34.380 --> 00:52:35.520
It\'s not an event.
890
00:52:35.520 --> 00:52:37.410
And they\'re not associated with individuals.
891
00:52:37.410 --> 00:52:38.460
Stop being heroic.
892
00:52:38.460 --> 00:52:39.960
It\'s part of the all American myth again.
893
00:52:39.960 --> 00:52:41.230
You\'re back to individualism.
894
00:52:41.230 --> 00:52:42.940
You think individuals make discoveries.
895
00:52:42.940 --> 00:52:45.690
Discoveries are processes but what individuals can do
896
00:52:46.670 --> 00:52:48.420
is promote different ways of seeing
897
00:52:49.890 --> 00:52:51.850
and different ways of doing.
898
00:52:51.850 --> 00:52:53.820
That\'s phenomenal.
899
00:52:53.820 --> 00:52:58.820
Once in a while, you get these extraordinary individuals
900
00:53:00.150 --> 00:53:01.450
and Lynn was one of those.
901
00:53:03.300 --> 00:53:07.030 line:15%
- So these are my illustrious predecessors in this argument,
902
00:53:07.030 --> 00:53:09.360 line:15%
the three Russians with the symbiogenesis
903
00:53:09.360 --> 00:53:11.620 line:15%
and Wallin with symbioticism.
904
00:53:11.620 --> 00:53:13.930 line:15%
Here\'s Faminitzyn, here\'s Kozo-Polyanski,
905
00:53:13.930 --> 00:53:15.940
and here\'s Mereschkhovski,
906
00:53:15.940 --> 00:53:17.750
and these are the symbiogeneticists.
907
00:53:17.750 --> 00:53:19.960
Here is Ivan Wallin.
908
00:53:19.960 --> 00:53:24.250
Ivan Wallin is one of the unsung heroes of American biology.
909
00:53:24.250 --> 00:53:27.510
He completely independently got the idea of symbiosis
910
00:53:27.510 --> 00:53:29.440
being involved in cell evolution.
911
00:53:29.440 --> 00:53:32.010
And he was laughed out of New York
912
00:53:32.010 --> 00:53:34.210
and that\'s enough to be laughed anywhere else.
913
00:53:34.660 --> 00:53:39.090
Wallin wrote in book Symbioticism and the Origin of Species.
914
00:53:39.090 --> 00:53:41.950
It\'s a rather startling proposal that bacteria,
915
00:53:41.950 --> 00:53:45.690
the organisms which are popularly associated with disease,
916
00:53:45.690 --> 00:53:48.230
may represent the fundamental causative factor
917
00:53:48.230 --> 00:53:49.640
in the origin of species.
918
00:53:49.640 --> 00:53:51.160
And he was completely right.
919
00:53:51.160 --> 00:53:53.140
Bacteria and the acquisition
920
00:53:53.140 --> 00:53:56.085
and integration of bacteria into other organisms
921
00:53:56.085 --> 00:53:57.970
is a form of symbiogenesis
922
00:53:57.970 --> 00:54:01.310
and it\'s the form that I think is the most important way
923
00:54:01.310 --> 00:54:04.720
novelty is generated in the evolutionary process.
924
00:54:05.630 --> 00:54:08.220
- [John] Working with her colleague Victor Fet,
925
00:54:08.220 --> 00:54:10.330
Lynn helped edit and arrange
926
00:54:10.330 --> 00:54:13.280
for the first English language publication
927
00:54:13.280 --> 00:54:17.830
of the Russian scientist Kozo-Polyansky\'s book of 1924,
928
00:54:19.050 --> 00:54:22.390
Symbiogenesis, a New Principle of Evolution.
929
00:54:24.030 --> 00:54:25.870 line:15%
- She loved to develop exchanges
930
00:54:25.870 --> 00:54:29.390 line:15%
with people around the world and in societies,
931
00:54:29.390 --> 00:54:33.450
and in places which otherwise often seemed closed to us.
932
00:54:33.450 --> 00:54:35.690
She would open and break down those barriers
933
00:54:35.690 --> 00:54:38.290
and start to get that information flowing.
934
00:54:38.290 --> 00:54:41.520
And I sometimes refer to Lynn\'s contribution
935
00:54:42.913 --> 00:54:46.550
as evolution\'s most beautiful idea,
936
00:54:46.550 --> 00:54:49.080
in the sense that philosophically
937
00:54:49.080 --> 00:54:52.870
we tend to elevate cooperation and working together
938
00:54:52.870 --> 00:54:57.550
above simply working individually and selfishly.
939
00:54:57.550 --> 00:54:59.760
We\'re utterly dependent as a society
940
00:55:00.780 --> 00:55:04.970
with engaging with this deep thought
941
00:55:04.970 --> 00:55:07.860
that arises out of the way that Lynn\'s helped us
942
00:55:07.860 --> 00:55:10.310
to see the whole story of life itself.
943
00:55:11.890 --> 00:55:14.020
- [John] Here\'s a graphic and an animation
944
00:55:14.020 --> 00:55:17.880
Lynn Margulis often used to illustrate her story
945
00:55:17.880 --> 00:55:20.620
of the early evolution of life.
946
00:55:20.620 --> 00:55:23.510
Through three symbiotic fusions,
947
00:55:23.510 --> 00:55:27.690
four different types of bacteria joined forces,
948
00:55:27.690 --> 00:55:31.120
to create all the other organisms.
949
00:55:31.120 --> 00:55:35.060
First, a fermenting archaebacterium
950
00:55:35.060 --> 00:55:38.930
joined with swimming bacterium, a spirochete,
951
00:55:39.810 --> 00:55:43.250
to form an anaerobic protoctist,
952
00:55:43.250 --> 00:55:45.080
which is a microorganism
953
00:55:45.080 --> 00:55:48.890
that does not require or even want oxygen.
954
00:55:48.890 --> 00:55:52.730
This fusion, the most contentious part of her theory,
955
00:55:52.730 --> 00:55:57.630
formed the tail-like undulipoda, the nucleus,
956
00:55:57.630 --> 00:56:01.270
and the internal structures necessary for mitosis.
957
00:56:03.420 --> 00:56:06.640
Next an oxygen breathing bacterium
958
00:56:06.640 --> 00:56:09.720
joined with this anaerobic protoctist
959
00:56:09.720 --> 00:56:12.410
to form an oxygen breathing protoctist.
960
00:56:15.210 --> 00:56:18.780
The oxygen breathing bacterium became the mitochondria.
961
00:56:22.430 --> 00:56:25.770
This evolved into all animals and fungi.
962
00:56:28.030 --> 00:56:31.970
Next, a photosynthetic cyanobacterium
963
00:56:31.970 --> 00:56:35.220
joined with the oxygen breathing protoctist
964
00:56:35.220 --> 00:56:39.412
to create a photosynthesizing and oxygen breathing cell
965
00:56:39.412 --> 00:56:43.430
that evolved into algae and then all the plants.
966
00:56:47.630 --> 00:56:50.860
The cyanobacteria became the chloroplasts.
967
00:56:53.980 --> 00:56:57.180
Although the mergers that formed the chloroplasts
968
00:56:57.180 --> 00:57:00.060
and the mitochondria were well-established
969
00:57:00.060 --> 00:57:02.050
by molecular analysis
970
00:57:02.050 --> 00:57:04.260
and made it into the textbooks,
971
00:57:04.260 --> 00:57:06.370
it was that first fusion
972
00:57:06.370 --> 00:57:09.620
that became Lynn Margulis\' greatest challenge.
973
00:57:11.380 --> 00:57:16.380
- I remember saying to her around 1989 when I first met her,
974
00:57:16.760 --> 00:57:18.310
I said, you know, you\'ll only be remembered
975
00:57:18.310 --> 00:57:19.143
for your mistakes.
976
00:57:19.143 --> 00:57:20.200
Why don\'t you give that one up
977
00:57:20.200 --> 00:57:21.650
because you got the other two in the bag.
978
00:57:21.650 --> 00:57:23.230
Let\'s move on that one, but she wasn\'t like that.
979
00:57:23.230 --> 00:57:24.890
- What did she say?
- Always wanted to push.
980
00:57:24.890 --> 00:57:26.590
No, she says, I\'m right.
981
00:57:26.590 --> 00:57:29.540
- [John] In order to get even close to understanding
982
00:57:29.540 --> 00:57:32.750
that first merger, the controversial one
983
00:57:32.750 --> 00:57:36.400
between an archaebacterium and a spirochete,
984
00:57:36.400 --> 00:57:40.850
I realized that I had to learn more about spirochetes,
985
00:57:40.850 --> 00:57:43.060
so I traveled to Oslo, Norway
986
00:57:43.060 --> 00:57:46.732
to visit Lynn\'s colleague of many years, Morten Laane.
987
00:57:51.233 --> 00:57:54.580
It looks like it\'s moving like waves,
988
00:57:54.580 --> 00:57:56.950 line:15%
but it\'s actually spinning.
989
00:58:00.501 --> 00:58:01.960
- [John] We looked at the blood of a person
990
00:58:01.960 --> 00:58:06.250
infected with the spirochete that causes Lyme disease,
991
00:58:06.250 --> 00:58:10.020
And he explained how, when exposed to antibiotics,
992
00:58:10.020 --> 00:58:13.360
the spirochetes form round bodies
993
00:58:13.360 --> 00:58:16.110
and hide in the red blood cells
994
00:58:16.110 --> 00:58:19.910
only to come out months or years later, as we saw here.
995
00:58:21.020 --> 00:58:23.140
This is persistent Lyme disease.
996
00:58:24.170 --> 00:58:27.470
In Lynn\'s hypothesis, the spirochetes
997
00:58:27.470 --> 00:58:31.400
became the cell\'s cilia and flagella,
998
00:58:31.400 --> 00:58:33.680
which are now called undulipodia.
999
00:58:33.680 --> 00:58:36.420
- Cilia and flagella are these little hairs
1000
00:58:36.420 --> 00:58:39.432
that stick out of almost all the complex cells.
1001
00:58:39.432 --> 00:58:42.920
Now I think that we have a modern counterpart
1002
00:58:42.920 --> 00:58:46.090
for what was once a free living cilia and flagellum.
1003
00:58:46.090 --> 00:58:49.530
That is, we have certain modern bacteria called spirochetes
1004
00:58:49.530 --> 00:58:51.410
that are really very similar.
1005
00:58:51.410 --> 00:58:55.110
- [John] Her hypothesis also proposes that the spirochetes
1006
00:58:55.110 --> 00:58:58.530
were involved in the origin of mitosis,
1007
00:58:58.530 --> 00:58:59.930
the division of the DNA.
1008
00:59:02.210 --> 00:59:05.440
Most scientists believe that this part
1009
00:59:05.440 --> 00:59:09.740
of Lynn\'s endosymbiotic theory is not well supported
1010
00:59:09.740 --> 00:59:12.420
by molecular evidence and is wrong.
1011
00:59:13.690 --> 00:59:15.970
But as Morten Laane pointed out to me...
1012
00:59:24.528 --> 00:59:28.528
- [Lynn] These are the spirochetes on Mixotrica,
1013
00:59:29.662 --> 00:59:31.579
and both the Treponemes
1014
00:59:32.984 --> 00:59:36.317
and the large spirochete is still alive.
1015
00:59:39.063 --> 00:59:42.730
(gentle instrumental music)
1016
00:59:45.712 --> 00:59:47.890
- [John] As I look at this picture I wonder,
1017
00:59:47.890 --> 00:59:50.840
how did she manage to do so much?
1018
00:59:51.770 --> 00:59:54.820 line:15%
Here she is with her sons Dorion and Jeremy,
1019
00:59:56.080 --> 00:59:58.600 line:15%
her second husband, Thomas Margulis,
1020
00:59:58.600 --> 01:00:03.020 line:15%
a crystallographer, her third son Zachary Margulis,
1021
01:00:03.020 --> 01:00:05.520 line:15%
and her daughter, Jennifer Margulis.
1022
01:00:06.980 --> 01:00:08.580 line:15%
- She often had young women come to her
1023
01:00:08.580 --> 01:00:11.190 line:15%
and say how can you balance this, that, and the other
1024
01:00:11.190 --> 01:00:12.390 line:15%
and she\'d say you can\'t.
1025
01:00:13.780 --> 01:00:15.600
You\'ll work it out the way you work it out.
1026
01:00:15.600 --> 01:00:18.370
- [John] Lynn Margulis\' theory of endosymbiosis
1027
01:00:18.370 --> 01:00:19.500
made her famous.
1028
01:00:21.570 --> 01:00:24.340
She won numerous awards and honorary degrees,
1029
01:00:26.150 --> 01:00:29.560
including admission to the National Academy of Sciences
1030
01:00:29.560 --> 01:00:31.700
and the National Medal of Science.
1031
01:00:34.020 --> 01:00:38.450
Margulis was a visiting professor at many universities,
1032
01:00:38.450 --> 01:00:42.770
including Oxford and the University of Barcelona.
1033
01:00:42.770 --> 01:00:47.770 line:15%
- Lynn lived for many years in Barcelona,
1034
01:00:53.465 --> 01:00:57.780
- [John] In 1988, Lynn was lured away from Boston University
1035
01:00:57.780 --> 01:01:00.890
to become a distinguished university professor
1036
01:01:00.890 --> 01:01:03.920 line:15%
at the University of Massachusetts Amherst,
1037
01:01:03.920 --> 01:01:06.040 line:15%
where she spent the rest of her career.
1038
01:01:07.500 --> 01:01:10.060
While she did receive funding from NASA,
1039
01:01:10.060 --> 01:01:13.430
Lynn never received major government funding
1040
01:01:13.430 --> 01:01:16.350
from the National Science Foundation or NIH.
1041
01:01:17.480 --> 01:01:21.310
- Because you have frankly a bunch of white guys in a row
1042
01:01:22.400 --> 01:01:25.370
who are getting all their grant money for saying X.
1043
01:01:25.370 --> 01:01:27.230
And if she said Y,
1044
01:01:27.230 --> 01:01:30.490
it was like, it\'s that Margulis woman again.
1045
01:01:30.490 --> 01:01:31.790
- You always think of scientists
1046
01:01:31.790 --> 01:01:35.720
in some ways like Mr. Spock in Star Trek,
1047
01:01:35.720 --> 01:01:37.600
that you\'re supposed to be disengaged,
1048
01:01:37.600 --> 01:01:39.360
you\'re supposed to be unemotional
1049
01:01:39.360 --> 01:01:41.810
and so on about your science.
1050
01:01:41.810 --> 01:01:43.400
Well, this is exactly the opposite.
1051
01:01:43.400 --> 01:01:46.830
If you\'re making new science and having new ideas,
1052
01:01:46.830 --> 01:01:48.500
you have to be passionate about them.
1053
01:01:48.500 --> 01:01:51.960
You have to grab a hold of this idea and push, push, push.
1054
01:01:51.960 --> 01:01:53.500
She had extraordinary energy.
1055
01:01:53.500 --> 01:01:55.490
She was out there doing presentations
1056
01:01:55.490 --> 01:01:58.120
and she was in the media a lot as well.
1057
01:01:59.070 --> 01:02:00.750
And as a woman in science,
1058
01:02:00.750 --> 01:02:02.910
don\'t forget, she\'s one of very few,
1059
01:02:02.910 --> 01:02:04.660
even though she didn\'t play that card.
1060
01:02:04.660 --> 01:02:06.270 line:15%
- She really liked being Lynn Margulis.
1061
01:02:06.270 --> 01:02:07.970 line:15%
She really liked being flamboyant.
1062
01:02:09.650 --> 01:02:14.530
At the same time, she had I think a very deep humility
1063
01:02:14.530 --> 01:02:19.240
about her own knowledge and what other people knew.
1064
01:02:19.240 --> 01:02:24.240
She really was humble in the face of nature.
1065
01:02:28.600 --> 01:02:33.290
- [Lorraine] This is an amoeba from the Delta del Ebro, 40x.
1066
01:02:39.197 --> 01:02:42.864
(gentle instrumental music)
1067
01:03:43.325 --> 01:03:46.992
(gentle instrumental music)
1068
01:03:55.210 --> 01:03:59.260 line:15%
- [Man] One more question.
1069
01:04:03.235 --> 01:04:04.068
- You ask them.
1070
01:04:06.021 --> 01:04:07.520
Were the bugs our ancestors?
1071
01:04:07.520 --> 01:04:09.640
Absolutely they were our ancestors.
1072
01:04:09.640 --> 01:04:12.950
There\'s certain sets of bacteria were our ancestors,
1073
01:04:12.950 --> 01:04:15.180
they became protists which are our ancestors,
1074
01:04:15.180 --> 01:04:17.670
this protists became animals which are our ancestors
1075
01:04:17.670 --> 01:04:20.560
and the animals, we are totally connected to them.
1076
01:04:20.560 --> 01:04:22.640
That\'s probably why we\'re so mean to them.
1077
01:04:22.640 --> 01:04:25.190 line:15%
You\'re always meanest to your relatives aren\'t you?
1078
01:04:30.040 --> 01:04:32.790 line:15%
- She pointed out basically that microbes run the show.
1079
01:04:33.810 --> 01:04:35.460 line:15%
Microbes rule the world.
1080
01:04:35.460 --> 01:04:36.850 line:15%
They have been doing so
1081
01:04:36.850 --> 01:04:40.030
ever since life began 3.5 billion years ago, or so.
1082
01:04:41.020 --> 01:04:42.350
They\'ve been regulating the atmosphere
1083
01:04:42.350 --> 01:04:44.960
and regulating the climate, cycling nutrients,
1084
01:04:46.390 --> 01:04:50.140
creating complex ecosystems, communicating with each other.
1085
01:04:50.140 --> 01:04:51.910 line:15%
- People used to think it was just a plain rock,
1086
01:04:51.910 --> 01:04:54.920 line:15%
but we now know that it\'s a skyscraper of bacteria.
1087
01:04:56.176 --> 01:04:58.060 line:15%
It was made by living organisms
1088
01:04:58.060 --> 01:05:00.780 line:15%
many hundreds of millions of years ago.
1089
01:05:00.780 --> 01:05:02.400
And it\'s just from those kinds of rocks
1090
01:05:02.400 --> 01:05:05.320
that we reconstruct the early history of life on Earth.
