I haven't been able to shake the feeling I got when my daughter said "I think men are smarter than

[RainDog]

44. Richard Dawkins thinks so too

Last edited Sun Apr 7, 2013, 05:00 PM - Edit history (1)

"I greatly admire Lynn Margulis's sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy. I'm referring to the theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, and I greatly admire her for it."

She was one of the most important voices to talk about the cultural baggage that scientists bring into the laboratory and how this impedes the ability to see other factors at work.

Long ago, when I was working on a project about the cultural baggage that men carried into science (who dominated the sciences because of the amount of time and energy needed to pursue such work and b/c of the cultural inhibition of women in such fields in general), she was someone who offered another pov. It was refreshing. I don't necessarily agree with her on every issue, etc. (not talking about science) but she was definitely a voice that deserved a wider hearing. I wish she had done more popular writing, like her ex. did.

Two other women that I think should be acknowledged more widely were part of research teams that discovered mitochondrial DNA - Margit M. K. Nass and Sylvan Nass and Ellen Haslbrunner, Hans Tuppy and Gottfried Schatz.

The discovery of mDNA has had repercussions in all areas of plant and animal biology, and helped to study early human evolution, too. mDNA also fits into the idea of symbiosis at the level of cell energy - and is a finding of a unique female attribution to genetic inheritance in all humans.