Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from our Microbial Ancestors.

by Lynn Margulis & Dorian Sagan.

University of California Press, Berkeley, 1st: 1986, rev: 1997

Reviewed by Kasey Rios Asberry


At once both reverent narrative, detailed chronology of the evolution of life on earth and as much of a "page turner" as many a suspense novel. The deepest strength of Microcosmos is in it's revelation of scale: it is a cosmology based upon understanding of the very small, the wide-spread and the very old. This edition carries an impassioned foreword by the late Lewis Thomas of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Four clear tables illuminate the book's primary thesis-the immense scale and scope of life on earth: Geological Time, Human Classification, Acceleration in Food Production and a Hierarchy Chart of relative sizes. Creationists will find the positioning of humans along this continuum troubling (at least), others may find our relatively humble, newcomer status liberating.

The most revolutionary notion is that at the microbial level collaboration has supported life more than aggression. The authors provide convincing evidence drawn from recent, solid research in paleontology, microbiology and evolutionary biology that in times of scarcity or stress selection favors cooperation -- the creatures that could share resources in complementary fashion set in motion the cyclical engines of the ecosystem which run today to the benefit of animals and plants.

For me a more startling idea is that there was a time when carbon dioxide breathing animals who produced oxygen as waste were so successful that they actually poisoned themselves. This "holocaust" killed most living creatures and drove others underground or underwater. Balance was restored in the biosphere by the growth of populations of microbes which used great quantities of oxygen (and whose waste was carbon dioxide). This entire saga unfolded somewhere around 2,000 million years ago, way before complex animals emerged. The stories of the evolution of self-organization, reproduction and communication-processes which laid the foundation for complex life forms to emerge all make fascinating, sometimes breathtaking, reading.

Microcosmos is an important offering from the prolific mother-and-son team of Margulis and Sagan. Not so technical as their beautifully illustrated field guide of subvisible life, Garden of Microbial Delights, or as popular in tone as The Mystery Dance; neither depth nor detail are sacrificed for readability in Microcosmos. In it designers, engineers, artists as well as scientists will find food for thought and inspiration.