1091
01:05:05.320 --> 01:05:09.880 line:15%
- Most of bacterial metabolism, and it\'s pretty diverse,
1092
01:05:09.880 --> 01:05:12.350
there\'s a lot of different metabolism,
1093
01:05:12.350 --> 01:05:15.380
evolved probably in the first billion years or so.
1094
01:05:16.660 --> 01:05:18.540
- [John] Another quick footnote.
1095
01:05:18.540 --> 01:05:23.080
Metabolism is the flow of energy and matter
1096
01:05:23.080 --> 01:05:26.920
through a network of chemical reactions within an organism
1097
01:05:26.920 --> 01:05:30.770
that allows it to maintain and perpetuate itself.
1098
01:05:31.940 --> 01:05:34.660
- We\'re not all that metabolically complex.
1099
01:05:34.660 --> 01:05:36.370
We humans, animals in general,
1100
01:05:36.370 --> 01:05:38.000
not that metabolically complex.
1101
01:05:38.000 --> 01:05:40.120
We\'re taking in food and some oxygen,
1102
01:05:41.260 --> 01:05:44.100
breaking it down and releasing a waste product.
1103
01:05:44.100 --> 01:05:44.933
That\'s it.
1104
01:05:44.933 --> 01:05:46.230
Bacteria would laugh at that.
1105
01:05:46.230 --> 01:05:47.380
We invented that.
1106
01:05:47.380 --> 01:05:49.100
That was like three billion years.
1107
01:05:49.100 --> 01:05:50.870
We figured that one out.
1108
01:05:50.870 --> 01:05:52.760
A few of us do it,
1109
01:05:52.760 --> 01:05:55.110
and then we\'re doing some other things as well.
1110
01:05:56.660 --> 01:06:01.220
What we are, are multicellular variations on a theme
1111
01:06:01.220 --> 01:06:04.630
that was established billions of years ago by the bacteria.
1112
01:06:05.964 --> 01:06:09.631
(gentle instrumental music)
1113
01:06:11.690 --> 01:06:13.460 line:15%
- You have to imagine the Archaean
1114
01:06:13.460 --> 01:06:16.820 line:15%
as nothing but these anaerobic bacterial ecosystems,
1115
01:06:16.820 --> 01:06:19.120
low lying communities everywhere on Earth.
1116
01:06:21.900 --> 01:06:25.110
We call it the planetary petticoat,
1117
01:06:25.110 --> 01:06:27.750
the undergarment of the Earth.
1118
01:06:27.750 --> 01:06:29.310
This is the tissue of Gaia.
1119
01:06:31.154 --> 01:06:34.190
If you plot on the map of Eastern North America
1120
01:06:34.190 --> 01:06:37.640
from Halifax, Nova Scotia all the way down
1121
01:06:37.640 --> 01:06:40.080
to the southern part of South Carolina,
1122
01:06:40.080 --> 01:06:42.070
it\'s the same active mat.
1123
01:06:42.070 --> 01:06:45.480
Now, people put houses and they destroy pieces of it
1124
01:06:45.480 --> 01:06:46.670
but it grows around.
1125
01:06:46.670 --> 01:06:49.400
You have a complete continuous existence
1126
01:06:49.400 --> 01:06:50.660
of the fabric of life.
1127
01:06:51.540 --> 01:06:55.470 line:15%
- We are on Cape Cod Bay, a particular section of the Bay
1128
01:06:55.470 --> 01:06:58.010 line:15%
that gets extremely low tides.
1129
01:06:58.010 --> 01:07:01.280
And a certain microbial community finds this
1130
01:07:01.280 --> 01:07:05.110
to be an absolutely wonderful place to photosynthesize
1131
01:07:05.110 --> 01:07:08.060
and to do other sorts of metabolisms.
1132
01:07:08.060 --> 01:07:10.120
- [John] While Betsey Dexter Dyer and I
1133
01:07:10.120 --> 01:07:13.860
were exploring the bacterial mats on Cape Cod Bay,
1134
01:07:13.860 --> 01:07:17.390
a woman came up to me and wondered what we were doing.
1135
01:07:17.390 --> 01:07:20.050
I told her that we were investigating bacteria.
1136
01:07:20.050 --> 01:07:23.364
Oh my god, are they dangerous, she asked.
1137
01:07:23.364 --> 01:07:27.197
(dramatic instrumental music)
1138
01:07:39.000 --> 01:07:40.370
- Most people hate bacteria.
1139
01:07:40.370 --> 01:07:42.870
They think it\'s disease and they don\'t understand
1140
01:07:42.870 --> 01:07:45.610
that we are 10% dry weight bacteria
1141
01:07:45.610 --> 01:07:47.110
and that we need the bacteria.
1142
01:07:52.986 --> 01:07:54.360
It looks like sand but it\'s not sand.
1143
01:07:55.483 --> 01:07:57.440
It\'s all like a carpet.
1144
01:08:00.500 --> 01:08:03.140
Can you get that idea that it\'s a carpet?
1145
01:08:03.140 --> 01:08:05.660
See the strings there?
- Yes.
1146
01:08:05.660 --> 01:08:09.967
- [Lynn] Those are cyanobacteria, filamentous cyanobacteria,
1147
01:08:09.967 --> 01:08:13.730
and they are the formers of the mat.
1148
01:08:13.730 --> 01:08:15.230
That\'s what forms them the strings.
1149
01:08:15.230 --> 01:08:16.530
You see the strings going?
1150
01:08:17.430 --> 01:08:18.410
There.
1151
01:08:18.410 --> 01:08:21.040
Now, if you see a string with your eye,
1152
01:08:21.040 --> 01:08:24.080
that means there are hundreds of little microscopic ones.
1153
01:08:25.090 --> 01:08:27.720
- One of the most dominant members of this community
1154
01:08:28.690 --> 01:08:33.030
is the cyanobacteria, also sometimes called the blue-greens.
1155
01:08:33.030 --> 01:08:36.170
They are major photosynthesizers,
1156
01:08:36.170 --> 01:08:37.480
and when I say photosynthesis,
1157
01:08:37.480 --> 01:08:40.730
I mean that they are using their bluish-greenish pigment
1158
01:08:40.730 --> 01:08:43.410
to capture energy from the sun
1159
01:08:43.410 --> 01:08:47.020
and to use that energy to make sugars.
1160
01:08:47.020 --> 01:08:52.020
- [Lynn] Top layer\'s salt, different kinds of salt and sand.
1161
01:08:52.570 --> 01:08:54.010
Second layer, green.
1162
01:08:54.010 --> 01:08:54.843
You see this?
1163
01:08:54.843 --> 01:08:56.110
Can you see this?
- Yes.
1164
01:08:56.110 --> 01:08:59.080
- Second layer, green, cyanobacteria,
1165
01:08:59.080 --> 01:09:01.850
masters of the world, the cyanobacteria.
1166
01:09:01.850 --> 01:09:04.830
It\'s the highest level of evolution.
1167
01:09:04.830 --> 01:09:05.810
Why?
1168
01:09:05.810 --> 01:09:10.810
Because they live off carbon dioxide, plentiful, available.
1169
01:09:12.410 --> 01:09:15.790
They live off sunlight as the source of energy,
1170
01:09:15.790 --> 01:09:18.580
plentiful, available from the very beginning.
1171
01:09:18.580 --> 01:09:20.480
Water, and that\'s all.
1172
01:09:21.930 --> 01:09:22.880
That\'s all.
1173
01:09:22.880 --> 01:09:26.800
- The other major photosynthesizer we saw today
1174
01:09:26.800 --> 01:09:28.740
are the purple sulfur bacteria.
1175
01:09:29.620 --> 01:09:31.700
- Underneath, the pink.
1176
01:09:31.700 --> 01:09:32.570
Now, this is the very...
1177
01:09:32.570 --> 01:09:34.230
Let me see if I can say this very clearly.
1178
01:09:34.230 --> 01:09:37.650
The pink are also photosynthetic bacteria,
1179
01:09:39.280 --> 01:09:44.280
but they use hydrogen sulfide, H2S, in photosynthesis.
1180
01:09:46.790 --> 01:09:49.950
They take away the hydrogens to make their food.
1181
01:09:49.950 --> 01:09:51.440
They\'re left with sulfur.
1182
01:09:52.670 --> 01:09:54.960
They are the ancestors of the green.
1183
01:09:54.960 --> 01:09:58.260
Why, because the green do something unbelievable.
1184
01:09:58.260 --> 01:10:00.924
They use H2O for photosynthesis.
1185
01:10:00.924 --> 01:10:03.190
They also take the hydrogens away
1186
01:10:03.190 --> 01:10:05.290
and put it to the carbon to make their food.
1187
01:10:05.290 --> 01:10:10.240
If you take hydrogens away from water, what do you get?
1188
01:10:10.240 --> 01:10:11.073
What\'s left?
1189
01:10:11.073 --> 01:10:12.510
You take hydrogens away from water?
1190
01:10:12.510 --> 01:10:13.500
Water is H20.
1191
01:10:13.500 --> 01:10:14.420
You take hydrogens away.
1192
01:10:14.420 --> 01:10:15.350
What do you get?
- Oxygen.
1193
01:10:15.350 --> 01:10:16.950
- You have oxygen left.
1194
01:10:16.950 --> 01:10:19.770
So whereas the pink ones deposit sulfur
1195
01:10:20.660 --> 01:10:23.750
and are stuck completely if there\'s no volcanic H2S.
1196
01:10:23.750 --> 01:10:26.900
If there\'s no H2S, they can\'t do anything.
1197
01:10:26.900 --> 01:10:30.080
The green ones take H2O.
1198
01:10:30.981 --> 01:10:32.850
So, they can move anywhere.
1199
01:10:32.850 --> 01:10:35.460
They can go anywhere because H2O is everywhere.
1200
01:10:35.460 --> 01:10:37.640
Every place they go, they make oxygen bubbles.
1201
01:10:37.640 --> 01:10:38.740
They change the world.
1202
01:10:40.380 --> 01:10:42.910
So they run the planet.
1203
01:10:42.910 --> 01:10:44.330
We think we run the planet
1204
01:10:44.330 --> 01:10:46.890
but we wouldn\'t run it for long without food.
1205
01:10:46.890 --> 01:10:49.000
They are the ultimate food supply.
1206
01:10:49.000 --> 01:10:50.600
When you look at the plants around here,
1207
01:10:50.600 --> 01:10:53.880
all this vegetation, the reason it\'s green
1208
01:10:53.880 --> 01:10:55.460
is because they\'re relatives.
1209
01:10:55.460 --> 01:10:56.790
These green thing,
1210
01:10:56.790 --> 01:10:59.850
their relatives are inside those plant bodies.
1211
01:11:04.380 --> 01:11:06.430
This is a completely different community.
1212
01:11:07.542 --> 01:11:10.920
It looks terrible to you probably, like vomit or something.
1213
01:11:10.920 --> 01:11:15.460
These white bacteria can take the carbon
1214
01:11:15.460 --> 01:11:19.020
and do it in the dark but their source of energy
1215
01:11:19.020 --> 01:11:23.240
is the hydrogen sulfide that oxidizes to sulfate.
1216
01:11:23.240 --> 01:11:27.210
So the point is that the waste of one
1217
01:11:27.210 --> 01:11:28.660
is the food of the other
1218
01:11:28.660 --> 01:11:31.140
and that\'s how the ecosystem goes around.
1219
01:11:31.140 --> 01:11:32.890
If we didn\'t have the waste of one
1220
01:11:32.890 --> 01:11:37.550
being the food of the other, we would be drowning as we are
1221
01:11:37.550 --> 01:11:42.550
in the urine or feces equivalent of the production.
1222
01:11:43.975 --> 01:11:48.000
(gentle instrumental music)
1223
01:11:48.000 --> 01:11:51.660
These communities are recycling everything.
1224
01:11:54.222 --> 01:11:55.350
They\'re recycling everything
1225
01:11:55.350 --> 01:12:00.350
and they\'re also persistent through time.
1226
01:12:01.900 --> 01:12:05.300
If we would listen to them or watch them
1227
01:12:05.300 --> 01:12:07.660
or understand what they were doing,
1228
01:12:07.660 --> 01:12:11.820
we would recognize that you can\'t just throw things out.
1229
01:12:11.820 --> 01:12:13.310
You never throw anything out.
1230
01:12:14.260 --> 01:12:15.320
It goes around.
1231
01:12:15.320 --> 01:12:17.570
Garbage doesn\'t go out, like out.
1232
01:12:17.570 --> 01:12:19.830
It goes around and around.
1233
01:12:19.830 --> 01:12:23.450
The quality of life after the garbage
1234
01:12:23.450 --> 01:12:25.650
is thrown out makes a lot of difference.
1235
01:12:25.650 --> 01:12:27.770
Now, these bacteria have solved that issue.
1236
01:12:27.770 --> 01:12:29.660
People haven\'t solved it at all.
1237
01:12:29.660 --> 01:12:33.020
People are in the growing stage and the ruining stage.
1238
01:12:33.020 --> 01:12:35.710
People are ruining their environment.
1239
01:12:35.710 --> 01:12:39.350
These bacteria are producing an environment that\'s livable.
1240
01:12:39.350 --> 01:12:41.760
I think we have lots to learn from them.
1241
01:12:41.760 --> 01:12:44.617
- The vast majority of everything that you see
1242
01:12:44.617 --> 01:12:47.400
that is operating smoothly in this world,
1243
01:12:47.400 --> 01:12:51.160
including the decomposition cycle is a microbial cycle.
1244
01:12:51.160 --> 01:12:53.920
- So they can run all the cycles, the nitrogen cycle,
1245
01:12:53.920 --> 01:12:55.820
the carbon cycle, the oxygen cycle.
1246
01:12:55.820 --> 01:12:57.280
You say what cannot they do?
1247
01:12:58.660 --> 01:13:00.160
The answer is they can\'t talk.
1248
01:13:01.010 --> 01:13:04.380
They don\'t have bones and most importantly,
1249
01:13:04.380 --> 01:13:05.470
they can\'t make wood.
1250
01:13:06.660 --> 01:13:08.260
That\'s the more important thing.
1251
01:13:08.260 --> 01:13:10.370
The plants did something very important
1252
01:13:10.370 --> 01:13:11.650
400 million years ago.
1253
01:13:11.650 --> 01:13:12.900
They made wood.
1254
01:13:12.900 --> 01:13:15.180
When they made wood, not all the plants of course,
1255
01:13:15.180 --> 01:13:18.170
but the important plants, the forest plants,
1256
01:13:18.170 --> 01:13:21.070
they made the biosphere go this direction
1257
01:13:21.070 --> 01:13:23.270
because before that, the biosphere was flat,
1258
01:13:24.130 --> 01:13:25.750
slimy like this and flat.
1259
01:13:26.710 --> 01:13:28.260
The plants do something very important.
1260
01:13:28.260 --> 01:13:29.170
They make wood.
1261
01:13:29.170 --> 01:13:31.610
That\'s about the only thing.
1262
01:13:31.610 --> 01:13:35.360
Everything else, bacteria do, everything else important.
1263
01:13:35.360 --> 01:13:40.360
They make all the sugars, all the acids, all the proteins,
1264
01:13:42.150 --> 01:13:45.220
all the nucleic acids, the DNA and RNA,
1265
01:13:45.220 --> 01:13:49.860
all the membranous fatty material, all the slime.
1266
01:13:49.860 --> 01:13:54.860
They even precipitate iron and make magnets, magnetite
1267
01:13:55.550 --> 01:13:58.080
and they make rocks, they make those stromatolite rocks,
1268
01:13:58.080 --> 01:14:00.130
they make that calcium carbonate.
1269
01:14:00.130 --> 01:14:02.960
You have iron precipitated in here.
1270
01:14:02.960 --> 01:14:05.170
The significance is that these bacteria,
1271
01:14:05.170 --> 01:14:06.830
not only do they photosynthesize
1272
01:14:06.830 --> 01:14:11.380
but they accumulate large quantities of iron.
1273
01:14:11.380 --> 01:14:13.800
And we know that in the Gunflint regions,
1274
01:14:14.652 --> 01:14:16.810
that is, the northern part of Minnesota,
1275
01:14:16.810 --> 01:14:21.810
and the southern part of Ontario
1276
01:14:21.940 --> 01:14:23.700
that these are the great iron deposits
1277
01:14:23.700 --> 01:14:25.310
two billion years ago.
1278
01:14:25.310 --> 01:14:27.160
Of course that\'s the source of the iron
1279
01:14:27.160 --> 01:14:30.570
that gets taken to Chicago and converted into steel.
1280
01:14:30.570 --> 01:14:35.330
Steel gets taken and moved into Detroit and it becomes cars.
1281
01:14:35.330 --> 01:14:38.010
But if these bacteria didn\'t accumulate the iron
1282
01:14:38.010 --> 01:14:39.180
to begin with,
1283
01:14:39.180 --> 01:14:42.760
the iron would be dispersed the way it is on Mars.
1284
01:14:42.760 --> 01:14:45.230
It would be unmanageable.
1285
01:14:45.230 --> 01:14:46.680
The animals come and go.
1286
01:14:46.680 --> 01:14:50.030
The animals go extinct but these don\'t go extinct.
1287
01:14:50.030 --> 01:14:52.330
They don\'t go extinct because they\'re bacteria.
1288
01:14:52.330 --> 01:14:54.670
In my opinion, bacteria don\'t go extinct.
1289
01:14:54.670 --> 01:14:56.350
They don\'t have species.
1290
01:14:56.350 --> 01:14:57.183
They don\'t have species.
1291
01:14:57.183 --> 01:14:58.180
They don\'t go extinct.
1292
01:14:58.180 --> 01:14:59.840
Why, because they transfer their genes
1293
01:14:59.840 --> 01:15:02.750
back and forth reversibly.
1294
01:15:02.750 --> 01:15:06.430
- Bacteria are extraordinarily promiscuous with their DNA.
1295
01:15:07.710 --> 01:15:09.620
They pick up other organisms\' DNA,
1296
01:15:09.620 --> 01:15:12.280
and other organisms typically for them are bacteria.
