Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality by Margulis, Lynn; Sagan, Dorian - 1991

New York: Summit Books, 1991. First edition, first printing.

GROUNDBREAKING EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO HUMAN SEXUALITY BY CELL BIOLOGIST MOTHER AND HER ECOLOGIST SON.

8 3/4 inches tall hardcover, turquoise paper-covered boards, black cloth spine with gilt title, signed by both authors on title page, 224 pp, very good in very good jacket in protective mylar sleeve.

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.