This is such an embarrassing comment -- for all the collective intelligence in this community the often-exhibited lack of imagination is painful. You've spent your life building/managing/working with complex systems and you cannot see the planet as the same thing?

FWIW, although I don't subscribe to Gaia Theory, I thought this was a perfectly fine comment and the commenter who called it embarrassing was being a jerk.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24461189.

Hardly. It sounds much more like simply respecting their intelligence and their drive to defend themselves rather than thinking of them as dumb things. The Gaia hypothesis is more about ecological interconnectivity and wholes rather than parts and both are missing from GPs statement. The idea that orcas have agency doesn't depend on whether its useful to think of entire ecosystems as having agency or not.

Interesting that this is labeled a “hypothesis” and not a self-evident truth. What else would it be?