1297
01:15:12.280 --> 01:15:14.510
Think of a flow of DNA,
1298
01:15:14.510 --> 01:15:17.130
of genes from bacterium to bacterium,
1299
01:15:17.130 --> 01:15:19.860
across the boundaries of what you might think of
1300
01:15:19.860 --> 01:15:23.780
are a species or a type, just a constant interchange.
1301
01:15:23.780 --> 01:15:26.820
- Lynn pointed this out in a very major way,
1302
01:15:26.820 --> 01:15:30.220
that there\'s one planetary bacterial organism
1303
01:15:30.220 --> 01:15:31.970
that has been helping to run the planet
1304
01:15:31.970 --> 01:15:34.160
ever since life started.
1305
01:15:34.160 --> 01:15:35.940
- So what is all life on Earth?
1306
01:15:35.940 --> 01:15:38.450
What\'s the real answer to what all life is,
1307
01:15:38.450 --> 01:15:41.000
it\'s either bacteria in their own communities
1308
01:15:41.000 --> 01:15:45.690
like these or it\'s bacteria in new kinds of communities
1309
01:15:45.690 --> 01:15:50.410
which we recognize as plants or animals or protists or fungi
1310
01:15:50.410 --> 01:15:54.960
but basically, it\'s the unit in life is bacteria.
1311
01:15:54.960 --> 01:15:57.130
These are communities of bacteria.
1312
01:15:57.130 --> 01:15:58.710
These microbes are out there
1313
01:15:58.710 --> 01:16:03.190
and they\'ve been there for about 3,500 million years
1314
01:16:06.390 --> 01:16:09.830
and if you listen very carefully you can hear them singing.
1315
01:16:11.750 --> 01:16:14.400
They are singing in English to help us out tonight
1316
01:16:16.230 --> 01:16:18.430
and if they are not, I\'ll translate for you.
1317
01:16:19.300 --> 01:16:23.460
The song is, got along without you before I met ya,
1318
01:16:23.460 --> 01:16:26.510
gonna get along without you now.
1319
01:16:26.510 --> 01:16:27.343
Thank you.
1320
01:16:28.183 --> 01:16:30.800
♪ Uh huh, mhm ♪
1321
01:16:30.800 --> 01:16:34.316
♪ Gonna get along without you now ♪
1322
01:16:34.316 --> 01:16:36.638
♪ Uh huh, mhm ♪
1323
01:16:36.638 --> 01:16:40.446
♪ Gonna get along without you now ♪
1324
01:16:40.446 --> 01:16:43.084
♪ You told me I was the neatest thing ♪
1325
01:16:43.084 --> 01:16:46.176
♪ You even asked me to wear your ring ♪
1326
01:16:46.176 --> 01:16:49.176
♪ You ran around with every girl in town ♪
1327
01:16:49.176 --> 01:16:52.037
♪ You didn\'t even care if it got me down ♪
1328
01:16:52.037 --> 01:16:55.214
♪ Uh huh, mhm ♪
1329
01:16:55.214 --> 01:16:58.032
♪ Gonna get along without you now ♪
1330
01:16:58.032 --> 01:17:01.032
♪ Uh huh, mhm ♪
1331
01:17:01.032 --> 01:17:04.216
♪ Gonna get along without you now ♪
1332
01:17:04.216 --> 01:17:07.404
♪ Got along without you before I met you ♪
1333
01:17:07.404 --> 01:17:10.118
♪ Gonna get along without you now ♪
1334
01:17:10.118 --> 01:17:13.216
♪ Gonna find somebody who\'s twice as cute ♪
1335
01:17:13.216 --> 01:17:16.920
♪ Because I didn\'t like you anyhow ♪
1336
01:17:16.920 --> 01:17:19.010
Oh, come on, super spirillum swim by.
1337
01:17:20.300 --> 01:17:21.320
Show yourself off.
1338
01:17:27.201 --> 01:17:30.868
(gentle instrumental music)
1339
01:17:37.820 --> 01:17:40.810
We are symbionts on a symbiotic planet.
1340
01:17:40.810 --> 01:17:42.010
Symbiosis is everywhere.
1341
01:17:43.060 --> 01:17:44.330
What is this lichen?
1342
01:17:44.330 --> 01:17:45.580
Product of symbiosis.
1343
01:17:45.580 --> 01:17:46.650
What does that mean?
1344
01:17:46.650 --> 01:17:48.560 line:15%
It means in the lichen you have the alga,
1345
01:17:48.560 --> 01:17:51.030 line:15%
which is the green part, which is making the food,
1346
01:17:51.030 --> 01:17:54.100 line:15%
and it\'s teamed up with the fungi, which is the white part.
1347
01:17:54.100 --> 01:17:56.580
Together, when they grow together they form,
1348
01:17:56.580 --> 01:17:58.660
by symbiosis, a lichen.
1349
01:17:58.660 --> 01:18:00.350
The lichen looks like a plant.
1350
01:18:00.350 --> 01:18:02.090
It\'s very similar to a plant.
1351
01:18:02.090 --> 01:18:03.690
It used to be called a plant.
1352
01:18:03.690 --> 01:18:05.080
We know it\'s not a plant.
1353
01:18:05.080 --> 01:18:07.110
It\'s the product of symbiosis.
1354
01:18:07.110 --> 01:18:10.280
Symbiosis is a very simple word and a very simple idea.
1355
01:18:10.280 --> 01:18:13.500
It\'s simply the living together of unlike organisms.
1356
01:18:13.500 --> 01:18:14.960
In fact in the early definition
1357
01:18:14.960 --> 01:18:18.610
it was the living together of differently named organisms.
1358
01:18:18.610 --> 01:18:20.500
- [John] So according to Lynn,
1359
01:18:20.500 --> 01:18:23.600
these ants don\'t have a symbiotic relationship
1360
01:18:23.600 --> 01:18:26.830
with each other, nor do these people
1361
01:18:26.830 --> 01:18:30.190
because they are each of the same species.
1362
01:18:30.190 --> 01:18:33.270
- You do not have a symbiotic relationship with your father
1363
01:18:33.270 --> 01:18:34.490
because, as far as we know,
1364
01:18:34.490 --> 01:18:36.600
you and he belong to the same species,
1365
01:18:36.600 --> 01:18:39.310
although sometimes I\'m sure you wonder.
1366
01:18:39.310 --> 01:18:41.760
- [John] But what about this egret and this deer?
1367
01:18:42.690 --> 01:18:44.330
This bee and this flower?
1368
01:18:45.180 --> 01:18:47.460
I think Lynn would say no,
1369
01:18:47.460 --> 01:18:50.970
they don\'t have a symbiotic relationship with each other,
1370
01:18:50.970 --> 01:18:55.610
because they don\'t live in physical contact with each other
1371
01:18:55.610 --> 01:18:57.910
for a prolonged period of time.
1372
01:18:59.200 --> 01:19:02.190
But they are important ecological relationships.
1373
01:19:03.510 --> 01:19:08.490
It gets confusing because most people and many biologists
1374
01:19:08.490 --> 01:19:12.210
describe symbiosis as mutually beneficial
1375
01:19:13.310 --> 01:19:16.920
but these are words that Lynn did not like to use
1376
01:19:16.920 --> 01:19:18.300
when describing nature.
1377
01:19:19.190 --> 01:19:21.310
- The word mutually beneficial,
1378
01:19:21.310 --> 01:19:23.840
a plus relationship for symbionts,
1379
01:19:23.840 --> 01:19:26.731
and pathogenic, a negative relationship
1380
01:19:26.731 --> 01:19:29.693
or one has costs and the other benefits.
1381
01:19:29.693 --> 01:19:33.210
The terminology is just totally inappropriate
1382
01:19:33.210 --> 01:19:34.240
for the analysis
1383
01:19:34.240 --> 01:19:37.730
and it\'s a case where it\'s actually impeded understanding.
1384
01:19:38.783 --> 01:19:42.140
(gentle instrumental music)
1385
01:19:42.140 --> 01:19:44.840
You can change the environment such that the relationship
1386
01:19:44.840 --> 01:19:47.750
which was mutually beneficially and very helpful
1387
01:19:47.750 --> 01:19:52.750
becomes exploitative, or detrimental or even necrotrophic,
1388
01:19:53.050 --> 01:19:54.840
that\'s where one kills the other.
1389
01:19:54.840 --> 01:19:56.190 line:15%
- Now the field has grown,
1390
01:19:56.190 --> 01:19:58.010 line:15%
it\'s not just Lynn Margulis anymore.
1391
01:19:58.010 --> 01:20:01.700 line:15%
Before that symbiosis was identifiable with Lynn Margulis.
1392
01:20:01.700 --> 01:20:04.320
If you said symbiosis, people said, oh, Lynn Margulis,
1393
01:20:04.320 --> 01:20:06.800
just like if you said, evolution, Darwin.
1394
01:20:06.800 --> 01:20:07.800
Identical story.
1395
01:20:07.800 --> 01:20:11.810
Identical story, because she articulated the idea,
1396
01:20:11.810 --> 01:20:13.070
she championed it,
1397
01:20:13.070 --> 01:20:15.070
she put those ideas out there.
1398
01:20:15.070 --> 01:20:17.280
- It should be realized that symbiosis
1399
01:20:17.280 --> 01:20:18.750
is the way of the world
1400
01:20:18.750 --> 01:20:20.560
and there are many, many different kinds
1401
01:20:20.560 --> 01:20:22.260
but you have symbiosis everywhere.
1402
01:20:23.590 --> 01:20:25.310
- [John] I traveled to Quebec
1403
01:20:25.310 --> 01:20:28.040
where Lynn\'s colleague Andre Fortin
1404
01:20:28.040 --> 01:20:30.030
and his graduate students
1405
01:20:30.030 --> 01:20:33.470
gave me a brief lesson in the wonders of mycorrhiza.
1406
01:20:40.046 --> 01:20:44.549
- [John] So that white, that white is all mycorrhizas?
1407
01:20:44.549 --> 01:20:45.632 line:15%
- [Man] Yup.
1408
01:21:06.881 --> 01:21:08.542
- [Man] So there\'s an ectomycorrihza.
1409
01:21:08.542 --> 01:21:13.542 line:15%
And we know because it\'s the little forks.
1410
01:21:23.400 --> 01:21:28.070
- [John] A network of microscopically thin tubular-filaments
1411
01:21:28.070 --> 01:21:33.070
penetrate into soil and rocks to find water and nutrients,
1412
01:21:33.530 --> 01:21:36.670
literally extending the root system of the plant.
1413
01:21:39.360 --> 01:21:42.900
Unfortunately, deep plowing and other modern agricultural
1414
01:21:42.900 --> 01:21:45.420
techniques destroy mycorrhizae.
1415
01:21:46.340 --> 01:21:50.610
I traveled to India to learn how the mycorrhizal symbiosis
1416
01:21:50.610 --> 01:21:53.380
has the potential to revolutionize agriculture.
1417
01:21:54.520 --> 01:21:56.580
In order to help grow crops
1418
01:21:56.580 --> 01:21:59.229
in depleted soils and reduce dependence
1419
01:21:59.229 --> 01:22:02.750
on expensive and polluting fertilizers,
1420
01:22:02.750 --> 01:22:07.200
mycorrhizae are being re-introduced into the system.
1421
01:22:07.200 --> 01:22:10.990
At the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi,
1422
01:22:10.990 --> 01:22:13.470
various plants and their associated
1423
01:22:13.470 --> 01:22:16.370
mycorrhizal fungi are grown.
1424
01:22:16.370 --> 01:22:19.460
Then the roots are cultured in the laboratory,
1425
01:22:19.460 --> 01:22:23.301
where spores are produced, harvested dried,
1426
01:22:23.301 --> 01:22:27.700 line:15%
and made into various forms that are delivered to farmers.
1427
01:22:27.700 --> 01:22:29.810 line:15%
- And these tablets have spores in them.
1428
01:22:31.180 --> 01:22:34.910
So you have the same size containers,
1429
01:22:34.910 --> 01:22:39.240
same quantity of substrate, with the same day of sowing
1430
01:22:41.680 --> 01:22:44.000
- [John] In the mycorrhizal symbiosis,
1431
01:22:44.000 --> 01:22:46.640
the plant gives the fungus food,
1432
01:22:46.640 --> 01:22:50.900
while the fungus helps the plants find water and nutrients,
1433
01:22:50.900 --> 01:22:53.001
helps them grow on rocks,
1434
01:22:53.001 --> 01:22:57.770
and what\'s most amazing, the mycorrhizae allow plants
1435
01:22:57.770 --> 01:22:59.770
to communicate with one another.
1436
01:23:00.960 --> 01:23:05.460
So if one plant is attacked by insects or a fungus,
1437
01:23:05.460 --> 01:23:08.042
it will mount a chemical defense
1438
01:23:08.042 --> 01:23:11.220
and it will send a message to neighboring plants
1439
01:23:11.220 --> 01:23:13.230
through the mycorrhizae
1440
01:23:13.230 --> 01:23:17.170
so that those plants can prepare their defense.
1441
01:23:24.439 --> 01:23:27.570
- [John] So you\'re saying that the mycorrhizal fungi
1442
01:23:27.570 --> 01:23:32.187
allow the two plants to communicate with one another?
1443
01:23:35.090 --> 01:23:39.320 line:15%
- [John] So if I was to dig up this dandelion there,
1444
01:23:39.320 --> 01:23:41.500 line:15%
would I see any?
1445
01:23:57.814 --> 01:24:01.040 line:15%
- And so I think that when we look back in time
1446
01:24:01.040 --> 01:24:04.560 line:15%
we can see that perhaps plants were never really plants,
1447
01:24:04.560 --> 01:24:08.630
we call them that, but they are plant/fungal consortia.
1448
01:24:10.340 --> 01:24:12.820
- [John] And it\'s the same with animals.
1449
01:24:12.820 --> 01:24:16.350
- What we know as coral is a consortium
1450
01:24:16.350 --> 01:24:20.340
of the coral genome and its products
1451
01:24:20.340 --> 01:24:25.340 line:15%
but also a symbiotic algae called zooxanthellae.
1452
01:24:25.540 --> 01:24:28.080
When we talk about coral bleaching,
1453
01:24:28.080 --> 01:24:31.370
when we say that the environment is heating up
1454
01:24:31.370 --> 01:24:34.300
and the corals are being bleached,
1455
01:24:34.300 --> 01:24:36.170
what it means is that the corals
1456
01:24:36.170 --> 01:24:39.340
are losing their symbiotic algae
1457
01:24:39.340 --> 01:24:43.290
and as such cannot get the carbon that they need
1458
01:24:43.290 --> 01:24:45.490
through photosynthesis and they die.
1459
01:24:46.860 --> 01:24:51.860
The coral itself is not one organism, it\'s several organisms
1460
01:24:52.660 --> 01:24:55.370
it\'s a consortium of organisms.
1461
01:24:55.370 --> 01:24:59.860
When you think about a cow which can\'t digest cellulose
1462
01:24:59.860 --> 01:25:04.860
without its symbionts, or any mammal
1463
01:25:05.760 --> 01:25:08.920
which can\'t really develop its digestive system
1464
01:25:08.920 --> 01:25:11.180
or its gut associated lymphoid tissue
1465
01:25:11.180 --> 01:25:13.880
without symbionts, we\'re consortia.
1466
01:25:15.470 --> 01:25:19.250
- You have a symbiotic relationship with your eyelash mites
1467
01:25:19.250 --> 01:25:21.450
and, of course, your underarm bacteria,
1468
01:25:21.450 --> 01:25:23.820
your between-the-toes bacteria, and so on.
1469
01:25:23.820 --> 01:25:25.950
So if you feel you\'re falling apart,
1470
01:25:25.950 --> 01:25:27.700
it\'s because you\'re falling apart.
1471
01:25:27.700 --> 01:25:30.160 line:15%
- And so when I see an animal like ourselves,
1472
01:25:30.160 --> 01:25:33.050 line:15%
I\'m also seeing us as containers for bacteria
1473
01:25:33.050 --> 01:25:35.430
and scaffolding for bacteria.
1474
01:25:35.430 --> 01:25:36.860 line:15%
- You know, there are many people who think
1475
01:25:36.860 --> 01:25:38.400 line:15%
that they actually invented us
1476
01:25:38.400 --> 01:25:40.090 line:15%
so they had a nice place to live,
1477
01:25:40.090 --> 01:25:41.970
which is like us building houses,
1478
01:25:41.970 --> 01:25:43.250
the bacteria built houses,
1479
01:25:43.250 --> 01:25:44.660
we ended up being them.
1480
01:25:44.660 --> 01:25:46.690
- We have a resident microbiota.
1481
01:25:46.690 --> 01:25:49.400 line:15%
Different things live in our bronchial tubes
1482
01:25:49.400 --> 01:25:52.330 line:15%
from our trachea from our nasal cavities,
1483
01:25:52.330 --> 01:25:54.940 line:15%
and each one of those is a stable community.
1484
01:25:54.940 --> 01:25:57.470
- I love bacteria, okay.
1485
01:25:57.470 --> 01:25:59.370
We cannot live without them.
1486
01:25:59.370 --> 01:26:02.830
if you don\'t have any bacteria, you die.
1487
01:26:02.830 --> 01:26:05.270
- To me, some of the most interesting studies
1488
01:26:05.270 --> 01:26:07.750
have been done on the skin.
1489
01:26:07.750 --> 01:26:11.680
If you study the microbiota in the palm of your hand,
1490
01:26:11.680 --> 01:26:13.370
the microbiota in the palm of your hand
1491
01:26:13.370 --> 01:26:15.090
is different from the microbiota
1492
01:26:15.090 --> 01:26:17.670
in the center of your forearm
1493
01:26:17.670 --> 01:26:20.980
is different from the microbiota in the axil of your arm.
1494
01:26:22.430 --> 01:26:26.900
The microbiota in the axil of my arm is more closely related
1495
01:26:26.900 --> 01:26:29.750
to the microbiota in the axil of your arm
1496
01:26:29.750 --> 01:26:33.275
than the microbiota in the axil of my arm to the microbiota
1497
01:26:33.275 --> 01:26:36.130
in my mid-forearm.
1498
01:26:36.130 --> 01:26:39.590
So in other words, that suggests a strong coevolution
1499
01:26:39.590 --> 01:26:41.320
in site specificity.
