Things that you discover while reading an academic paper. In this case, this is the paper¹: “Symbiogenesis: The Holobiont as a Unit of Evolution.”

Yes, about the holobiont, a concept introduced by Adolf Meyer-Abich in 1943, and then (apparently independently) by Lynn Margulis in her 1991 book “Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation.”

But in this case, I do not want to write about the paper itself. I want to marvel about the unbounded, impossible to follow, fractal connections among the living organisms…

I was looking for details about Lynn Margulis’ research, and I started reading this paper published by two researchers at the Department of Microbiology, University of Barcelona, together with Lynn Margulis, in 2013. But Lynn Margulis had died two years before, in 2011. And there, on the second page, the featured image in this post shocked me cause it obviously didin’t seem to fit in a research article… Art inside Science?

And here is the reason… artistic endosymbiosis!

Fig. 1. Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis, a painting by Shoshanah Dubiner. A six-foot wide reproduction of the painting occupies a hallway in the Morrill Science Center at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, MA, USA where Lynn Margulis was a Distinguished Professor from 1988 until her death in 2011. (Image courtesy of the artist [http://www.cybermuse.com].)

The Spanish researchers were also paying tribute to their co-author Margulis, alive inside the paper, information stretching beyond the limits of her (biological) life.

Here is Shoshanah Dubiner’s charming post Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis:

Last November, I read of the sudden death of Lynn Margulis, controversial evolutionary biologist and one of my heroines. Her various books, including Origin of Eukaryotic Cells, The Five Kingdoms, What Is Life?, Microcosmos, and Dazzle Gradually (some written with her son Dorion Sagan), shaped my understanding of life on Earth and, through their clear and often poetically charged writing, told a story of cooperation, complexity and dazzling beauty.

In my painting are some of the main players of the endosymbiosis drama as described by Margulis.

And explicitly quoting Margulis:

“So, what is life? Life is planetary exuberance, a solar phenomenon. It is the astronomically local transmutation of Earth’s air, water, and sun into cells….Life is the single explanding organization connected through Darwinian time to the first bacteria and…to all citizens of the biosphere…..It is matter gone wild, capable of choosing its own direction in order to forestall the inevitable moment of thermodynamic equilibrium—death.”

And here, you can see the an animation of the image by David Domingo.

Life is weird, matter going wild, but sometimes… beautifully perceived by their living creatures.

In this case, the author of this blog.

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(1) Guerrero, Ricardo, Lynn Margulis, and Mercedes Berlanga. “Symbiogenesis: The Holobiont as a Unit of Evolution.” Int. Microbiol 16, no. 3 (2013): 133–43.

Featured Image: Shoshanah Dubiner, Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis