CONCEPT
Symbiogenesis
The creation of new organisms through the merger of existing ones — Margulis's term for the evolutionary mechanism that produced the most consequential increases in biological complexity.
Symbiogenesis is the evolutionary process by which new species arise through the permanent merger of two or more organisms into an integrated whole. Lynn Margulis championed this concept as evolution's primary creative force, arguing that the major transitions in life's complexity — from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, from single-celled to multicellular organisms — occurred through symbiotic integration rather than gradual modification. Unlike natural selection, which filters existing variation, symbiogenesis creates new variation by combining the genomes and capabilities of different organisms. The mitochondrial and chloroplast origins exemplify this: free-living bacteria became permanent cellular residents, their metabolic capabilities integrated into hosts that could not have evolved those capabilities through mutation alone. Margulis positioned symbiogenesis as complementary to, not opposed to, Darwinian selection — but as the mechanism responsible for the qualitative leaps that gradualism cannot explain.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The term symbiogenesis was coined by Russian biologist Konstantin Mereschkowski in 1909 and developed by Boris Kozo-Polyansky and Ivan Wallin in the early twentieth century, but the