1500
01:26:41.320 --> 01:26:44.050
- [John] If our body is full of bacteria,
1501
01:26:44.050 --> 01:26:46.000
when do they arrive?
1502
01:26:46.890 --> 01:26:48.590
- So they arrive immediately
1503
01:26:48.590 --> 01:26:52.370
as the baby descends the birth canal.
1504
01:26:52.370 --> 01:26:54.000
- [John] So, when I go to the supermarket
1505
01:26:54.000 --> 01:26:58.250
and they have all the wipes and when you wipe your hands
1506
01:26:58.250 --> 01:27:01.870
and you\'re killing those bacteria.
1507
01:27:01.870 --> 01:27:06.330
- So I actually don\'t know what\'s in those wipes,
1508
01:27:06.330 --> 01:27:08.870
but if it\'s in the same that\'s in Purell dispensers,
1509
01:27:08.870 --> 01:27:13.580
like if it has high levels of alcohol and what not,
1510
01:27:13.580 --> 01:27:17.360
what happens is you will destroy some
1511
01:27:17.360 --> 01:27:19.570
of your normal microbiota in your hands
1512
01:27:19.570 --> 01:27:21.770
and what it will do is it will cause you
1513
01:27:21.770 --> 01:27:24.310
to get skin infections and what not
1514
01:27:24.310 --> 01:27:27.610
because your normal microbiota are a part of your health.
1515
01:27:27.610 --> 01:27:30.540 line:15%
- And they\'re finding that microbiomes in general
1516
01:27:30.540 --> 01:27:34.680 line:15%
are very very diverse, except when you get sick.
1517
01:27:35.734 --> 01:27:38.830
Then they find that the diversity of microbiomes
1518
01:27:38.830 --> 01:27:41.770
collapses down and that the sickened people
1519
01:27:41.770 --> 01:27:44.670
who have a particular type of cancer for example,
1520
01:27:44.670 --> 01:27:46.820
their microbiomes get very similar.
1521
01:27:46.820 --> 01:27:48.440
- Throughout their body?
- Throughout their bodies.
1522
01:27:48.440 --> 01:27:51.780
And so this person who has a particular type of colon cancer
1523
01:27:51.780 --> 01:27:54.450
and this person has a particular type of colon cancer,
1524
01:27:54.450 --> 01:27:56.590
their microbiomes are very similar.
1525
01:27:56.590 --> 01:28:00.320
Disease states means that you lose diversity.
1526
01:28:00.320 --> 01:28:04.730
You lose the homeostasis that the microbiota is giving you.
1527
01:28:04.730 --> 01:28:08.720
- I think personally that we feel happy
1528
01:28:08.720 --> 01:28:10.960
when our component bacteria
1529
01:28:11.860 --> 01:28:16.050
are growing and eating
1530
01:28:16.050 --> 01:28:16.990
and so on.
1531
01:28:16.990 --> 01:28:21.910
We feel terrible when they are cramped for space
1532
01:28:21.910 --> 01:28:26.530
and they are drowning and choking in their own waste
1533
01:28:26.530 --> 01:28:28.840
and that it\'s a sense of health.
1534
01:28:28.840 --> 01:28:30.780
Now, I can\'t define health.
1535
01:28:30.780 --> 01:28:32.263
You probably can\'t define health either
1536
01:28:32.263 --> 01:28:34.620
but we all know what health is.
1537
01:28:34.620 --> 01:28:37.300
When our components are healthy,
1538
01:28:37.300 --> 01:28:38.720
yes, that\'s what feeling good is.
1539
01:28:38.720 --> 01:28:42.030
It\'s an equivalency but that\'s my personal opinion.
1540
01:28:42.030 --> 01:28:45.510
- We have 10 to the 13th animal cells,
1541
01:28:45.510 --> 01:28:48.650
and we have 10 to the 14th bacterial cells,
1542
01:28:48.650 --> 01:28:51.550
so we\'re 90% non-human by cell.
1543
01:28:52.780 --> 01:28:57.780
By gene, we are something like one to 200.
1544
01:28:58.000 --> 01:29:00.840
In other words, there\'s one human gene
1545
01:29:00.840 --> 01:29:03.430
for every 200 microbial genes.
1546
01:29:03.430 --> 01:29:07.830
- So we\'re more them than us
1547
01:29:07.830 --> 01:29:09.660
by the old nomenclature,
1548
01:29:09.660 --> 01:29:13.420
but by today\'s nomenclature, we are an ecosystem.
1549
01:29:13.420 --> 01:29:16.150
That\'s the story, that\'s the new story,
1550
01:29:16.150 --> 01:29:17.550
that\'s the science revolution
1551
01:29:17.550 --> 01:29:21.210
that Lynn was working to show so hard,
1552
01:29:21.210 --> 01:29:24.310
and incredibly is just bursting out now
1553
01:29:24.310 --> 01:29:26.030
in the scientific community.
1554
01:29:26.030 --> 01:29:27.490
- What we\'re finding out now
1555
01:29:27.490 --> 01:29:32.490
is that we actually need these symbionts
1556
01:29:32.650 --> 01:29:34.500
to develop properly.
1557
01:29:34.500 --> 01:29:39.310
We\'ve subcontracted developmental signals to bacteria.
1558
01:29:39.310 --> 01:29:44.160
- The microbes are integrated into our physiology.
1559
01:29:44.160 --> 01:29:47.040
- They\'re really very much part of our body.
1560
01:29:47.040 --> 01:29:50.870
- [Man] So we\'ve co-evolved, co-developed and co-metabolize?
1561
01:29:50.870 --> 01:29:52.570
- Yeah, yeah.
1562
01:29:52.570 --> 01:29:55.370
This is a new way of thinking about biology.
1563
01:29:55.370 --> 01:29:57.880
- And now the definition scientists are beginning to use
1564
01:29:57.880 --> 01:30:01.310
is holobiont, meaning that the individual
1565
01:30:01.310 --> 01:30:03.560
is no longer one genome.
1566
01:30:03.560 --> 01:30:06.860
Human genome, and then there is some other genes from us,
1567
01:30:06.860 --> 01:30:08.440
some other organisms over here.
1568
01:30:08.440 --> 01:30:09.350
No.
1569
01:30:09.350 --> 01:30:14.080
- We\'re consortia and the holobiont is what the name is
1570
01:30:14.080 --> 01:30:18.270
for this consortium, it\'s a name for a team.
1571
01:30:18.270 --> 01:30:19.103
- Wow.
1572
01:30:19.103 --> 01:30:22.850
So you start to think in terms of organisms
1573
01:30:22.850 --> 01:30:25.402
as complex ecological systems.
1574
01:30:25.402 --> 01:30:29.069
(gentle instrumental music)
1575
01:30:30.010 --> 01:30:33.920
- [Lynn] Every animal or plant or even fungus
1576
01:30:33.920 --> 01:30:38.040
that we look at and label and consider an individual
1577
01:30:38.040 --> 01:30:43.040
is in fact many different individuals of different species.
1578
01:30:44.530 --> 01:30:47.630
- But what Lynn was important for was, I think,
1579
01:30:47.630 --> 01:30:49.740
getting people to think synthetically,
1580
01:30:50.900 --> 01:30:52.730
bringing people together.
1581
01:30:52.730 --> 01:30:55.430
She had so much energy when she walked into a room,
1582
01:30:55.430 --> 01:30:58.170
Lynn\'s here, it was inspirational for everybody.
1583
01:30:58.170 --> 01:30:59.900
Everybody was touched by Lynn.
1584
01:30:59.900 --> 01:31:02.450
Anybody who knew her was touched by Lynn.
1585
01:31:02.450 --> 01:31:03.610 line:15%
- And she was very cooperative.
1586
01:31:03.610 --> 01:31:06.900 line:15%
She would help lots and lots and lots of different people,
1587
01:31:06.900 --> 01:31:08.900 line:15%
some scientists, some non-scientists.
1588
01:31:08.900 --> 01:31:09.850
She promoted people.
1589
01:31:09.850 --> 01:31:11.560
She connected people.
1590
01:31:11.560 --> 01:31:15.430
- Her door was always open, and she always invited us
1591
01:31:15.430 --> 01:31:18.060
and many other people over for dinner
1592
01:31:18.060 --> 01:31:20.320
so dinners were a big event.
1593
01:31:20.320 --> 01:31:22.380
There was always lively discussion
1594
01:31:22.380 --> 01:31:24.030
and everybody was well fed.
1595
01:31:24.030 --> 01:31:26.310
It was a good place to be.
1596
01:31:26.310 --> 01:31:28.470
It was a just continuation of the learning
1597
01:31:28.470 --> 01:31:29.520
in a different place.
1598
01:31:33.358 --> 01:31:34.850
- I was sitting at the microscope one day
1599
01:31:34.850 --> 01:31:36.950
and I was asking her questions
1600
01:31:36.950 --> 01:31:38.070
and it was getting late
1601
01:31:38.070 --> 01:31:40.500
and she said, well, of course you got to go soon, don\'t you?
1602
01:31:40.500 --> 01:31:43.150
I said, yeah, yeah I\'ve got to go.
1603
01:31:43.150 --> 01:31:45.120 line:15%
I told her, I have to go chase after this girl,
1604
01:31:45.120 --> 01:31:47.750 line:15%
and she said, Alex, when you want to stay
1605
01:31:47.750 --> 01:31:51.220 line:15%
and sit on a Saturday night and look at the organisms
1606
01:31:51.220 --> 01:31:54.050
just as much if not more, she held up her finger like that,
1607
01:31:54.050 --> 01:31:56.120
than you want to chase pretty girls,
1608
01:31:56.120 --> 01:31:57.630
then you\'ll be a scientist.
1609
01:31:58.975 --> 01:32:01.140
- Beth, come and take a look at cilia.
1610
01:32:01.140 --> 01:32:03.510
Beth, forget the phone calls.
1611
01:32:03.510 --> 01:32:05.020
Look at...
1612
01:32:05.020 --> 01:32:07.080
This is an absolutely remarkable video.
1613
01:32:08.710 --> 01:32:12.144
Here\'s a spore germinating in the soil.
1614
01:32:12.144 --> 01:32:13.989
It\'s a little time lapse here.
1615
01:32:13.989 --> 01:32:15.989
And out comes an amoeba.
1616
01:32:17.244 --> 01:32:21.565
Now the amoebae start feeding and they start dividing
1617
01:32:21.565 --> 01:32:23.046
and feeding, dividing and feeding,
1618
01:32:23.046 --> 01:32:25.178
essentially feeding on bacteria
1619
01:32:25.178 --> 01:32:28.145
until they deplete the bacteria.
1620
01:32:28.145 --> 01:32:29.577
- It\'s amazing.
- It\'s unbelievable.
1621
01:32:29.577 --> 01:32:31.464
It\'s a different world.
- This is really inner space.
1622
01:32:31.464 --> 01:32:33.106
- It\'s the protist world.
- Yeah.
1623
01:32:33.106 --> 01:32:35.742
- It\'s the protist world.
- Yeah.
1624
01:32:35.742 --> 01:32:37.950
- Now that\'s the same organism.
1625
01:32:37.950 --> 01:32:41.070
Each of those is one of the amoebae you just saw
1626
01:32:41.070 --> 01:32:45.737
and they start aggregating toward an aggregation center.
1627
01:32:46.632 --> 01:32:48.218
And they form this sort of slug stage.
1628
01:32:48.218 --> 01:32:51.208
I\'m sure is reminiscent of organisms you\'ve seen before.
1629
01:32:51.208 --> 01:32:52.517
This is Minakatella
1630
01:32:52.517 --> 01:32:55.912
studied in the sacred forest of Japan by Minaka.
1631
01:32:55.912 --> 01:32:58.860
These are now the amoebae that didn\'t get into the pack.
1632
01:32:58.860 --> 01:33:02.457
And these are the ones that went multicellular.
1633
01:33:02.457 --> 01:33:05.374
And so you have this amoeboid mass.
1634
01:33:08.884 --> 01:33:13.816
It\'s dryness that induces the upright development.
1635
01:33:13.816 --> 01:33:17.718
If you cut through it, it\'s all packed amoebae.
1636
01:33:17.718 --> 01:33:21.385
(gentle instrumental music)
1637
01:33:29.205 --> 01:33:32.872
(gentle instrumental music)
1638
01:33:44.996 --> 01:33:49.445
♪ My days have grown so lonely ♪
1639
01:33:49.445 --> 01:33:53.612
♪ For I have lost my one and only ♪
1640
01:33:55.497 --> 01:33:57.914
- [John] I\'m trying to reimagine this person
1641
01:33:57.914 --> 01:34:02.421
walking toward me out of the mist as a holobiont,
1642
01:34:02.421 --> 01:34:05.231
a community of interdependent organisms,
1643
01:34:05.231 --> 01:34:09.481
with many interacting gemomes, human and bacterial,
1644
01:34:10.394 --> 01:34:12.502
but it\'s hard to do.
1645
01:34:12.502 --> 01:34:16.051
Isn\'t she really an individual, with one set,
1646
01:34:16.051 --> 01:34:18.903
her own personal set of genes
1647
01:34:18.903 --> 01:34:20.928
that she inherited from her parents,
1648
01:34:20.928 --> 01:34:24.637
and which are a blue print that determine who she is
1649
01:34:24.637 --> 01:34:26.637
and who she will become?
1650
01:34:28.218 --> 01:34:31.371
This idea, called genetic determinism,
1651
01:34:31.371 --> 01:34:35.067
or, as people often say: it\'s in our genes,
1652
01:34:35.067 --> 01:34:37.495
is so ingrained in our culture
1653
01:34:37.495 --> 01:34:39.697
that millions of dollars were spent
1654
01:34:39.697 --> 01:34:43.547
to decode the human genome with the expectation
1655
01:34:43.547 --> 01:34:47.296
that we would uncover genes for human diseases
1656
01:34:47.296 --> 01:34:51.012
and abnormalities and be able to cure them.
1657
01:34:51.012 --> 01:34:54.587
But the results of the massive Human Genome Project
1658
01:34:54.587 --> 01:34:56.188
were disappointing.
1659
01:34:56.188 --> 01:35:00.126
Very few genes were found that related one to one
1660
01:35:00.126 --> 01:35:04.698
with human characteristics, normal or abnormal.
1661
01:35:04.698 --> 01:35:07.102
Indeed the very concept of the gene
1662
01:35:07.102 --> 01:35:10.082
was brought into question.
1663
01:35:10.082 --> 01:35:14.117
- The gene is one of those complex philosophical concepts
1664
01:35:14.117 --> 01:35:16.633 line:15%
which was useful at one time,
1665
01:35:16.633 --> 01:35:19.912 line:15%
but is now kind of hindering progress.
1666
01:35:19.912 --> 01:35:24.352
(gentle instrumental music)
1667
01:35:24.352 --> 01:35:29.195 line:15%
- We\'ve woken up 10 years later to the fact that knowing,
1668
01:35:29.195 --> 01:35:32.270 line:15%
as it were what some people called The Book of Life,
1669
01:35:32.270 --> 01:35:35.137
doesn\'t actually tell you very much about life,
1670
01:35:35.137 --> 01:35:37.907
and that\'s a huge shock.
1671
01:35:37.907 --> 01:35:40.688
But I don\'t think we\'ve yet absorbed how big a shock
1672
01:35:40.688 --> 01:35:43.710
it really is because it isn\'t just that,
1673
01:35:43.710 --> 01:35:46.821
okay, sequencing the genome doesn\'t tell you the answer
1674
01:35:46.821 --> 01:35:48.549
to the question, what is life?
1675
01:35:48.549 --> 01:35:51.716
It\'s also that many of the assumptions
1676
01:35:53.081 --> 01:35:55.944
that led to those predictions about what we would be able
1677
01:35:55.944 --> 01:35:58.987
to do once we had sequenced the genome have turned out
1678
01:35:58.987 --> 01:36:00.487
to be incorrect.
1679
01:36:00.487 --> 01:36:04.987
- The idea that genes control in a unidirectional way,
1680
01:36:04.987 --> 01:36:08.140
there\'s no direct evidence for it at all.
1681
01:36:08.140 --> 01:36:08.973
That\'s the basic thing.
1682
01:36:08.973 --> 01:36:09.806 line:15%
There\'s no evidence.
1683
01:36:09.806 --> 01:36:11.716 line:15%
Here\'s a hypothesis that\'s not even recognized
1684
01:36:11.716 --> 01:36:13.260 line:15%
to be a hypothesis.
1685
01:36:13.260 --> 01:36:14.618 line:15%
It\'s just taken as a truth.
1686
01:36:14.618 --> 01:36:16.571
- And that\'s much more disturbing.
1687
01:36:16.571 --> 01:36:19.151
And that\'s where we have to completely rethink
1688
01:36:19.151 --> 01:36:22.151
our basic assumptions about biology.
1689
01:36:23.774 --> 01:36:26.995
- [John] To do so, I\'ll follow Lynn\'s lead,
1690
01:36:26.995 --> 01:36:30.662
go back to the basics and ask, what is life?
1691
01:36:31.539 --> 01:36:33.521
- Life, what is life?
1692
01:36:33.521 --> 01:36:35.506
Life is not a thing.
1693
01:36:35.506 --> 01:36:37.340
Life is a process.
1694
01:36:37.340 --> 01:36:39.625
It\'s a process that makes itself,
1695
01:36:39.625 --> 01:36:42.659
and as far as we know it\'s always based on cells.
1696
01:36:42.659 --> 01:36:46.565
Cells may be as small as a millionth of a meter,
1697
01:36:46.565 --> 01:36:50.813
which is a micron, and these things wrap themselves
1698
01:36:50.813 --> 01:36:53.692
into structures of their own making.
1699
01:36:53.692 --> 01:36:57.031
Intrinsic to life is the propensity to grow;
1700
01:36:57.031 --> 01:37:00.664
to grow, to excrete, to exchange material,
1701
01:37:00.664 --> 01:37:04.978
and to grow, and to grow, and to grow, and this is life.
1702
01:37:04.978 --> 01:37:07.857
Life is a way of behaving.
1703
01:37:07.857 --> 01:37:12.173
If you have a bull and he\'s fighting the bullfighter,
1704
01:37:12.173 --> 01:37:13.993
this is life.
