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August 6, 2009
The Gaia hypothesis, first proposed by British scientist James Lovelock in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford University Press 1979), is the notion that all living things are interlinked as a single self-regulating body. This idea, which reaches back to Plato's Timaeus--in which Plato argued that the world is a giant organism fashioned by a God, the Demiurge--- and it is popular with some scientists and often expressed in popular culture as Mother Earth in perpetual balance.
The world as an organism was pushed to one side in favour of of the world as a machine by modern science (Newtonian physics) What was rejected was the holistic organic idea of seeing parts coming together to make living wholes that function only as complete systems and not as blind mechanisms built out of disparate bits and pieces. Lovelock's ideas are structured around balance, equilibrium and homeostasis. peaking of the new perspective on ourselves of looking at the planet from outer space, Lovelock writes:
We now see that the air, the ocean and the soil are much more than a mere environment for life; they are a part of life itself. Thus the air is to life just as is the fur to a cat or the nest for a bird. Not living but something made by living things to protect against an otherwise hostile world. For life on Earth the air is our protection against the cold depths and fierce radiations of space.There is nothing unusual in the idea of life on Earth interacting with the air, sea and rocks, but it took a view from outside to glimpse the possibility that this combination might consist of a single giant living system and one with the capacity to keep the Earth always at a state most favorable for the life upon it.Things are kept in balance because when something occurs to shift the natural order of things, then other things occur to compensate, bringing one back to the original state.
I have difficulty with "things are kept in balance", the "natural order of things" and coming "back to the original state", even though I hold to an organic view of life. In his The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? (Princeton University Press), Peter D. Ward argues that the history of the earth and its life suggests that there are violent fluctuations—especially mass-extinction episodes—and no evidence that the earth then returns to anything like equilibrium. Rather than a harmonious balance, he argues, the planet swings between boom- and -bust cycles with durations of relative calm arcing over extended periods of time.
Instead of Earth being a stable, self-regulating organism where life begets favorable conditions for furthering itself, it is a place where living organisms foster major extinctions that will culminate in planetary biocide--ultimate extinction. It's a declinist thesis since life is globally self-destructive over the long haul.
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"a place where living organisms foster major extinctions that will culminate in planetary biocide--ultimate extinction"
At some point cyanobacteria polluted the earth with toxic oxygen until they caused their own mass extinction, and certainly will the human species do something similar. I buy the idea that the earth harbors boom-and-bust cycles characterized by dominant types of life forms; however, even as we populate the planet microbes populate us, and from us they will rise again. While this entry doesn't specify that humans will be the forebears of biocide, does it really seem plausible that life can be wiped out?
Consider DNA as the only living creature, one which procreates via seeming infinite vessels. To stop life would require such rapid changes to the environment that no organism could be naturally selected.
Perhaps I am not adding anything new - it just seems that your entry was quite on base until the last paragraph. Are you just simply extrapolating the logical conclusion of the boom-bust notion, or are you espousing it yourself?