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Another God
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I started a thread not too long ago called The Greatest Scientists are True Philosophers in which I claimed that any scientist which has pushed science forwards has been the sort of person who thinks outside the box, questions what they are told to believe, and ponder meaningful questions etc.
I have recently been exposed to another more recent example of this, and I just wanted to post it because it was a really interesting read. http://www.nyu.edu/classes/neimark/margulis.html was the first person to really push the hypothesis that Mitochondria in cells actually came from a symbiotic relationship between several cells (ie: Eukaryotes are a collection of prokaryotes working together (well, at least, the mitochondrion was a prokaryote which joined the eukaryotic ride).
Anyway, reading the article I really enjoyed the following few tidbits:
And this point most importantly:
I have recently been exposed to another more recent example of this, and I just wanted to post it because it was a really interesting read. http://www.nyu.edu/classes/neimark/margulis.html was the first person to really push the hypothesis that Mitochondria in cells actually came from a symbiotic relationship between several cells (ie: Eukaryotes are a collection of prokaryotes working together (well, at least, the mitochondrion was a prokaryote which joined the eukaryotic ride).
Anyway, reading the article I really enjoyed the following few tidbits:
"That's propaganda" is her way of dismissing dogma, which she hates. She is restless, passionately curious,
irreverent, sassy and very sharp.
Her solution was the theory that cells with nuclei evolved from the merger of two or more different bacterial cells lacking nuclei. The responses to her letter resembled a
Rorschach test. One scientist corrected her grammar. Another ordered her out of his field. "Bernal said I'd solved the problem.' she says.
And this point most importantly:
Yet, Margulis has spent much of her career on the margins of respectability, battling the scientific community's lack of familiarity with the more than 200,000 known species of microbes on Earth, most of which do nothing that directly harms or helps the human race. "Microbiology was, historically, a practical art, not a science," she says. "You know, kill the germs and save the food." Only in the past ten years have science textbooks begun to reflect her views. Ironically, she herself has become the new authority. "It's worrisome," she says. "Depressing. Authorities change. The experience doesn't. When science is taught by reading a textbook, you open the door to dogma."
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