1705
01:37:13.993 --> 01:37:17.057
Five minutes later the bull is dead.
1706
01:37:17.057 --> 01:37:18.514
There\'s no life there.
1707
01:37:18.514 --> 01:37:19.905
The DNA is there.
1708
01:37:19.905 --> 01:37:21.066
The carbon is there.
1709
01:37:21.066 --> 01:37:23.430
The water is there, but the bull is dead.
1710
01:37:23.430 --> 01:37:25.039
What has been lost?
1711
01:37:25.039 --> 01:37:28.901
What has been lost is the process, and what is the process?
1712
01:37:28.901 --> 01:37:32.502
It is the self-making process where components
1713
01:37:32.502 --> 01:37:35.863
from the environment are taken in and moved around
1714
01:37:35.863 --> 01:37:39.104
and changed chemically to do what, to make more.
1715
01:37:39.104 --> 01:37:40.416
Why, to make more.
1716
01:37:40.416 --> 01:37:41.862
Why, to make more.
1717
01:37:41.862 --> 01:37:45.745
Life is always expanding, always making more of itself.
1718
01:37:45.745 --> 01:37:48.026
Now some people use a fancy word for this,
1719
01:37:48.026 --> 01:37:49.718
and they call it autopoiesis.
1720
01:37:49.718 --> 01:37:51.736
That is the self-making.
1721
01:37:51.736 --> 01:37:54.815
This is a good word because this word tells us
1722
01:37:54.815 --> 01:37:57.815
that the system itself makes itself.
1723
01:38:01.419 --> 01:38:04.086
So what is the smallest simplest
1724
01:38:06.752 --> 01:38:09.333
unit, material, that can do this?
1725
01:38:09.333 --> 01:38:10.696
This is a cell.
1726
01:38:10.696 --> 01:38:15.284
We know of nothing less complicated than a cell
1727
01:38:15.284 --> 01:38:18.598
that has this property of making more, of growing,
1728
01:38:18.598 --> 01:38:22.465
of making more, of growing, and eventually reproducing.
1729
01:38:22.465 --> 01:38:24.513
- [John] Fritjof Capra showed me a way
1730
01:38:24.513 --> 01:38:27.013
to understand the cell system.
1731
01:38:28.298 --> 01:38:31.032
Here\'s a stylized eukaryotic cell
1732
01:38:31.032 --> 01:38:33.580
with the major parts labeled.
1733
01:38:33.580 --> 01:38:37.933
Now replace these labels with each part\'s function.
1734
01:38:37.933 --> 01:38:41.210
It becomes clear that all the parts of the cell
1735
01:38:41.210 --> 01:38:43.793
work together like a community.
1736
01:38:46.035 --> 01:38:48.794
The prevailing neo-Darwinist point of view
1737
01:38:48.794 --> 01:38:51.285
which Lynn Margulis disputed
1738
01:38:51.285 --> 01:38:55.202
is that the DNA molecule controls the organism.
1739
01:38:56.698 --> 01:39:00.345
But DNA is a part of the cell system
1740
01:39:00.345 --> 01:39:03.512
and doesn\'t actively control anything.
1741
01:39:04.571 --> 01:39:08.221
- DNA by itself doesn\'t do anything.
1742
01:39:08.221 --> 01:39:10.864
It can only be replicated.
1743
01:39:10.864 --> 01:39:12.855
It can only be expressed.
1744
01:39:12.855 --> 01:39:14.605 line:15%
- [Lynn] And I think
1745
01:39:22.672 --> 01:39:25.005
- DNA is a storage molecule,
1746
01:39:25.952 --> 01:39:28.360
quite a fascinating storage molecule,
1747
01:39:28.360 --> 01:39:30.823
but it\'s not telling the cell what to do.
1748
01:39:30.823 --> 01:39:34.780
It\'s part of the cell that is being used
1749
01:39:34.780 --> 01:39:36.368
as the cell reproduces.
1750
01:39:36.368 --> 01:39:39.900
It\'s the cell that reproduces, not the DNA that reproduces.
1751
01:39:39.900 --> 01:39:44.185
- The way I would put it is to go back to ideas
1752
01:39:44.185 --> 01:39:48.352
that Barbara McClintock developed way back in the,
1753
01:39:49.305 --> 01:39:50.735
well, she got the Nobel Prize
1754
01:39:50.735 --> 01:39:53.715
for her work on Jumping Genes about 1983.
1755
01:39:53.715 --> 01:39:57.813
She described the genome as an organ of the cell,
1756
01:39:57.813 --> 01:39:58.969
and that\'s lovely.
1757
01:39:58.969 --> 01:40:01.945
Because what it tells you is that it\'s a kind of database,
1758
01:40:01.945 --> 01:40:04.448
and that the rest of the cell and indeed the tissues
1759
01:40:04.448 --> 01:40:06.320
and the organs beyond the cells,
1760
01:40:06.320 --> 01:40:09.299
are what tell it what to do.
1761
01:40:09.299 --> 01:40:13.966
- We see that cells are actually in charge of their DNA.
1762
01:40:15.169 --> 01:40:18.252
Cells control the reading of the DNA,
1763
01:40:19.407 --> 01:40:22.141
access to different parts of the DNA,
1764
01:40:22.141 --> 01:40:25.295
expression of different data that\'s in the DNA
1765
01:40:25.295 --> 01:40:28.273
- I think we have therefore to reverse our thinking.
1766
01:40:28.273 --> 01:40:30.157
Instead of thinking that everything follows
1767
01:40:30.157 --> 01:40:32.663
once you know the genome, you can, as it were,
1768
01:40:32.663 --> 01:40:34.733
mechanically compute from the genome
1769
01:40:34.733 --> 01:40:37.153
to reproduce the whole of biology.
1770
01:40:37.153 --> 01:40:40.065
You got to reverse it; and ask the question:
1771
01:40:40.065 --> 01:40:42.167
How on earth does the rest of the system
1772
01:40:42.167 --> 01:40:45.107
tell the genome what to do?
1773
01:40:45.107 --> 01:40:48.247
- [John] This question, how does the organism
1774
01:40:48.247 --> 01:40:49.830
instruct its genes,
1775
01:40:51.183 --> 01:40:52.545
is at the heart
1776
01:40:52.545 --> 01:40:57.053
of the scientific discipline called epigenetics.
1777
01:40:57.053 --> 01:41:01.927 line:15%
- Epigenetics is really the ways by which different genes
1778
01:41:01.927 --> 01:41:05.271 line:15%
are used at different times and places
1779
01:41:05.271 --> 01:41:07.188
so that the same genome
1780
01:41:08.979 --> 01:41:11.799
that you inherit in your fertilized egg
1781
01:41:11.799 --> 01:41:13.757
can give rise to this set of proteins
1782
01:41:13.757 --> 01:41:16.852
in muscle cells, this set of proteins in neurons,
1783
01:41:16.852 --> 01:41:18.940
this set of proteins in lymphocytes,
1784
01:41:18.940 --> 01:41:21.716
this set of proteins in pancreas cells
1785
01:41:21.716 --> 01:41:24.887
so that the one genome can give rise
1786
01:41:24.887 --> 01:41:27.152
to all these different cell types.
1787
01:41:27.152 --> 01:41:28.986
That\'s epigenetics.
1788
01:41:28.986 --> 01:41:32.403
It involves how the genes are being used.
1789
01:41:34.619 --> 01:41:37.378
What you look like, what you act like,
1790
01:41:37.378 --> 01:41:40.461
is not merely a read out of a genome.
1791
01:41:41.352 --> 01:41:45.685
- So this comes back to the idea that the full story
1792
01:41:47.579 --> 01:41:49.875
doesn\'t lie in the genes alone.
1793
01:41:49.875 --> 01:41:52.766
It lies in all that structuring.
1794
01:41:52.766 --> 01:41:55.419
All of that, well I have to call it the system.
1795
01:41:55.419 --> 01:41:58.836 line:15%
- The whole metabolic network of the cell
1796
01:42:00.699 --> 01:42:03.883 line:15%
has an effect on these genetic processes.
1797
01:42:03.883 --> 01:42:06.970
And the metabolic network of the cell
1798
01:42:06.970 --> 01:42:09.720
is influenced by the environment.
1799
01:42:10.572 --> 01:42:12.870
So according to what we eat,
1800
01:42:12.870 --> 01:42:15.805
according to maybe toxic chemicals in the air,
1801
01:42:15.805 --> 01:42:19.055
this will affect our genetic processes.
1802
01:42:19.983 --> 01:42:22.290
- [John] It\'s common to ask if a disease,
1803
01:42:22.290 --> 01:42:24.701
physical characteristic or behavior
1804
01:42:24.701 --> 01:42:29.021
is caused by the genes or the environment.
1805
01:42:29.021 --> 01:42:30.604
Nature or nurture?
1806
01:42:31.748 --> 01:42:35.415
From this new perspective it is always both.
1807
01:43:00.274 --> 01:43:01.941 line:15%
- The more we assume
1808
01:43:04.405 --> 01:43:07.509 line:15%
about the characteristics of human beings
1809
01:43:07.509 --> 01:43:10.186
being genetically determined,
1810
01:43:10.186 --> 01:43:13.186
the less effort we are going to put
1811
01:43:13.186 --> 01:43:15.519
into sustaining environments
1812
01:43:21.523 --> 01:43:25.356
in which people will grow up as humane humans.
1813
01:43:49.170 --> 01:43:51.560
(gentle instrumental music)
1814
01:43:51.560 --> 01:43:54.810
- [John] She is a complex metabolizing system.
1815
01:43:55.970 --> 01:43:58.340
It is this entire system,
1816
01:43:58.340 --> 01:44:01.020
including her genome, her microbiome,
1817
01:44:03.110 --> 01:44:03.943
her culture,
1818
01:44:07.370 --> 01:44:08.450
and her environment,
1819
01:44:09.430 --> 01:44:13.500
that determines who she is and who she will become.
1820
01:44:19.442 --> 01:44:23.109
(gentle instrumental music)
1821
01:44:34.390 --> 01:44:35.900
I have often been troubled
1822
01:44:35.900 --> 01:44:39.980
by the idea that the magnificent diversity of life
1823
01:44:39.980 --> 01:44:42.430
came about through the natural selection
1824
01:44:42.430 --> 01:44:44.470
of a string of accidents,
1825
01:44:44.470 --> 01:44:47.330
random genetic mutations that happen
1826
01:44:47.330 --> 01:44:50.030
when the DNA, the genes, are copied.
1827
01:44:51.030 --> 01:44:52.570
Yet this is the basis
1828
01:44:52.570 --> 01:44:55.250
of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution
1829
01:44:55.250 --> 01:44:56.620
that is taught in schools.
1830
01:44:57.840 --> 01:44:59.950
- Random mutation and natural selection
1831
01:44:59.950 --> 01:45:01.710
is a gross oversimplification
1832
01:45:03.010 --> 01:45:05.760
and it\'s wrong because we now know a lot
1833
01:45:05.760 --> 01:45:08.690
about the processes of variation.
1834
01:45:09.700 --> 01:45:13.810
First of all, we\'ve learned that cells
1835
01:45:13.810 --> 01:45:16.810
can repair copying errors,
1836
01:45:16.810 --> 01:45:18.980
can detect them and correct them;
1837
01:45:19.820 --> 01:45:22.160
so they\'re reduced to a bare minimum,
1838
01:45:22.160 --> 01:45:23.510
less than one in a billion.
1839
01:45:24.670 --> 01:45:28.290
So it\'s a kind of quality control which is going on.
1840
01:45:28.290 --> 01:45:32.260
The cell is not the helpless victim of mistakes
1841
01:45:32.260 --> 01:45:34.910
that its replication apparatus makes.
1842
01:45:34.910 --> 01:45:37.430 line:15%
- Jim Shapiro, Lynn, and I interacted as a trio
1843
01:45:37.430 --> 01:45:38.300 line:15%
for some time.
1844
01:45:39.840 --> 01:45:43.620 line:15%
Jim\'s work, of course, nicely produced in his book,
1845
01:45:43.620 --> 01:45:46.900
Evolution: A View from the 21st Century,
1846
01:45:46.900 --> 01:45:51.010
demonstrates just how far from random mutations are.
1847
01:45:51.010 --> 01:45:52.620 line:15%
- What\'s happened is we\'ve gone
1848
01:45:52.620 --> 01:45:54.990 line:15%
from random mutation and accidents,
1849
01:45:54.990 --> 01:45:57.480 line:15%
which was a default assumption
1850
01:45:57.480 --> 01:46:00.900
in the absence of any real knowledge
1851
01:46:00.900 --> 01:46:02.250
of how these things worked,
1852
01:46:03.510 --> 01:46:08.510
to understanding that genetic change is an active process
1853
01:46:08.710 --> 01:46:11.770
that cells carry out on their genomes.
1854
01:46:13.220 --> 01:46:14.630
- I didn\'t know that.
1855
01:46:14.630 --> 01:46:16.650
It was for me a major discovery
1856
01:46:16.650 --> 01:46:20.100
through Lynn, then contacting with Jim, as it were,
1857
01:46:20.100 --> 01:46:24.740
to find out not only were mutations not random,
1858
01:46:24.740 --> 01:46:29.410
so that part of the standard story was clearly incorrect,
1859
01:46:29.410 --> 01:46:32.650
but that the frequency of mutations in particular areas
1860
01:46:32.650 --> 01:46:37.310
can be influenced by the environment and by the physiology.
1861
01:46:37.310 --> 01:46:38.890
- The DNA is changed
1862
01:46:39.870 --> 01:46:42.556
by a whole series of different kinds
1863
01:46:42.556 --> 01:46:45.470
of bio-chemical processes.
1864
01:46:45.470 --> 01:46:49.050
In many cases these involve cutting and splicing DNA,
1865
01:46:49.940 --> 01:46:52.420
just as we do in the laboratory,
1866
01:46:52.420 --> 01:46:53.253
and that\'s why I like
1867
01:46:53.253 --> 01:46:56.370
to call it natural genetic engineering.
1868
01:46:58.850 --> 01:47:01.260
- The point is that information is flowing
1869
01:47:01.260 --> 01:47:05.650 line:15%
from the environment and there is feedback to the genome.
1870
01:47:05.650 --> 01:47:08.230
- Instead of being a read-only memory system,
1871
01:47:09.240 --> 01:47:13.730
the genome is a read-write memory system.
1872
01:47:15.030 --> 01:47:17.370
- [John] One of the pioneering scientists
1873
01:47:17.370 --> 01:47:21.160
who studied the ability of the genome to change
1874
01:47:21.160 --> 01:47:23.450 line:15%
in response to the environment
1875
01:47:23.450 --> 01:47:26.160 line:15%
was the Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock.
1876
01:47:27.250 --> 01:47:29.310
- I am very much interested
1877
01:47:30.360 --> 01:47:34.370
in the nature of changes
1878
01:47:34.370 --> 01:47:36.700
that occur in the genome
1879
01:47:36.700 --> 01:47:41.120
when the genome meets something very unexpected.
1880
01:47:41.120 --> 01:47:44.270
- So what she\'s talking about is cells
1881
01:47:45.130 --> 01:47:49.300
dealing with their genomes in a sentient manner,
1882
01:47:50.210 --> 01:47:54.361
in a cognitive manner, where they sense damage
1883
01:47:54.361 --> 01:47:59.361
and take the appropriate steps to repair the damage.
1884
01:47:59.830 --> 01:48:03.100
- It\'s very smart to be able to sense it,
1885
01:48:03.100 --> 01:48:04.630
to be able to regulate it.
1886
01:48:04.630 --> 01:48:07.920
So when I first started talking about smart cells,
1887
01:48:07.920 --> 01:48:09.600
there were many, many smiles,
1888
01:48:09.600 --> 01:48:11.440
but I think we have to recognize
1889
01:48:11.440 --> 01:48:13.410
that the cells are very smart.
1890
01:48:13.410 --> 01:48:14.940 line:15%
- The thing that Lynn argued,
1891
01:48:17.430 --> 01:48:19.360 line:15%
which certainly most neo-Darwinists
1892
01:48:19.360 --> 01:48:21.320
nor most people would accept,
1893
01:48:22.170 --> 01:48:27.170
is that all beings on the planet are sentient beings.
1894
01:48:27.400 --> 01:48:28.990
All.
1895
01:48:28.990 --> 01:48:32.290
They make decisions, they make choices.
1896
01:48:32.290 --> 01:48:34.560 line:15%
- Well, life is matter that chooses.
1897
01:48:41.490 --> 01:48:44.090
- [John] You would say that cells are cognitive,
1898
01:48:44.090 --> 01:48:45.090
and that they think.
1899
01:48:46.274 --> 01:48:49.080
- I don\'t use the word think myself,
1900
01:48:49.080 --> 01:48:50.860
because I think it\'s like consciousness.
1901
01:48:50.860 --> 01:48:55.860
It\'s a word which is filled with philosophical implications
1902
01:48:58.910 --> 01:49:03.640
and a lot of desire on our part to limit it to ourselves.
1903
01:49:04.630 --> 01:49:07.640
I like the word cognitive because you can define it.
1904
01:49:08.800 --> 01:49:12.480
Cognition is action based on sensory information.
1905
01:49:13.410 --> 01:49:14.420
- [John] Okay.
1906
01:49:14.420 --> 01:49:17.630
I can certainly say that this caterpillar has cognition,
1907
01:49:18.510 --> 01:49:22.000
but what about the oak tree it is crawling on?
1908
01:49:22.000 --> 01:49:24.080
Does it have cognition?
1909
01:49:24.080 --> 01:49:28.980
For Barbara McClintock, that green ball growing on the tree,
1910
01:49:28.980 --> 01:49:31.720
an oak gall, holds an answer.
1911
01:49:32.630 --> 01:49:35.840
- The galls on oak trees,
1912
01:49:35.840 --> 01:49:40.840
a particular wasp has a particular oak tree that it goes to.
1913
01:49:41.010 --> 01:49:46.010
As soon as it lays its egg, the cells are reprogrammed
1914
01:49:46.600 --> 01:49:49.610
to make a very particular structure,
1915
01:49:49.610 --> 01:49:51.910
one that it isn\'t using itself at all.
