CONCEPT
The Composite Self
Lynn Margulis's dissolution of the illusion that biological individuals are unified wholes—her demonstration that every complex organism is a confederation of formerly separate organisms, integrated tightly enough to present as one—and the challenge this poses to easy distinctions between a self and a society, a mind and a system.
"Beneath our superficial differences we are all of us walking communities of bacteria.”
Lynn Margulis meant this literally, and the literalness matters. Your body contains more bacterial cells than human ones. Your mitochondria are former bacteria, still running their own ancient machinery inside your cells. Your existence depends moment to moment on the coordinated activity of components that were once, and in a precise sense still are, separate living things. The unified self is a high-level appearance produced by the integration of a multitude. There is no single thing in there that is you. There is a society, governed well enough that it presents as one. This is not a philosophical speculation but an empirical finding, vindicated by the molecular evidence that confirmed serial endosymbiosis: the organelles carry their own DNA, their own replication schedules, their own bacterial heritage. They are at once part of