Gaia Hypothesis
Description
Alasdair Lord:
"Rex Wyler of Green Peace discusses scientist James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis,
- In Greek mythology only Chaos precedes Gaia. Gaia was the Greek goddess of Earth, mother of all life, similar to the Roman Terra Mater (mother [sic] Earth) reclining with a cornucopia, or the Andean Pachamama, the Hindu, Prithvi, “the Vast One,” or the Hopi Kokyangwuti, Spider Grandmother, who with Sun god Tawa created Earth and its creatures.
The book proposed a hypothesis developed by Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis, that life on Earth self-regulates its environment to create optimum conditions for the additional advancement of life. Living organisms concentrate useful elements, compounds, and nutrients, and redistribute them into the water, soil, and atmosphere where they stabilize climate, feed other life forms, and influence the environment in which they evolved.i Wyler further comments, Many concepts developed in Lovelock’s Gaia, were not new, of course, although some of the science to support these ideas was new. Over 2,500 years ago, Taoists considered the natural patterns of Earth and living beings as primary, and that “all creatures lived together in mystic unity,” co-evolving and feeding each other. Many Indigenous cultures understood that they were part of, and lived within, a larger living community of life that included air, water, soil, and fire. The North American Lakota term, Mitákuye Oyás’in (all our relations) recognizes this fundamental kinship among all beings.ii As a cornerstone hypothesis of this book, it is understood that Gaia is a living entity with consciousness and that humans exist as active participants, not masters, in this system. In a finite closed system, in this case Gaia, there is a finite carrying capacity to support a finite human population in balance with flora, fauna and oceans within (at least) nine planetary boundaries (see Appendix Two) that have been identified."
(https://www.alasdairlord.co.uk/downloads/first_chapter.pdf)
Discussion
David Cayley:
"In 1965 Jim Lovelock was working at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), a joint initiative of NASA and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. His assignment was to devise instruments that could detect life on Mars, should there be any. In thinking about this problem, he had the inspired idea of turning his question around and asking, in effect, how a Martian would know that there is life on earth. This brought to his attention the earth’s unlikely atmosphere, a mix of gases as unstable, Lovelock has joked, as those mingled in the intake manifold of a car. Why don’t these gases react with one another until they eventually reach that state of chemical equilibrium that had recently been shown to characterize the atmospheres of Mars or Venus? How is such a “giant disequilibrium” maintained? The answer came “in a flash,” Lovelock told me in one of the several interviews I did with him for CBC Radio: “The organisms at the surface [of the earth] must be regulating the atmosphere.” “Not just putting gases in the atmosphere,” he reiterated to emphasize his point, but “regulating the atmosphere.” Thus was born the Gaia hypothesis.
Lovelock, as he has now related in more than ten books on the subject, soon discovered many more ways in which living things produce their own environment. He has shown, for example, that marine creatures emit aerosols of sulfur and iodine in exactly the quantities required by creatures on the land where these crucial elements are deficient. He has demonstrated that earth’s biota remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the amounts necessary to maintain a comfortable climate. And he has established that forest fires help regulate the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere. The discovery of these mechanisms, and others like them, confirmed Lovelock’s initial intuition at JPL that the earth as a whole must engage in some form of self-regulation. The idea of naming this hypothesis after Gaia, the ancient Greek goddess of the earth, came from the novelist William Golding who was Lovelock’s friend, interlocutor and neighbour at the time Lovelock first began to explore the implications of his “flash” at JPL. So grand a theory, Golding said, deserved an equally grand name, and what better name than Gaia, mother of all, first to arise from primeval Chaos, oldest of the gods. Lovelock, fatefully, accepted his friend’s suggestion. “When you get given a name by a wordsmith of quality like Bill Golding,” he later told me, “you don’t turn it down. But, boy has it given me trouble.”
The name, as Lovelock says, was a blessing and a curse in one. It attracted media attention, as the several broadcasts I did about it for Ideas testify, and it resonated with many counter-cultural movements – from that branch of feminism in which interest in goddesses was reviving, to the environmental movement which grew out of the first Earth Day in 1970, to the hippie cultural ecologists who were advocating retooling, degrowth and a return to earth. Musician Paul Winter composed a mass, the Missa Gaia, that was first presented at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in 1982; writer William Irwin Thompson made the name a sign of a new way of thinking in a book he edited called Gaia: A Way of Knowing. But, at the same time, this cultural and philosophical resonance became a source of derision amongst Lovelock’s scientific colleagues – the trouble he referred to above. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that the theory struck him as “a metaphor, not a mechanism,” and many other leading biologists rejected it out of hand as well.[5] Some of this condescension and disregard was rooted in the theory’s cultural associations, but it also arose from the sense that Lovelock’s hypothesis offended and threatened neo-Darwinian orthodoxy.
Modern sciences rest on the banishment of any idea of end, goal or purpose from their accounts. Aristotle held that each thing was determined by its end or final cause, as well as by its material character and the forces acting on it. Objects fall to earth because they seek their “natural place” – it is in their nature to do so. 17th century natural philosophy subtracted this idea. It held that things move only because some overt and discernible force pushes them – everything can be reduced to matter in motion, “Occult” causes were ruled out. Purpose was driven out of science and thereby fated to return endlessly as heresy. In the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy that ruled evolutionary biology at the time Lovelock first presented his hypothesis, it was an axiom that change could not arise by any purposeful process – e.g. giraffes developed long necks so they could reach high branches – but only by random mutation which might confer an advantage in what Darwin called the struggle for existence – a giraffe with a longer neck, by happy chance, appeared and was then rewarded with more food and more progeny. In this context Lovelock’s idea of planetary self-regulation looked like the latest version of the perennial heresy that had erupted in Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of evolution, in which new “needs” call forth new habits, or in Hans Driesch’s “vitalist” developmental biology in which “entelechies” governed embryological development, and in many other such attempts to reintroduce teleology to biology. (Teleology, from telos the Greek word for end of goal, refers to any sequence determined by its end and not by a chain of antecedent mechanical causes.) What evolutionary advantage could there be for marine creatures in producing dimethyl sulfide or methyl iodide in the exact quantities required on the land, or in producing the nuclei which allow clouds to condense and form in just the amount needed to radiate light away from the earth and preserve its comfortable temperature? These phenomena might demonstrably occur, but they must be only fortunate accidents or coincidences, not elements of self-regulation.