1916
01:49:51.910 --> 01:49:55.980
What has happened to that genome to reprogram it?
1917
01:49:57.240 --> 01:50:00.760
- [John] This oak gall is a symbiosis
1918
01:50:00.760 --> 01:50:03.350
between an insect and a plant.
1919
01:50:06.310 --> 01:50:11.310
- So there is a misconception that Lynn was not a Darwinist,
1920
01:50:11.590 --> 01:50:13.750
and that\'s not true at all.
1921
01:50:15.220 --> 01:50:20.190 line:15%
Where she and the Neo-Darwinist paradigm differed
1922
01:50:20.190 --> 01:50:23.410 line:15%
was in the source of innovation.
1923
01:50:23.410 --> 01:50:26.880
Where do you get new species?
1924
01:50:26.880 --> 01:50:28.330
Where do you get new traits?
1925
01:50:29.660 --> 01:50:32.950
The Neo-Darwinist paradigm is you get new traits
1926
01:50:32.950 --> 01:50:35.910
from mutations and you get new traits
1927
01:50:35.910 --> 01:50:38.840
from sexual recombination.
1928
01:50:38.840 --> 01:50:43.840
She said, fine, but that\'s a very small amount of change.
1929
01:50:45.710 --> 01:50:48.520
When we look at big evolutionary change,
1930
01:50:48.520 --> 01:50:50.170
when we look at speciation,
1931
01:50:50.170 --> 01:50:53.880
we have lots and lots of examples that involve symbiosis.
1932
01:50:58.080 --> 01:51:01.910 line:15%
- When de Bary, Anton de Bary, coined the word symbiosis,
1933
01:51:03.270 --> 01:51:06.920 line:15%
1876 I think, argued immediately
1934
01:51:06.920 --> 01:51:09.350
that this was going to be a form of evolution
1935
01:51:09.350 --> 01:51:11.560
that was distinct from Darwinian gradualism,
1936
01:51:11.560 --> 01:51:13.980
that this was saltational, this was leaps.
1937
01:51:15.060 --> 01:51:16.620
- [John] In that email from Lynn
1938
01:51:16.620 --> 01:51:18.950
that I carry around in my pocket,
1939
01:51:18.950 --> 01:51:22.260
Lynn writes: saltatory evolution prevails,
1940
01:51:24.330 --> 01:51:27.840
and then lists a handful of ways in which evolution
1941
01:51:27.840 --> 01:51:32.840
results from organisms exchanging and acquiring genomes.
1942
01:51:34.050 --> 01:51:38.280
She calls them all merger-integration-fusion processes.
1943
01:51:39.390 --> 01:51:42.500
First on the list is symbiogenesis.
1944
01:51:44.130 --> 01:51:45.650
- What is symbiogenesis?
1945
01:51:45.650 --> 01:51:48.820
It is simply symbiosis leading to new kinds of evolution.
1946
01:51:49.990 --> 01:51:52.930
What we now know which is so different,
1947
01:51:52.930 --> 01:51:53.763
in fact it\'s different
1948
01:51:53.763 --> 01:51:55.880
from what many people are taught today,
1949
01:51:55.880 --> 01:51:57.760
is that it\'s not just the lichen
1950
01:51:57.760 --> 01:52:00.310
that is the product of symbiogenesis;
1951
01:52:00.310 --> 01:52:03.710
it is all animal cells, all plant cells,
1952
01:52:03.710 --> 01:52:06.660
all fungal cell and all protoctist cells,
1953
01:52:06.660 --> 01:52:10.100
that is, all life on Earth that is not bacteria
1954
01:52:10.100 --> 01:52:12.100
is a product of symbiogenesis.
1955
01:52:12.100 --> 01:52:13.120
What does that mean?
1956
01:52:13.120 --> 01:52:16.050
It means that very different sorts of organisms
1957
01:52:16.050 --> 01:52:19.410
came together to make a new kind of being.
1958
01:52:19.410 --> 01:52:22.020
People who work with computers know this very well.
1959
01:52:22.020 --> 01:52:25.140
You don\'t start all over making the modem.
1960
01:52:25.140 --> 01:52:27.930
You don\'t start all over making the hard disk.
1961
01:52:27.930 --> 01:52:32.170
You recombine already refined parts
1962
01:52:32.170 --> 01:52:34.870
that were already developed by others.
1963
01:52:34.870 --> 01:52:38.270
And then you get something genuinely new.
1964
01:52:38.270 --> 01:52:42.330
- [John] One of Lynn\'s favorite examples of symbiogenesis
1965
01:52:42.330 --> 01:52:44.420
are green animals.
1966
01:52:44.420 --> 01:52:46.780
- [John] The ancestor of this worm, swallowed, ate,
1967
01:52:46.780 --> 01:52:49.800
but did not digest the green entity
1968
01:52:49.800 --> 01:52:52.730
that does photosynthesis and it resulted
1969
01:52:52.730 --> 01:52:55.500
in these green worms that are fully photosynthetic,
1970
01:52:55.500 --> 01:52:58.190
have lost their mouths and they are really very different
1971
01:52:58.190 --> 01:53:01.770
from their immediate ancestors who are not photosynthetic.
1972
01:53:01.770 --> 01:53:03.850
These kinds of symbiogenetic events,
1973
01:53:03.850 --> 01:53:06.040
that is the living together of organisms
1974
01:53:06.040 --> 01:53:07.950
with very different abilities
1975
01:53:07.950 --> 01:53:12.330
that lead to really new tissues, new organs, new forms,
1976
01:53:12.330 --> 01:53:14.320
to me is a much more,
1977
01:53:14.320 --> 01:53:15.580
it\'s not a much more important,
1978
01:53:15.580 --> 01:53:18.831
it is the major mechanism of change
1979
01:53:18.831 --> 01:53:21.860
in the fossil record and in evolution.
1980
01:53:21.860 --> 01:53:26.860
- She realized that sometimes, organisms swallow bacteria
1981
01:53:27.670 --> 01:53:31.790
and take them apart and incorporate their genome
1982
01:53:31.790 --> 01:53:35.440
into the larger organism\'s genome.
1983
01:53:35.440 --> 01:53:39.120
This was of course, then spectacularly supported
1984
01:53:39.570 --> 01:53:42.220 line:15%
and verified by the Human Genome Project
1985
01:53:42.220 --> 01:53:46.450 line:15%
where to their great surprise geneticists found strands
1986
01:53:46.450 --> 01:53:50.260
and strands of bacterial genomes within the human genome.
1987
01:53:51.320 --> 01:53:53.540
- [John] In Acquiring Genomes,
1988
01:53:53.540 --> 01:53:56.670
A Theory of the Origins of Species,
1989
01:53:56.670 --> 01:54:00.060
Lynn and Dorion show that the important variations
1990
01:54:00.060 --> 01:54:02.520
that lead to evolutionary change
1991
01:54:02.520 --> 01:54:05.130
come from the acquisition of genomes.
1992
01:54:06.530 --> 01:54:08.560
The book investigates the ways
1993
01:54:08.560 --> 01:54:12.310
through which individual cells and organisms
1994
01:54:12.310 --> 01:54:17.310
acquire and recombine DNA from more than a single source.
1995
01:54:18.520 --> 01:54:23.490
Lynn Margulis and other scientists call these processes sex.
1996
01:54:23.490 --> 01:54:28.380
This is an electron micrograph of bacterial sex.
1997
01:54:28.380 --> 01:54:31.670
- In 1986, my co-author Dorion Sagan and I
1998
01:54:31.670 --> 01:54:33.770
wrote a book called The Origins of Sex
1999
01:54:33.770 --> 01:54:36.540
and everybody was looking at it
2000
01:54:36.540 --> 01:54:38.990
to try and find out what they really are interested in
2001
01:54:38.990 --> 01:54:40.670
and they were very disappointed
2002
01:54:40.670 --> 01:54:42.690
because it\'s a very biological book
2003
01:54:42.690 --> 01:54:45.340
and its full of protoctists and other organisms.
2004
01:54:47.030 --> 01:54:49.260
- [John] Reading this book I realized
2005
01:54:49.260 --> 01:54:51.200
that, like most people,
2006
01:54:51.200 --> 01:54:53.870
my understanding of sex and reproduction
2007
01:54:53.870 --> 01:54:55.160
was limited to animals.
2008
01:54:56.200 --> 01:54:59.976
But there are organisms that reproduce without sex.
2009
01:54:59.976 --> 01:55:03.726
(gentle instrumental music)
2010
01:55:10.790 --> 01:55:13.610
And there is sex, the acquisition of DNA
2011
01:55:13.610 --> 01:55:17.180
by a cell or organism, without reproduction.
2012
01:55:25.930 --> 01:55:30.590
And there is what Lynn called forbidden fertilization,
2013
01:55:30.590 --> 01:55:34.530
sex between two very different types of organisms,
2014
01:55:34.530 --> 01:55:36.900
producing a third type of organism.
2015
01:55:38.190 --> 01:55:43.190
- Geosiphon only is made when a member of one kingdom,
2016
01:55:44.260 --> 01:55:47.170
so what we have here is a fungus,
2017
01:55:47.170 --> 01:55:49.900
is fertilized by a member of another kingdom.
2018
01:55:49.900 --> 01:55:54.900
Now, the little flitting strings here are cyanobacteria
2019
01:55:56.120 --> 01:55:58.480
and what we have here is a literal mating.
2020
01:55:59.750 --> 01:56:03.140
This is the pornographic action right there.
2021
01:56:03.140 --> 01:56:07.080
The fungus is breaking down its cell membrane
2022
01:56:07.080 --> 01:56:11.720
and its cell wall and it\'s taking the cyanobacterium
2023
01:56:11.720 --> 01:56:13.390
into its own body
2024
01:56:13.390 --> 01:56:15.730
and you end up with this little moss like thing
2025
01:56:15.730 --> 01:56:17.830
that is not a plant and not a moss at all.
2026
01:56:19.240 --> 01:56:21.340
You have a new organism
2027
01:56:21.340 --> 01:56:25.530
formed routinely by a fertilization like fusion
2028
01:56:25.530 --> 01:56:28.140
between members of different kingdoms.
2029
01:56:28.140 --> 01:56:30.440
- Mixing between organisms
2030
01:56:30.440 --> 01:56:33.450
that normally don\'t mate together, or hybridization,
2031
01:56:34.400 --> 01:56:38.730
is a very powerful source of genetic novelty.
2032
01:56:43.130 --> 01:56:46.300
- [John] I have often wondered how is it possible
2033
01:56:46.300 --> 01:56:50.550
that this caterpillar will one day become this moth.
2034
01:56:52.760 --> 01:56:56.300
How did this bizarre life cycle come to be?
2035
01:56:59.550 --> 01:57:03.170
On the Isle of Man, between Great Britain and Ireland,
2036
01:57:03.170 --> 01:57:08.170
I met Don Williamson, a scientist and colleague of Lynn\'s,
2037
01:57:08.400 --> 01:57:11.830
who developed a controversial hypothesis
2038
01:57:11.830 --> 01:57:14.610
that provides an answer to this very question.
2039
01:57:15.760 --> 01:57:19.340
- I was collecting icanus on a rocky beach,
2040
01:57:19.340 --> 01:57:22.650
and I slipped and fell on my head and I had a stroke.
2041
01:57:22.650 --> 01:57:24.530
I\'ve never been the same since.
2042
01:57:26.590 --> 01:57:31.240
- [John] Don Williamson spent his career studying larvae
2043
01:57:31.240 --> 01:57:34.840
living in plankton and is highly regarded in this field.
2044
01:57:35.740 --> 01:57:39.420
Plankton is a world of life most of us know nothing about.
2045
01:57:40.760 --> 01:57:44.610
Huge masses of organisms floating in the ocean.
2046
01:57:44.610 --> 01:57:49.050
Don\'s story begins with one planktonic larva in particular,
2047
01:57:49.050 --> 01:57:50.810
that of a starfish.
2048
01:57:50.810 --> 01:57:51.900
- Luidi scarci.
2049
01:57:52.750 --> 01:57:55.590
I have a picture of it on my fridge
2050
01:57:55.590 --> 01:57:59.050
just to remind me, that\'s how it all started.
2051
01:57:59.050 --> 01:58:03.910
This particular starfish, the five-armed juvenile,
2052
01:58:03.910 --> 01:58:07.570 line:15%
merely drops off the swimming larva.
2053
01:58:07.570 --> 01:58:12.570 line:15%
This larva could go on swimming for a further three months.
2054
01:58:15.530 --> 01:58:18.090 line:15%
This struck me as amazing.
2055
01:58:18.090 --> 01:58:22.200 line:15%
How can an animal,
2056
01:58:24.440 --> 01:58:27.540
one animal, hatch from one egg,
2057
01:58:28.720 --> 01:58:33.200
diverge into two animals that are really two animals,
2058
01:58:34.090 --> 01:58:39.090
one of which will be drifting away in the plankton
2059
01:58:39.160 --> 01:58:43.750
while the other is on the sea floor
2060
01:58:43.750 --> 01:58:48.600
crawling about and feeding itself.
2061
01:58:52.040 --> 01:58:55.570
This was an anomaly
2062
01:58:55.570 --> 01:58:58.380
that puzzled me and intrigued me
2063
01:58:59.420 --> 01:59:01.280
throughout my life.
2064
01:59:01.280 --> 01:59:04.480
- [John] After many years of puzzling over this
2065
01:59:04.480 --> 01:59:06.010
and other anomalies,
2066
01:59:06.010 --> 01:59:10.310
Don came up with an answer: hybridization.
2067
01:59:10.310 --> 01:59:13.840
- In the sea, a male and a female
2068
01:59:13.840 --> 01:59:18.000
actually mating individually is extremely rare.
2069
01:59:19.170 --> 01:59:24.170 line:15%
Most cases, the female sheds her eggs,
2070
01:59:24.730 --> 01:59:26.320 line:15%
the male sheds his sperm,
2071
01:59:27.564 --> 01:59:30.620
and all the fertilization takes place in the water.
2072
01:59:31.700 --> 01:59:34.860
If you do get two unrelated groups
2073
01:59:34.860 --> 01:59:39.860
spawning at the same time, there\'s every opportunity
2074
01:59:40.150 --> 01:59:43.840
for some of the eggs to get fertilized
2075
01:59:43.840 --> 01:59:47.420
with the sperm of the unrelated species.
2076
01:59:48.390 --> 01:59:53.250
In most cases, nothing happens, but once in a million years,
2077
01:59:53.250 --> 01:59:58.250
literally once in a million years, you get a viable hybrid.
2078
02:00:00.260 --> 02:00:04.360
- [John] The result is what Don calls a sequential hybrid.
2079
02:00:06.860 --> 02:00:11.150
First, one animal is born from an egg and lives its life.
2080
02:00:12.570 --> 02:00:15.090
This animal is traditionally called a larva.
2081
02:00:16.600 --> 02:00:19.720
Then that animal transforms itself
2082
02:00:19.720 --> 02:00:21.100
into what\'s called a pupa.
2083
02:00:23.230 --> 02:00:28.230
Inside the pupa, enzymes digest the larva\'s tissues
2084
02:00:28.488 --> 02:00:30.750
leaving a rich gooey fluid.
2085
02:00:31.900 --> 02:00:36.170
And from this egg-like fluid, a second animal is born.
2086
02:00:37.370 --> 02:00:40.450
So as the result of hybridization,
2087
02:00:40.450 --> 02:00:44.550
from one set of chromosomes two animals are born,
2088
02:00:44.550 --> 02:00:45.910
one after the other.
2089
02:00:47.740 --> 02:00:50.681
Don performed hybridization experiments
2090
02:00:50.681 --> 02:00:52.890
and had some bizarre results.
2091
02:00:53.980 --> 02:00:58.980
- So I got hundreds of little larvae spinning about.
2092
02:01:01.660 --> 02:01:04.940
They were fascinating little creatures
2093
02:01:04.940 --> 02:01:08.990
but like nothing I had seen before.
2094
02:01:09.860 --> 02:01:14.420
- [John] His work continues to disturb many scientists.
2095
02:01:14.420 --> 02:01:17.400
A few of Lynn\'s colleagues urged me
2096
02:01:17.400 --> 02:01:20.630
not to include Don Williamson in this film.
2097
02:01:21.550 --> 02:01:23.830
But when I talked to them further,
2098
02:01:23.830 --> 02:01:27.930
I realized that they hadn\'t read his books or papers
2099
02:01:27.930 --> 02:01:32.010
and were relying on hearsay and on one paper
2100
02:01:32.010 --> 02:01:35.530
that sought to disprove his theories, but doesn\'t.
2101
02:01:37.260 --> 02:01:40.280
Why do scientists want so much
2102
02:01:40.280 --> 02:01:42.290
for Don Williamson to be wrong?
2103
02:01:44.120 --> 02:01:48.210
It was while reading a review of Don\'s second book
2104
02:01:48.210 --> 02:01:50.445
that I found the answer.
2105
02:01:50.445 --> 02:01:54.940
The reviewer writes that if Williamson is correct,
2106
02:01:54.940 --> 02:01:58.530
then our current understanding of animal evolution
2107
02:01:58.530 --> 02:02:00.750
is fundamentally wrong,
2108
02:02:00.750 --> 02:02:04.940
and many scientific careers have essentially been wasted.
2109
02:02:06.080 --> 02:02:08.717
Don\'s theory strikes at the very core
2110
02:02:09.250 --> 02:02:13.690 line:15%
of contemporary thinking on evolution: Darwin\'s tree model.
2111
02:02:16.780 --> 02:02:19.740
- The concept that the tree is the right topology
2112
02:02:21.830 --> 02:02:23.020
I think is very wrong.
2113
02:02:24.640 --> 02:02:26.410
It\'s very wrong, even Woese\'s tree
2114
02:02:28.570 --> 02:02:33.570
because a tree assumes that the lineages continue to branch
2115
02:02:34.610 --> 02:02:37.490
and branch and branch from a common ancestor
2116
02:02:37.490 --> 02:02:41.990
and Stephen Bell himself showed that there was movement
2117
02:02:41.990 --> 02:02:44.470
of genetic material from one branch to another.
