CONCEPT
Serial Endosymbiosis
Lynn Margulis's mechanism for the origin of the complex cell—a sequence of distinct merger events, each importing a fully formed competence from an organism that had already evolved it—and the template for understanding how AI architectures acquire capabilities they could not have developed from scratch.
Serial endosymbiosis is
Lynn Margulis's account of how the complex eukaryotic cell—the unit of all plant and animal life—came into being through a sequence of acquisitions rather than a single act of gradual refinement. An ancestral host cell acquired, at some point, the bacterium that became the mitochondrion, importing aerobic respiration without having to evolve it through the slow accumulation of mutations under selection. Later, in the lineage leading to plants and algae, a second acquisition brought in the cyanobacterium that became the chloroplast, and with it photosynthesis. Each merger was not a refinement of what already existed but the wholesale importation of a fully formed, independently evolved competence from an organism that had developed it in a completely different lineage under completely different pressures. The host did not have to invent respiration. It absorbed a respirer. This is the heart of the mechanism:
symbiogenesis as a route to capability