Lovelock learned to answer these objections in several registers. He stopped saying that “living organisms” were producing their own environment and began to say that “the whole system” was involved.[6] He drew attention to the baffling properties of cybernetic systems in which causation is circular rather than linear. Once a domestic thermostat is set, the temperature regulates the furnace, and the furnace regulates the temperature in an endless circle of which neither is the cause. The Gaia hypothesis models such a circular process, Lovelock said, whereas modern sciences had previously used linear mathematics to model linear, cause-and-effect processes. He recognized, of course, that a thermostat must be set by someone before it falls into its homeostatic pattern of self-regulation. The system must have a goal or end-state which governs its self-regulation. In the case of Gaia, he claimed that this goal was set by “the properties of the universe.” Because carbon-based life forms are “quite fussy about the range of temperatures and conditions at which they can exist,” these tolerances “set the goal of the self-regulating system Gaia.
In effect, Lovelock argued that the earth itself is a unit of evolution, still subject to natural selection but on a cosmic or universal scale where the selection pressures are established by the parameters of life itself. He was not contradicting or replacing Darwinian theory by this hypothesis, he said, he was only supplementing it by enlarging its frame. Just as Newtonian physics had worked fine until Einstein pushed it to the limit at which it broke down, so Darwinian principles of natural selection had been sufficient until the planet as a whole was considered. Only when Earth was observed from outside, as it was for the first time in Lovelock’s thought experiment during NASA’s Mars mission, did it become necessary to ask whether Earth itself evolves. People had known for a long time that it changed – they had, for centuries, hunted fossils, measured the age of rocks, and charted the advance retreat of glaciers – but they had still taken that “Nature” which governs “natural selection” for granted as the context in which evolution operates. Lovelock by considering the earth as a whole had identified properties that belonged to it only as a whole, properties that could not be reduced to more rudimentary terms.
Lovelock’s theory was initially polarizing and controversial. The problems, as I mentioned earlier, began with the grandiloquent name that was William Golding’s equivocal gift. The name expanded the idea’s cultural reach but poisoned its scientific reception, creating the view that Lovelock’s hypothesis was, as an editor at Nature said, “a danger to science.”[8] Leading biologists denounced the theory as mystical para-science, rather than as the fruitful and fully testable proposal that Lovelock showed, again and again, that it was. This disdain began to abate during the 1990’s when Lovelock decided it was time he talked directly to opinion leaders in biology. In England, at the time, this group included Robert May, John Maynard Smith and William Hamilton, all or whom Lovelock sought out. They told him they thought his theory was nonsense. He asked if they had read any of his papers. They admitted that they had not and were relying entirely on the opinions of their graduate students. Once they became acquainted with what he was actually saying, Lovelock says, “they swung right round,” accepting the evidence for self-regulation while still insisting on the challenge this evidence posed to neo-Darwinian theory.[9] Parallel scientific developments also assisted Lovelock’s cause and made his theory seem less exotic and less threatening. These included the emergence of various new sciences employing similar concepts of self-organization and self-regulation as those which Lovelock was developing. Where things stand today is a question somewhat beyond my competence. There is no body which grants scientific theories the equivalent of the imprimatur – let it be printed – by which the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church certifies books. But I do have the impression that Lovelock’s theory is today better understood and more widely accepted than ever before. In 2001, for example, four scientific organizations, operating “global change research programmes,” met in Amsterdam and released a Declaration on Earth System Science which stated that, “The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components”"
(https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2021/4/1/gaia-and-the-path-of-the-earth)
Gaia and the Common Home of Humanity
"In Greek mythology, Gaia is the second primordial deity, born after Chaos, and one of the first inhabitants of Olympus. Gaia originated Uranus, Heaven. Heaven and Earth, in other words, Uranus and Gaia, originated countless other deities as well as oceans, mountains, plants and life. Gaia thus becomes a universal concept which, just as the Earth System itself, crosses all borders. Much more than a collection of living beings and ecosystems, Gaia represents this living planet and its complex intertwined network, an interaction of beings and phenomena from which emerges a whole incomparably larger than the sum of its parts. For millennia, Gaia meant planet Earth for humanity. It still has symbolic value and power. It raises consciousness and awareness of human beings towards their cradle, their space ship, their home and their life-support system. That whole, the ancestral mother of all life, is Gaia.
This meaning was the basis for the choice of the name Gaia for the first scientific theory, developed by James Lovelock, that proposed planet Earth as a single functionally interdependent living organism. The hypothesis was presented in 1969[1] stating that the Earth’s biosphere generates, maintains and regulates the conditions for its own survival, unlike what traditional theories suggested. With the recent discovery of the climate change phenomenon and of “Planetary Boundaries”, the development and accomplishment of Lovelock’s initial hypothesis have been gaining credibility among scientists.
Gaia is also the name of a city by the mouth of the Douro River, on the other bank across from the city of Porto, which, through a merger of words of Porto and Gaia, originated the name of Portugal. Very appropriately, the port of Gaia has been chosen to host the Common Home of Humanity."