2118
02:02:44.470 --> 02:02:49.470
That makes the topology a net, a web, and no longer a tree.
2119
02:02:50.320 --> 02:02:53.740
In that Oxford debate with Lynn, Richard Dawkins
2120
02:02:53.740 --> 02:02:57.380
and others that I have excerpted throughout this film,
2121
02:02:57.380 --> 02:03:01.440
there\'s a revealing moment which was only recorded in audio.
2122
02:03:16.975 --> 02:03:19.829
(gentle instrumental music)
2123
02:03:19.829 --> 02:03:21.120
- [John] It would be convenient
2124
02:03:21.120 --> 02:03:24.780
if nature conformed to the theories of biologists,
2125
02:03:26.030 --> 02:03:30.730
but we must humbly admit that as we learn more about nature,
2126
02:03:30.730 --> 02:03:32.800
our theories must change.
2127
02:03:35.120 --> 02:03:39.950
And much of evolution remains an awe inspiring mystery.
2128
02:03:43.000 --> 02:03:46.990
Evolution is the growth and development of life
2129
02:03:47.870 --> 02:03:52.870
from one cell to a living system with many interconnected
2130
02:03:52.890 --> 02:03:56.310
and co-evolving parts that covers the Earth.
2131
02:03:57.790 --> 02:04:01.560
And Lynn Margulis would be quick to point out that the cars,
2132
02:04:01.560 --> 02:04:05.850
clothing and buildings in this photo may not be alive,
2133
02:04:06.790 --> 02:04:10.360
but they are part of our living system,
2134
02:04:10.360 --> 02:04:13.990
which evolves from generation to generation.
2135
02:04:21.747 --> 02:04:25.414
(gentle instrumental music)
2136
02:04:33.980 --> 02:04:37.690
- In the early \'60s scientists were asked,
2137
02:04:37.690 --> 02:04:42.080 line:15%
they were asked to develop a life detection apparatus.
2138
02:04:42.080 --> 02:04:44.820
That is, how can you tell if a planet has life on it?
2139
02:04:44.820 --> 02:04:47.260
In fact NASA approached the scientific community
2140
02:04:47.260 --> 02:04:48.660
with this problem.
2141
02:04:48.660 --> 02:04:53.570 line:15%
- I was hired by NASA in 1961, it\'s a long time ago,
2142
02:04:53.570 --> 02:04:55.730
mainly because I\'d invented a number
2143
02:04:55.730 --> 02:04:59.830
of exceedingly sensitive detection devices.
2144
02:04:59.830 --> 02:05:02.600
- And I want to tell you how NASA asking the question
2145
02:05:02.600 --> 02:05:05.217
has changed so dramatically our views
2146
02:05:05.217 --> 02:05:08.320
of the Earth as a planet.
2147
02:05:08.320 --> 02:05:13.310
The Gaia hypothesis says that you can detect life
2148
02:05:13.310 --> 02:05:15.550
from an atmosphere of a planet.
2149
02:05:15.550 --> 02:05:19.340
- If the atmosphere is completely at equilibrium,
2150
02:05:19.340 --> 02:05:21.890
or near to it, then there\'s unlikely
2151
02:05:21.890 --> 02:05:23.560
to be any life on the planet,
2152
02:05:24.780 --> 02:05:25.980
- [John] The atmosphere.
2153
02:05:26.930 --> 02:05:29.610
We are bathed in it.
2154
02:05:29.610 --> 02:05:32.030
It connects each of us to each other.
2155
02:05:33.270 --> 02:05:36.210
It transports much of the matter
2156
02:05:36.210 --> 02:05:38.450
that life uses to make itself,
2157
02:05:44.620 --> 02:05:47.490
- I was sitting in a room, in an office
2158
02:05:47.490 --> 02:05:51.000
that I shared with Carl Sagan at JPL
2159
02:05:51.000 --> 02:05:55.720
and we were discussing life on Mars and how to find it,
2160
02:05:55.720 --> 02:05:58.680
when in marched an astronomer, Lou Kaplan,
2161
02:05:58.680 --> 02:06:01.050
with his arms full of sheets of paper.
2162
02:06:01.050 --> 02:06:02.690
We all said, well, what\'s this?
2163
02:06:04.110 --> 02:06:08.580
When we looked at it closely it was the complete analysis
2164
02:06:08.580 --> 02:06:11.200
of the Martian and Venus atmospheres.
2165
02:06:12.490 --> 02:06:14.680
We said to Lou, well, interpret it for us.
2166
02:06:14.680 --> 02:06:15.740
What\'s it mean?
2167
02:06:15.740 --> 02:06:18.290
He said, it means that the atmospheres of both planets
2168
02:06:18.290 --> 02:06:20.300
are almost entirely carbon dioxide
2169
02:06:20.300 --> 02:06:22.750
with only traces of the other gases present.
2170
02:06:23.970 --> 02:06:25.812
I immediately knew this meant
2171
02:06:25.812 --> 02:06:28.730
that they were both dead planets.
2172
02:06:28.730 --> 02:06:31.550
- The Earth as a planet is profoundly different
2173
02:06:31.550 --> 02:06:34.780
from our sister planets, that is Mars on the one hand
2174
02:06:34.780 --> 02:06:36.420
and Venus on the other.
2175
02:06:36.420 --> 02:06:39.140
And the differences have to be understood
2176
02:06:39.140 --> 02:06:41.145
as a product of life.
2177
02:06:41.145 --> 02:06:43.230
- If you look at the Earth\'s atmosphere,
2178
02:06:43.230 --> 02:06:46.320
it\'s wildly out of equilibrium, incredibly.
2179
02:06:46.320 --> 02:06:47.153
Just think of it.
2180
02:06:47.153 --> 02:06:48.820
There\'s methane and oxygen mixed.
2181
02:06:48.820 --> 02:06:51.420
If it was a different composition it would blow up.
2182
02:06:53.100 --> 02:06:56.370
Something must be regulating or it wouldn\'t stay constant.
2183
02:06:56.370 --> 02:06:59.770
- Gas composition of the lower atmosphere, the temperature,
2184
02:07:00.650 --> 02:07:04.230
the oxidation state, that these things,
2185
02:07:04.230 --> 02:07:06.310
that these aspects of the lower atmosphere
2186
02:07:06.310 --> 02:07:11.310
are modified by the presence of living organisms
2187
02:07:12.210 --> 02:07:15.150
in such a way as to regulate the atmosphere
2188
02:07:15.150 --> 02:07:18.730
to keep these aspects within a range suitable
2189
02:07:18.730 --> 02:07:20.370
for life on the surface.
2190
02:07:20.370 --> 02:07:22.410
It says therefore that the lower atmosphere
2191
02:07:22.410 --> 02:07:24.900
is not a passive environment
2192
02:07:24.900 --> 02:07:27.382
but it is an actively modulated environment
2193
02:07:27.382 --> 02:07:29.540
for life on the surface.
2194
02:07:29.540 --> 02:07:31.000
- That was my eureka moment.
2195
02:07:31.000 --> 02:07:33.700
Here was this great system that was looking after itself
2196
02:07:33.700 --> 02:07:35.540
and keeping the planet habitable.
2197
02:07:36.699 --> 02:07:40.366
(gentle instrumental music)
2198
02:07:45.620 --> 02:07:49.180 line:15%
The conventional wisdom held by geologists
2199
02:07:49.180 --> 02:07:51.960 line:15%
was that life was a kind of passenger on the Earth.
2200
02:07:51.960 --> 02:07:55.380 line:15%
- The Earth was thought of as basically a dead ball of rock
2201
02:07:55.380 --> 02:07:58.160 line:15%
with a thin smear of life on its surface
2202
02:07:58.160 --> 02:08:00.910 line:15%
that didn\'t have any influence or much influence
2203
02:08:00.910 --> 02:08:03.560
on what the composition of the surface looked like.
2204
02:08:04.800 --> 02:08:06.700
The geologists were in charge.
2205
02:08:06.700 --> 02:08:07.760
There were different departments,
2206
02:08:07.760 --> 02:08:09.440
geology, meteorology, chemistry,
2207
02:08:09.440 --> 02:08:11.510
and they didn\'t really talk to each other very much.
2208
02:08:11.510 --> 02:08:14.210
That\'s a fragmented reductionist approach
2209
02:08:14.210 --> 02:08:15.660
to understanding the Earth.
2210
02:08:15.660 --> 02:08:18.900
- Now, the Gaia notion is quite different.
2211
02:08:18.900 --> 02:08:21.070
It sees the evolution of life
2212
02:08:21.070 --> 02:08:24.350
and the evolution of the planet as not two processes
2213
02:08:24.350 --> 02:08:26.910
but one single tightly coupled process.
2214
02:08:26.910 --> 02:08:28.705
- The rocks, the atmosphere, the biota,
2215
02:08:28.705 --> 02:08:31.640
they\'re tightly coupled, they interact as a system.
2216
02:08:31.640 --> 02:08:34.810
- It is hard to believe from an astronomical point of view
2217
02:08:34.810 --> 02:08:36.620
that the temperature is simply
2218
02:08:36.620 --> 02:08:38.830
by accident maintained constant.
2219
02:08:38.830 --> 02:08:40.180
We prefer to believe
2220
02:08:40.180 --> 02:08:42.860
that there is an active temperature regulating system
2221
02:08:42.860 --> 02:08:44.740
and when we look around we see
2222
02:08:44.740 --> 02:08:47.940
that it is really the sum of the organisms
2223
02:08:47.940 --> 02:08:51.360
and their activities that have the potential
2224
02:08:51.360 --> 02:08:52.770
for regulating the temperature.
2225
02:08:52.770 --> 02:08:57.560
- I\'d first come along and published on Gaia in 1965
2226
02:08:57.560 --> 02:08:59.490
long before I met Lynn.
2227
02:08:59.490 --> 02:09:03.480 line:15%
- He intuited that Gaia existed and that Gaia must work.
2228
02:09:03.480 --> 02:09:04.950 line:15%
He couldn\'t say how.
2229
02:09:04.950 --> 02:09:08.240
I think Lynn played a key role in getting him thinking
2230
02:09:08.240 --> 02:09:10.760
in a way that together they could begin to say
2231
02:09:10.760 --> 02:09:11.910
how it could happen.
2232
02:09:11.910 --> 02:09:16.910
- It was about 1971 I think when she asks Carl,
2233
02:09:18.430 --> 02:09:19.930
by then they were divorced,
2234
02:09:21.430 --> 02:09:25.420
did anybody know about oxygen in the atmosphere
2235
02:09:25.420 --> 02:09:29.730
and how it came and what role it played?
2236
02:09:30.640 --> 02:09:33.000
He sort of hummed and hawed and eventually said,
2237
02:09:33.000 --> 02:09:35.320
well, you best speak to Jim Lovelock.
2238
02:09:35.320 --> 02:09:37.090
He\'s got some strange ideas
2239
02:09:37.090 --> 02:09:39.260
on how the atmosphere came about.
2240
02:09:39.260 --> 02:09:43.900
She was probably more aware than anybody I\'d met
2241
02:09:43.900 --> 02:09:48.800
about the role of bacteria, micro-organisms generally,
2242
02:09:48.800 --> 02:09:51.100
in the infrastructure of the Earth.
2243
02:09:51.100 --> 02:09:53.030
- We think it\'s the major groups of bacteria
2244
02:09:53.030 --> 02:09:55.370
that actually are running the Gaian system.
2245
02:09:55.370 --> 02:09:59.481
- And this was an incredibly valuable contribution.
2246
02:09:59.481 --> 02:10:02.340
(gentle instrumental music)
2247
02:10:02.340 --> 02:10:05.310
Most scientists before then, if not all,
2248
02:10:05.310 --> 02:10:07.570
tended to regard the bacteria as something
2249
02:10:07.570 --> 02:10:08.820
in a pathology lab.
2250
02:10:10.220 --> 02:10:13.160
They didn\'t think the whole ruddy show was running on them.
2251
02:10:13.160 --> 02:10:14.850
- There\'s something more than chemistry
2252
02:10:14.850 --> 02:10:16.190
on the surface of the planet.
2253
02:10:16.190 --> 02:10:18.250
And this more than chemistry turns out to be life
2254
02:10:18.250 --> 02:10:19.900
and that is the basic idea.
2255
02:10:19.900 --> 02:10:21.350
- We got on exceedingly well.
2256
02:10:23.650 --> 02:10:25.310
She was the first person I\'d met
2257
02:10:25.310 --> 02:10:29.360
that would listen to anything I had to say about Gaia.
2258
02:10:29.360 --> 02:10:30.600
- I love Jim Lovelock.
2259
02:10:30.600 --> 02:10:35.050
I think he\'s the most original, mischievous,
2260
02:10:36.170 --> 02:10:38.490
anti-academic mind I\'ve ever met.
2261
02:10:39.450 --> 02:10:44.170
He\'s just totally original and very science grounded.
2262
02:10:44.170 --> 02:10:47.530
- And that allowed them together, I think, in the early \'70s
2263
02:10:47.530 --> 02:10:50.310
to have this extraordinary outburst of creativity.
2264
02:10:50.310 --> 02:10:53.120
Suggesting all kinds of extraordinary ways
2265
02:10:53.120 --> 02:10:56.450
in which life could be involved in regulating methane
2266
02:10:56.450 --> 02:10:59.200
in the atmosphere and in turn oxygen in the atmosphere,
2267
02:11:00.570 --> 02:11:03.300
how bacterial life is entwined in the,
2268
02:11:03.300 --> 02:11:07.260
what we call the biogeochemical cycles that support life.
2269
02:11:07.260 --> 02:11:09.840
Some of those ideas have stood the test of time
2270
02:11:09.840 --> 02:11:11.040
and others of course haven\'t.
2271
02:11:11.040 --> 02:11:14.040
But it was the creative outburst, if you like,
2272
02:11:14.040 --> 02:11:15.760
in this interdisciplinary fusion
2273
02:11:15.760 --> 02:11:18.250
that is incarnated in those two people.
2274
02:11:18.250 --> 02:11:21.640
You have the depth of insight into biology
2275
02:11:21.640 --> 02:11:22.860
from Lynn on the one hand.
2276
02:11:22.860 --> 02:11:25.270
You have this physical, chemical
2277
02:11:25.270 --> 02:11:27.610
and almost philosophical reasoning of Jim Lovelock
2278
02:11:27.610 --> 02:11:28.933
on the other.
2279
02:11:28.933 --> 02:11:32.600
(gentle instrumental music)
2280
02:11:35.710 --> 02:11:38.720
It basically arose as an idea, Gaia,
2281
02:11:38.720 --> 02:11:41.190
almost in some ways arguably at the wrong time.
2282
02:11:41.190 --> 02:11:44.350
Because it arose at a time when biologists
2283
02:11:44.350 --> 02:11:48.290
were trying to purge any notion of things
2284
02:11:48.290 --> 02:11:49.800
being for the good of the species
2285
02:11:49.800 --> 02:11:53.030
or for the good of the collective out of their theory.
2286
02:11:53.030 --> 02:11:55.550
- The criticisms of the neo-Darwinists
2287
02:11:55.550 --> 02:11:58.170
were getting almost out of hand by then.
2288
02:11:58.170 --> 02:11:59.210 line:15%
- What I\'m not happy about
2289
02:11:59.210 --> 02:12:02.810 line:15%
is to talk about the function of a particular gas
2290
02:12:02.810 --> 02:12:05.350 line:15%
in the regulation of the biosphere
2291
02:12:05.350 --> 02:12:08.450
because it implies that individual organisms
2292
02:12:08.450 --> 02:12:10.800
that are manufacturing that gas are doing it
2293
02:12:10.800 --> 02:12:12.130
for the good of the biosphere.
2294
02:12:12.130 --> 02:12:15.350
It further implies that if it were bad for them
2295
02:12:15.350 --> 02:12:17.540
as individuals they might still do it
2296
02:12:17.540 --> 02:12:20.500
because that\'s the only way that the biosphere will persist
2297
02:12:20.500 --> 02:12:22.730
and the real danger is that people will think,
2298
02:12:22.730 --> 02:12:24.660
will assume that individual organisms
2299
02:12:24.660 --> 02:12:26.894
will sacrifice themselves for the benefit
2300
02:12:26.894 --> 02:12:29.660
of the entire system, and that\'s wrong.
2301
02:12:29.660 --> 02:12:31.520
And it\'s dangerously wrong in the sense
2302
02:12:31.520 --> 02:12:34.010
that it\'s very, very widely believed among laymen
2303
02:12:34.010 --> 02:12:35.210
and even among professionals.
2304
02:12:35.210 --> 02:12:38.950
- Neo-Darwinism, which was the developed branch
2305
02:12:38.950 --> 02:12:41.250
of Darwin\'s great theory,
2306
02:12:44.250 --> 02:12:45.380
seemed to be taken
2307
02:12:45.380 --> 02:12:49.570
by many as the final last word that was on the subject,
2308
02:12:49.570 --> 02:12:51.000
which is always dangerous.
2309
02:12:51.890 --> 02:12:55.810
They wrongly assumed that Gaia was against it.
2310
02:12:55.810 --> 02:13:00.810
- They saw anything that looked like an argument
2311
02:13:01.060 --> 02:13:04.200
for cooperation or so forth,
2312
02:13:04.200 --> 02:13:07.385
and Gaia was the grandest argument in their eyes
2313
02:13:07.385 --> 02:13:09.440
of biological cooperation,
2314
02:13:09.440 --> 02:13:12.870
as being somehow heretical to the theory.
2315
02:13:12.870 --> 02:13:17.030
- One senior British scientist,
2316
02:13:17.030 --> 02:13:18.510
John Maynard Smith,
2317
02:13:18.510 --> 02:13:20.820
referred to Gaia as an evil religion.
2318
02:13:24.070 --> 02:13:27.320
They were intemperate in their language generally.
2319
02:13:27.320 --> 02:13:31.110
Lynn was very combative and would usually fight them.
2320
02:13:31.110 --> 02:13:33.230
What was it Richard Dawkins referred to her
2321
02:13:33.230 --> 02:13:34.240
as Attila the Hen.
2322
02:13:35.440 --> 02:13:36.950
That was Lynn.
2323
02:13:36.950 --> 02:13:39.790
She was right, of course, and he was wrong.
