Friday, November 22, 7-10pm. NOTE TIME CHANGE
Fireside Room, Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, 505 E. Charleston, Palo Alto
FREE, donations appreciated

Fasten your seatbelts for a fascinating, in-depth portrait of one of the most remarkable scientists of the 20th century. Lynn Margulis was a scientific rebel who challenged entrenched theories of evolution to present a new narrative about life evolving through collaboration.  Her brilliant and radical approaches challenged the entrenched, male-dominated scientific community and are today fundamentally changing how we look at our selves, evolution, and the environment.

As a young scientist in the 1960s, Margulis was ridiculed when she first proposed that symbiosis was a key driver of evolution, but she persisted. Instead of the mechanistic view that life evolved through random genetic mutations and competition, she presented a symbiotic narrative in which bacteria joined together to create the complex cells that formed animals, plants and all other organisms – which together form a multi-dimensional living entity that covers the Earth. Humans are not the pinnacle of life with the right to exploit nature, but part of this complex cognitive system in which each of our actions has repercussions.

We’re starting at 7pm this month because Symbiotic Earth is a long film (about 2/12 hours). But if you’re like me, you’ll find all of it fascinating and emerge with a deeper understanding of how life evolves and our relationship to the myriad other life forms on earth.
–Barbara Weinstein