Because the News item concerning Lynn Margulis will quickly scroll away on this forum, I offer the following.
Lynn Margulis is dead. Richard Dawkins (on whether she was a one-hit wonder and her obituary):
Yes, that is exactly what she was. She was right about one big thing – and not many people can say that, so she deserves credit for it. But she more than used that credit up being wrong, in a big way, about almost everything else. She bizarrely saw herself as anti-Darwinian, and bad-mouthed the entire neo-Darwinian synthesis and just about everybody associated with it. She once said, in my presence, “John Maynard Smith doesn’t understand evolution”. Fortunately she was not taken seriously enough for her net influence to be negative, but it’s a close-run thing. Sorry to sound grumpy about the dead, but this foolish obituary is enough to drive anyone to it.
My response to this esteemed “professor of science” — who purports to educate those of us involved in legitimate science and not Darwinian speculation and fantasies — is as follows:
Dear Professor Dawkins,
Why are you grumpy? Her [Lynn Margulis’s] chemistry shut down at death. She was nothing more than a bunch of chemistry that came about by natural selection and random variation.
She’s dead and has entered eternal oblivion just as you will one day. Her life was completely pointless and meaningless in the grand scheme of things, just as your life ultimately will be.
So, professor Dawkins, why not take your own advice?
THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE?
So why be grumpy? Or, is that how you enjoy your life?