2324
02:13:39.790 --> 02:13:42.970
- Since we have not discovered or worked out
2325
02:13:42.970 --> 02:13:44.340
all the mechanistic details.
2326
02:13:44.340 --> 02:13:45.320
and I certainly agree
2327
02:13:45.320 --> 02:13:48.390
we are nowhere near having finished that job,
2328
02:13:48.390 --> 02:13:51.670
people say: I don\'t believe it, you don\'t have a mechanism,
2329
02:13:51.670 --> 02:13:54.470
therefore the phenomenon of regulation doesn\'t exist.
2330
02:13:54.470 --> 02:13:56.860
Those people will be biting their tongues
2331
02:13:56.860 --> 02:13:58.420
in another decade or so.
2332
02:13:58.420 --> 02:13:59.940 line:15%
- We found mechanisms.
2333
02:13:59.940 --> 02:14:04.190 line:15%
We showed that but for life the carbon dioxide
2334
02:14:04.190 --> 02:14:08.050
in the atmosphere now would be so great that we\'d be fried.
2335
02:14:09.430 --> 02:14:13.080
Life has pumped it down continuously so that it\'s low.
2336
02:14:13.080 --> 02:14:14.410
There is a mechanism,
2337
02:14:14.410 --> 02:14:18.140
the pumping out of carbon dioxide to keep the planet cool.
2338
02:14:18.140 --> 02:14:20.120
Now we\'ve discovered another mechanism,
2339
02:14:20.120 --> 02:14:23.110
the clouds are produced by algae over the oceans.
2340
02:14:27.180 --> 02:14:30.290
They didn\'t really ever read any of the papers on Gaia.
2341
02:14:31.870 --> 02:14:34.490
They just got scuttle-butt from their students
2342
02:14:35.780 --> 02:14:38.710
and I\'ve even got this in writing from William Hamilton.
2343
02:14:38.710 --> 02:14:41.530
He apologized for never having read my papers
2344
02:14:41.530 --> 02:14:43.560
and just assumed that what was said around
2345
02:14:43.560 --> 02:14:45.580
about Gaia was correct.
2346
02:14:45.580 --> 02:14:48.104
- [John] Do you think the name was a problem?
2347
02:14:48.104 --> 02:14:49.600
- Yeah, probably.
2348
02:14:49.600 --> 02:14:52.760
But what would you have done?
2349
02:14:52.760 --> 02:14:55.550 line:15%
It so happened I lived in a village with Bill Golding
2350
02:15:12.500 --> 02:15:14.747
- However, because of its mythological connotations
2351
02:15:14.747 --> 02:15:17.350
that immediately gets up the backs
2352
02:15:17.350 --> 02:15:20.500
of a number of purist scientists
2353
02:15:20.500 --> 02:15:25.500
who would rather have less laden language.
2354
02:15:25.580 --> 02:15:27.560
- Jim Lovelock says, which is wonderful,
2355
02:15:27.560 --> 02:15:30.870
he said, well, let them think the Earth is a pile of rocks
2356
02:15:30.870 --> 02:15:31.703
and they can kick it.
2357
02:15:31.703 --> 02:15:34.210
But let them think that it\'s a live organism,
2358
02:15:34.210 --> 02:15:35.450
they respect it.
2359
02:15:35.450 --> 02:15:37.680
I say, that\'s not right, Jim.
2360
02:15:37.680 --> 02:15:40.400
- I look on the Earth as a living object.
2361
02:15:40.400 --> 02:15:43.300
I think the definition of life needs refining.
2362
02:15:43.300 --> 02:15:46.770
- To me the Gaia theory is absolutely not:
2363
02:15:46.770 --> 02:15:48.280
the Earth is an organism.
2364
02:15:48.280 --> 02:15:50.800
It\'s the Earth is a physiological system
2365
02:15:50.800 --> 02:15:54.270
made up of ecosystems, themselves made up of communities,
2366
02:15:54.270 --> 02:15:56.540
and that the minimal unit is a cell.
2367
02:15:57.481 --> 02:16:01.148
(gentle instrumental music)
2368
02:16:33.790 --> 02:16:35.940
- [John] An email from Lynn Margulis
2369
02:16:35.940 --> 02:16:37.320
started me on a journey.
2370
02:16:38.620 --> 02:16:40.680
During the making of this film,
2371
02:16:40.680 --> 02:16:42.930
I have had daily conversations with Lynn.
2372
02:16:44.240 --> 02:16:48.000
She continually provoked and challenged me
2373
02:16:48.000 --> 02:16:49.150
to dig a little deeper.
2374
02:16:50.310 --> 02:16:52.910
She will, I\'m sure, continue to do so.
2375
02:16:57.900 --> 02:17:01.440
As I stare at my reflection, a thought surfaces.
2376
02:17:03.050 --> 02:17:05.530
Perhaps Descartes\' famous expression
2377
02:17:05.530 --> 02:17:07.580
I think, therefore I am,
2378
02:17:08.560 --> 02:17:13.260
should be changed to we think, therefore I am.
2379
02:17:14.360 --> 02:17:18.140
For indeed, I am the product of communities
2380
02:17:18.140 --> 02:17:22.330
of cognitive cells and symbionts that make up my body,
2381
02:17:23.180 --> 02:17:26.994
and a product of the social and ecological communities
2382
02:17:26.994 --> 02:17:28.510
of which I am a part.
2383
02:17:29.440 --> 02:17:33.110
And together, we are Gaia, a symbiotic Earth.
2384
02:17:34.340 --> 02:17:38.090
- We are part of it, you see, and we have sentience.
2385
02:17:38.090 --> 02:17:40.860
This is why Gaia is the sentient entity
2386
02:17:40.860 --> 02:17:44.093
because we\'re an important animal species in it
2387
02:17:44.093 --> 02:17:47.340
and we\'ve let it see itself for the first time.
2388
02:17:49.420 --> 02:17:52.600
We are through our intelligence and communications,
2389
02:17:52.600 --> 02:17:55.640
in a way, the nervous system of our planet.
2390
02:17:55.640 --> 02:17:58.150
We can\'t help it because we\'re part of it.
2391
02:17:58.150 --> 02:18:01.020
So we should be he heart and the mind of the Earth,
2392
02:18:01.020 --> 02:18:01.980
not it\'s malady.
2393
02:18:03.050 --> 02:18:05.350
I\'ve tried to show you that Gaia theory
2394
02:18:05.350 --> 02:18:07.830
provides an intellectual habitat
2395
02:18:07.830 --> 02:18:11.570
where understanding of the Earth can evolve and grow.
2396
02:18:11.570 --> 02:18:13.450
Perhaps its greatest value lies
2397
02:18:13.450 --> 02:18:17.110
in its metaphor of a living Earth which reminds us
2398
02:18:17.110 --> 02:18:19.670
that we are part of it and most of all
2399
02:18:19.670 --> 02:18:23.160
that there are no human rights, only human obligations.
2400
02:18:23.160 --> 02:18:23.993
Thank you.
2401
02:18:26.000 --> 02:18:28.610
It\'s become a live thinking planet.
2402
02:18:28.610 --> 02:18:30.060
Think where it\'s going to go?
2403
02:18:31.690 --> 02:18:34.470
\'Cause we\'re only a stage in evolution.
2404
02:18:34.470 --> 02:18:36.850
- [John] So you\'re very optimistic.
2405
02:18:36.850 --> 02:18:38.668
You seem--
- Oh, yes.
2406
02:18:38.668 --> 02:18:41.370 line:15%
(gentle instrumental music)
2407
02:18:41.370 --> 02:18:43.370 line:15%
We certainly were kindred souls,
2408
02:18:43.370 --> 02:18:45.310 line:15%
she was a rebel and so was I.
2409
02:18:53.003 --> 02:18:56.670
(gentle instrumental music)
2410
02:19:00.570 --> 02:19:04.080 line:15%
- If I asked her, are you awed by life, she would say yes.
2411
02:19:05.780 --> 02:19:08.780 line:15%
That\'s as close to spirituality or anything else I could get
2412
02:19:09.980 --> 02:19:14.480
because she was, but also driven to try and understand.
2413
02:19:16.330 --> 02:19:17.880
- [Lynn] Has the fluid ever been analyzed?
2414
02:19:17.880 --> 02:19:20.580
- No, no.
- Well, you know the fluid
2415
02:19:20.580 --> 02:19:23.430
is going to be the breakdown product of what happened
2416
02:19:23.430 --> 02:19:24.860
when it was sealed.
2417
02:19:24.860 --> 02:19:26.770
- When Lynn was a girl
2418
02:19:26.770 --> 02:19:28.890
she said she wanted to be an explorer,
2419
02:19:28.890 --> 02:19:29.990
and she wanted to be an explorer
2420
02:19:29.990 --> 02:19:32.570
in the most adventurous sense of that word.
2421
02:19:32.570 --> 02:19:36.690
Completely, freely, genuinely curious
2422
02:19:36.690 --> 02:19:38.610
about the world around her
2423
02:19:38.610 --> 02:19:42.480 line:15%
and being smart enough to be able to interpret the world
2424
02:19:42.480 --> 02:19:43.991 line:15%
as a scientist.
2425
02:19:43.991 --> 02:19:46.158
- [Lynn] We\'re going to go through the abdomen.
2426
02:19:46.158 --> 02:19:47.660
- [Man] Through the abdomen.
2427
02:19:47.660 --> 02:19:49.530
- [John] Embedded in this piece of amber
2428
02:19:49.530 --> 02:19:53.070
is a 20 million year old termite.
2429
02:19:53.070 --> 02:19:56.070 line:15%
Lynn studied termites her entire career.
2430
02:19:56.070 --> 02:19:57.470 line:15%
- I don\'t know whether we have enough or not,
2431
02:19:57.470 --> 02:19:59.690 line:15%
but let\'s just take a look.
2432
02:20:03.830 --> 02:20:04.910
Oh boy, there they are.
2433
02:20:04.910 --> 02:20:06.260
We\'ve got hundreds of them.
2434
02:20:07.720 --> 02:20:12.620 line:15%
- Termites, she loved Mastotermes Darwiniensis.
2435
02:20:12.620 --> 02:20:17.620
- [Lynn] Mastotermes Darwiniensis from Darwin, Australia
2436
02:20:19.450 --> 02:20:21.080
brought by Betsy Dyer.
2437
02:20:22.420 --> 02:20:24.510
Well, Andrew, why they are called Mastotermes
2438
02:20:24.510 --> 02:20:27.990
is very obvious, because they masticate.
2439
02:20:29.220 --> 02:20:31.490
Look at those jaws, look at those jaws.
2440
02:20:31.490 --> 02:20:34.450
- [John] In order to digest the wood they eat,
2441
02:20:34.450 --> 02:20:39.280
termites rely on a community of symbiotic protists
2442
02:20:39.280 --> 02:20:40.720
that live in their gut.
2443
02:20:40.720 --> 02:20:44.690
- [Lynn] The hind gut has coruga,
2444
02:20:48.040 --> 02:20:49.560
Mixotricha paradoxa
2445
02:20:51.280 --> 02:20:52.680
and Delta triconmypha.
2446
02:20:53.650 --> 02:20:57.010
- [John] But the protists don\'t do it by themselves,
2447
02:20:57.010 --> 02:20:59.910
they each include a community of bacteria.
2448
02:21:01.190 --> 02:21:04.830
One of these protists, Mixotricha paradoxa,
2449
02:21:04.830 --> 02:21:08.750
Lynn called the beast with five genomes.
2450
02:21:08.750 --> 02:21:11.720
Because in addition to its own genome,
2451
02:21:11.720 --> 02:21:15.830
it has a community of spherical bacteria in its gut,
2452
02:21:15.830 --> 02:21:19.890
and three different bacteria on its surface.
2453
02:21:19.890 --> 02:21:23.590
The wiggling hair-like things on the edge there
2454
02:21:23.590 --> 02:21:26.920
are two kinds of spirochete bacteria
2455
02:21:26.920 --> 02:21:28.440
that move the protist around.
2456
02:21:29.430 --> 02:21:32.330
- [Lynn] The little faster beating treponemes in there
2457
02:21:33.430 --> 02:21:37.850
and spastic ca-mel-ee par-eh-lima in the cortex,
2458
02:21:37.850 --> 02:21:41.830
the three surface components of Mixotricha paradoxa.
2459
02:21:44.060 --> 02:21:45.660
- [John] Communities of bacteria
2460
02:21:47.000 --> 02:21:49.030
within communities of protists
2461
02:21:52.010 --> 02:21:53.010
within termites
2462
02:21:56.300 --> 02:21:57.900
within communities of termites
2463
02:21:59.040 --> 02:22:02.990
within ecosystems within Gaia.
2464
02:22:10.910 --> 02:22:14.900
Lynn Margulis\'s quest to understand the origin
2465
02:22:14.900 --> 02:22:19.650 line:15%
of the first nucleated cell propelled her ever onward.
2466
02:22:20.820 --> 02:22:21.670 line:15%
- [Lynn] My what?
2467
02:22:25.060 --> 02:22:26.320 line:15%
- Oh, plans for science.
2468
02:22:27.230 --> 02:22:28.640
They are very simple.
2469
02:22:28.640 --> 02:22:31.340
They are the same as they were 40 years ago.
2470
02:22:31.340 --> 02:22:34.210
I like to tell my children and my students
2471
02:22:34.210 --> 02:22:37.080
that we\'ve won three out of four.
2472
02:22:37.080 --> 02:22:42.080
We won the archaeabacterial nature of the cytoplasm,
2473
02:22:42.103 --> 02:22:43.960
bacterial nature of the cytoplasm;
2474
02:22:44.810 --> 02:22:49.010
of course the mitochondria, and the chloroplasts,
2475
02:22:49.010 --> 02:22:50.870
and they still won\'t let me publish,
2476
02:22:52.650 --> 02:22:56.150
I\'m still being rejected on the spirochete stuff
2477
02:22:56.150 --> 02:22:57.110
by some people.
2478
02:22:57.110 --> 02:22:58.210
So that\'s what I want to do.
2479
02:22:58.210 --> 02:23:00.500
I want to finish four out of four,
2480
02:23:00.500 --> 02:23:02.620
not three out of four, four out of four.
2481
02:23:02.620 --> 02:23:05.650
Finish, that\'s the plan.
2482
02:23:06.940 --> 02:23:08.260 line:15%
- But that\'s what she was like.
2483
02:23:08.260 --> 02:23:11.840 line:15%
Extremely, extreme devotion to that concept.
2484
02:23:11.840 --> 02:23:13.680 line:15%
Wouldn\'t let it go because it was key.
2485
02:23:13.680 --> 02:23:14.513
It was big.
2486
02:23:15.560 --> 02:23:19.450
- [John] Lynn Margulis\'s serial endosymbiosis theory
2487
02:23:19.450 --> 02:23:24.090
is clearly explained in her book her book, Symbiogentics,
2488
02:23:24.090 --> 02:23:27.500
The Fourth Edition of Symbiosis in Cell Evolution.
2489
02:23:28.750 --> 02:23:32.820
Finished just before her death, it remains unpublished.
2490
02:23:34.820 --> 02:23:39.820 line:15%
- I quote Blaise Pascal with a very beautiful statement
2491
02:23:40.000 --> 02:23:42.560 line:15%
where he says, knowledge is like a sphere.
2492
02:23:43.480 --> 02:23:46.870
The larger it gets, the larger gets the surface
2493
02:23:46.870 --> 02:23:49.630
which is the boundary to the unknown.
2494
02:23:49.630 --> 02:23:51.510
The unknown is always there.
2495
02:23:51.510 --> 02:23:55.210
As knowledge grows so the unknown grows.
2496
02:23:55.210 --> 02:23:56.900
- [Lynn] Mixotricha lasted from the late Archean.
2497
02:23:58.860 --> 02:24:00.213
I don\'t know.
2498
02:24:00.213 --> 02:24:02.954
Hold that up to the camera please.
2499
02:24:02.954 --> 02:24:05.240
Let me get that lower part.
2500
02:24:05.240 --> 02:24:07.450
Right, and look at that.
2501
02:24:07.450 --> 02:24:10.980
- [John] Through a life of open-minded, rigorous
2502
02:24:10.980 --> 02:24:14.160
and passionate scientific inquiry,
2503
02:24:14.160 --> 02:24:18.060
Lynn Margulis gave us a new way of thinking about life
2504
02:24:18.980 --> 02:24:21.179
and about ourselves.
2505
02:24:21.179 --> 02:24:24.846
(gentle instrumental music)
2506
02:24:29.780 --> 02:24:32.840
- Well, I think I may have promised, at least I meant to,
2507
02:24:34.650 --> 02:24:38.650
to give Emily Dickinson, my next door neighbor,
2508
02:24:38.650 --> 02:24:42.650
that superb nineteenth century poet, the last word here.
2509
02:24:43.600 --> 02:24:44.850
And she\'s talking
2510
02:24:44.850 --> 02:24:49.850
about us biologists and scientists.
2511
02:24:50.860 --> 02:24:53.880
The poem is called What Mystery Pervades a Well
2512
02:24:53.880 --> 02:24:55.920
but this is the last stanza.
2513
02:24:55.920 --> 02:24:57.730
And this is what she says:
2514
02:24:57.730 --> 02:25:00.860
For nature is a stranger yet.
2515
02:25:00.860 --> 02:25:03.120
The ones who cite her most
2516
02:25:03.120 --> 02:25:04.840
have not passed her haunted house,
2517
02:25:04.840 --> 02:25:07.490
nor simplified her ghost.
2518
02:25:07.490 --> 02:25:10.080
To pity those who know her not
2519
02:25:10.080 --> 02:25:12.040
is helped by the regret
2520
02:25:12.040 --> 02:25:15.480
that those who know her, know her less
2521
02:25:15.480 --> 02:25:17.520
the nearer her they get.
2522
02:25:18.637 --> 02:25:20.040
Thank you.
2523
02:25:20.040 --> 02:25:23.790
(gentle instrumental music)
Distributor: Bullfrog Films
Length: 147 minutes
Date: 2018
Genre: Expository
Language: English
Grade: 7 - 12, College, Adults
Color/BW:
Closed Captioning: Available
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