Lynn Margulis

Role in Parisi's project

Lynn Margulis is the evolutionary theorist whose work on endosymbiosis and microbial genetic exchange supplies the biological hinge of abstract sex. In Parisi's account, Margulis's research identifies mitochondria as descendants of free-living bacteria with their own genetic apparatus. The nucleated cell is consequently not a unitary organism but an assembly in which nuclear and mitochondrial channels mutate at different rates and affect one another (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Essays/Abstract Sex.pdf, pp. 1–2).

Parisi carefully distinguishes the genealogy of the vocabulary: Konstantin Mereschovsky had coined symbiogenesis for prolonged parasitic associations that precede a new organism, while Margulis developed the cellular and evolutionary case that made this alternative to linear descent scientifically consequential (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Essays/Abstract Sex.pdf, pp. 1–2). Margulis's importance here is therefore not authorship of every symbiotic term, but the demonstration that acquired bacterial lineages persist inside what later appears to be an individual organism.

Sex without copulation

The definition quoted at the opening of Matthew Fuller's interview separates biological sex from copulation, reproduction and gender: sex is genetic mixing that may operate at several levels in the same organism. Parisi says this definition enabled her to cross the science/humanities and nature/culture divisions without treating nature as a fixed ground for gender (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Interviews/Matthew Fuller - Luciana Parisi Interview (2004).pdf, p. 1).

This displacement also changes evolutionary form. Bacterial conjugation, transduction and parasitic merger distribute information laterally; sexual reproduction is one later organization of sex rather than its universal model. Margulis's microbial work lets Parisi describe novelty as noncumulative mixing under contingent pressures, not the progressive refinement of a lineage by selection (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Essays/Abstract Sex.pdf, pp. 3–4).

Laboratory and conceptual transmission

Parisi participated in a study group connected to Margulis's laboratory. She recalls that the laboratory introduced her to bacterial colonies as collective rhythms of transmission and “futuristic architectures”; the study group joined working biologists to discussions across evolution, geology and philosophy (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Interviews/Matthew Fuller - Luciana Parisi Interview (2004).pdf, pp. 1–2). This is a direct material route by which a scientific research program entered Parisi's theory rather than a retrospective analogy.

Andrew Goffey's review confirms the scale of the transfer: Margulis's “genetic trading” becomes the alternative model of transmission through which Parisi challenges unity, linear descent and the biological/technological divide (Luciana Parisi/Secondary Sources/Texts/Reviews/Goffry - Sex Cells (Review of Parisi - Abstract Sex) (Mute) (2009).pdf, p. 1). The archive supports Margulis's conceptual and laboratory relation to Parisi, but not a comprehensive biography; claims outside that relation remain unverified.