SIGNED. Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors

New York: Summit Books, 1986. First printing.

SCARCE SIGNED COPY OF A REVOLUTIONARY VIEW OF EVOLUTION BY THE WOMAN WHO DISCOVERED BACTERIAL SYMBIOSIS.

13.5x22 cm hardcover, orange paper covered boards, brown cloth spine with gilt title, inscribed on front free endpaper, "To Jack & Nita with love of life & discontinuities/ Lynn Margulis Feb 1987," 301 pp, black & white illustrations. near-fine in near-fine jacket. FROM THE FOREWORD BY DR. LEWIS THOMAS: "Microcosmos is nothing less than the saga of the life of the planet. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan have put it all together, literally, in this extraordinary book, which is unlike any treatment of evolution for a general readership that I have encountered before. A fascinating account that we humans should be studying now for clues to our own survival."

LYNN MARGULIS (1938-2011) was an American evolutionary biologist, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has said that "Lynn Margulis's name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution." In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei – an event Ernst Mayr called "perhaps the most important and dramatic event in the history of life" – by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria. her formative paper, On the Origin of Mitosing Cells, appeared in 1967 after being rejected by fifteen journals. Still a junior faculty member at Boston University at the time, her theory that cell organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts were once independent bacteria was largely ignored for another decade, becoming widely accepted only after it was powerfully substantiated through genetic evidence.

DORION SAGAN (born 1959) is an American essayist, fiction writer, poet, and theorist of ecology. He has written and co-authored books on culture, art, literature, evolution, and the history and philosophy of science. As an ecological theorist he has been at the forefront of bringing our growing understanding of symbiosis as a major force in evolution into the intellectual mainstream, both within science and the humanities, and rethinking the human body as a "multispecies organism." With Carl Sagan and Lynn Margulis, his parents, he is coauthor of the entries for both "Life" and "Extraterrestrial Life" in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Sagan's close collaborations with multiple scientists from different fields including evolution, ecology, and thermodynamics have helped usher in new, more integral and realistic biological approaches which recognize humanity as a very recent part of a four billion year old biosphere, with important implications for both medicine and the long-term viability of the human species as a planetary life form. His coauthored critiques have helped effect a rapprochement between neo-Darwinism and the biochemistry and microbial ecology of group selection, one bearing fruits for example in the new emphasis among health professionals on the importance of the human microbiome.