Taking the Gaia Hypothesis Seriously
nautil.us
nautil.us
Organisms hitting puberty are notoriously moody, weird, and confused, alternating between bouts of idealism and self-destructiveness. Looking at the state of the world today, I'd say the Gaia hypothesis, at least in this respect, is holding up.
Organisms hitting puberty are notoriously moody, weird, and confused, alternating between bouts of idealism and self-destructiveness. Looking at the state of dogs crawling with fleas, I'd say the flea-bitten-dog hypothesis, at least in this respect, is holding up.
If reproducing oneself were simply a matter of dispersing your cells, then Henrietta Lacks would be the most reproductively-fit person of all time.[1] But her immortal cell-line, now living in tens of thousands of laboratories, hasn't produced any new people, which is kind of the point of reproduction. It isn't a continuation of her higher-order pattern.
Analogously, an impact-induced panspermic dispersal of radiodurans etc. might eventually seed many worlds with life, but would in no way represent a continuation of the higher-order pattern that is Gaia, and thus wouldn't be a biosphere reproducing.
I read Lovelock back in the late 80's so my memory may be a bit foggy, but his central point seemed to be against anthropocentrism and the hubris that humans are necessary (and by extension that phenomena like HeLa have some existential or cosmic significance). He may have been wrong and his views may not sit well with everyone, but they are reasonably honest intellectually.
Honestly this was strongly uploaded in part because the community here is weaker in biology -- a similarly garbage engineering article would never have seen the front page.
However I do believe its an interesting and useful perspective or model to to guide scientists by as they often, to become really knowledgable at something, have to isolate their subject matter quite a lot. Having this bigger more holistic perspective could have some advantages. Maybe, who knows.
Its certainly not something which is not needed and its certainly not science, but perhaps a kind of ethical framework.
The Gaia hypothesis is the idea that life not only adapts to its environment but also changes its environment in ways that, over time, support more life.
This is not done intentionally of course, in the same way that adaptations of life are not intentional but rather a product of the nature of life and adaptation. Life adapts to its environment, including the living aspects of the environment and the waste products of other life. Over time, this transforms the planet into a complex system of symbiotic relationships, or an ecosystem, and the overall composition of the planet reflects this gradual transformation.
We can test this by finding life on other worlds and seeing if it has changed its environment in meaningful ways. We can also look at the ways that life has changed the nonliving aspects of our own planet like mineral deposits in rock formations. As the article states, as time goes on, we find more ways to identify the markers of life on our planet without looking at life directly.
We can use it meaningfully right now by modeling the types of changes we expect life to make on planets. This helps us determine whether a planet might have life by identifying the changes we expect life to make that intersect with the limited information we have available.
There's nothing unscientific or mystical about the idea. It simply states that planets should be understood as systems where both the living and nonliving aspects are changed by life. There are many ways it could be wrong. Maybe there's evidence that life has changed our planet but we're a special case, and it isn't a universal principle. We'll know more about it once we have more examples of life, but for now, it's a useful framework for finding those examples.
Many scientific breakthroughs have happened because knowledge from two different fields were combined, often by accident to give entirely new understanding.
But that doesn't disqualify homeostasis as evidence of life, as corporations don't emerge except when living creatures create them.
Anyway, as I understood it, homeostasis is by definition a quality of living beings. Many things have a tendency towards an equilibrium, and of course that doesn't have to have anything to do with life.
Am I misunderstanding the claim?
Isn't that the case with other living creatures too? I mean I'm pretty sure every human living today emerged because living creatures (usually their father and mother) created them.
If I used the incredibly similar word "metastability," would you feel the same way?
The article has a strong title, yet at least to me presents no arguments to support it's claim.
> The truth is, despite its widespread moniker, Gaia is not really a hypothesis. It’s a perspective [...].
Each practical research project starts by defining the context and bounds of research. It seems to me that he is proposing the adaptation of a more general strategy when defining the context. He does not make any claims other than that the limited context apparently present in some astrobiological, geological, etc., studies might cause you to miss crucial things. A very hard claim to prove or disprove a priori but this does not render the viewpoint useless.
- "Gaia" makes it easy to think we are bound to Earth, and that nature protects Earth. There is no magical force that ties us to Earth, or a magical force that keeps it liveable, it's just a lucky coincidence and a complex set of systems. Maybe we stop global warming, and then a supervolcano erupts.
- "Balance of ecosystems" creates the illusion that even the tiniest change in nature will hurt it. We spend more time worrying about tigers going extinct than an asteroid wiping out all life.
- "Biodiversity" makes us think that more variety is always better. No universal law rules that a single super-crop couldn't keep us happy and fed in an environment without biodiversity. If we bring two of each species to a space station, it won't be because of economic reasons. Wild animals and plants do their best to destroy biodiversity constantly anyways.
- "Nature knows" causes us to think that naturally occurring solutions are better. For example the genetically engineered Golden Rice, which could save millions of lives yearly, is a victim of this belief.
Similar flaws in thinking even cause most of the medical profession to only see medicine as a way to treat disease instead of improving wellbeing. Ask doctors and they'll tell you: all medicine has side-effects! If you gave doctors a pill that eliminates the need for sleep without side effects, they would only give it to people who are dying from insomnia.
The truth is, despite its widespread moniker, Gaia is not
really a hypothesis. It’s a perspective
[1] https://chem.libretexts.org/Core/Physical_and_Theoretical_Ch...
The biosphere of Earth is indeed a huge and very complex system, but it's pointless to "animate" it, it lives according to its own laws that should be studied objectively, not according to some fuzzy analogies rooted in our bias and perceptions (an example of a similar bias: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Anthropomorphism).
I know that's a very far-fetching idea/concept but I like to think in this way.