Rebel with a Cause
by
Dorion Sagan
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| Photo: Victoria Reay |
Although my father, Carl Edward Sagan (1934-1996), is still far more famous for being a scientist and popularizing it, I believe that future historians will gauge my mother, Lynn Petra Alexander Margulis (1938-2011) to have made the greater contribution to human knowledge.
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| Lynn Margulis Photo: Roshi Joan Halifax |
When
your parents are famous and they die it must, I think, be different than if
they're not. Perhaps it is that way for everybody: instead of expiring,
vanishing into the shadows never to return again, they become bigger, their
presences enlarge. Living matter, which I take to be a complex open
thermodynamic system at Earth's surface, one whose intelligence not only dwarfs
but contains humankind, has been saving aspects of its information, memorizing
itself as it were, for 3.8 billion years. Indeed, this is part of what my
mother studied—she studied the “earliest stages of evolution” because, she
said, “in this way I can lay low and not be ‘name-called’ . . . [for example]
‘denialist’ . . . because I ask hard questions and require solid evidence
before I embrace a particular causal hypothesis. Indeed, is not my attitude of
inquiry exactly what science is about?”
Here
she was talking about the AIDS-HIV connection, which she had investigated and
she found was full of holes and unanswered questions. It also didn’t pass the
smell test: If the science was there, and good, why the ad hominem attacks, the
obfuscation, the pillorying of those who would ask questions.
