Who was an American evolutionary theorist and biologist who vocally supported the usage of the term "undulipodium"?
Lynn Margulis Lynn Margulis (born Lynn Petra Alexander; March 5, 1938 – November 22, 2011) was an American evolutionary theorist and biologist, science author, educator, and popularizer, 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. Margulis was also the co-developer of the Gaia hypothesis with the British chemist James Lovelock, proposing that the Earth functions as a single self-regulating system, and was the principal defender and promulgator of the five kingdom classification of Robert Whittaker.
Unified neutral theory of biodiversity The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography (here "Unified Theory" or "UNTB") is a hypothesis and the title of a monograph by ecologist Stephen Hubbell. The hypothesis aims to explain the diversity and relative abundance of species in ecological communities, although like other neutral theories of ecology, Hubbell's hypothesis assumes that the differences between members of an ecological community of trophically similar species are "neutral," or irrelevant to their success. This implies that biodiversity arises at random, as each species follows a random walk. The hypothesis has sparked controversy, and some authors consider it a more complex version of other null models that fit the data better.