From green bodies to green people: A long way to understanding symbiosis

Twenty years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, A. de Bary introduced the term “symbiosis” and offered to biologists another interesting topic: tight mutual ties between organisms. Soon thereafter, in 1883, A. Schimper coined the term “chloroplasts” for chlorophyll-containing bodies in plant cytoplasm while raised the question of their origin. Finally, in 1909, K. Merezhkovsky suggested the term “symbiogenesis” for emergence of new organisms by merging. These are original scientific foundations upon which the words like evolution, man's place in nature, equilibrium, symbiosis, cooperation and competition were built, before being transferred from original concepts of evolutionary biology and ecology to various growing environmental trends. Here, I focus on some of these “term-inflation” events and outline their implications for the science vs. humanities debate.