Do "living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet"?
wikipedia.org
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Apr 20, 2019 · Faced with this preponderance of evidence, it is time to revive an idea that was once roundly mocked: the Gaia hypothesis
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James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis” has challenged conventional thinking about the nature of the earth as an integrated system. Gaia proposes that the earth acts like a living organism.
Lovelock struggled as much as any of us to arrive at a prescription for shifting industrial, consumer society toward an ecological society. Nevertheless, Gaia reframed the popular picture of Earth, as a single, living system, and helped launch the modern ecology movement.
Lovelock:
One of Britain's most respected - if maverick - independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.www.theguardian.com/...
Gaia theory:
"In the 1970s, while working with the US space program, Lovelock developed methods for determining whether a planet supported life. He focused on the fact that living organisms naturally change a planet’s atmosphere, described how life changed Earth’s atmosphere, and developed the idea that Earth’s sulfur cycle provided an example of how biological life could create the conditions for more life. Lovelock also pointed out in the 1970s that humanity was changing Earth’s atmosphere, with dangerous implications.
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.
Margulis had studied symbiosis in early organisms and formulated the proposal that eukaryotic cells (cells with nuclei) had evolved as a symbiotic union of primitive cells without nuclei – an example of how life creates conditions for more advanced life. In 1978, Robert Schwartz and Margaret Dayhoff demonstrated that mitochondria descended from bacteria and chloroplasts from cyanobacteria, providing experimental evidence for Margulis’ theory.
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.
Margulis had studied symbiosis in early organisms and formulated the proposal that eukaryotic cells (cells with nuclei) had evolved as a symbiotic union of primitive cells without nuclei – an example of how life creates conditions for more advanced life. In 1978, Robert Schwartz and Margaret Dayhoff demonstrated that mitochondria descended from bacteria and chloroplasts from cyanobacteria, providing experimental evidence for Margulis’ theory. 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. "
greenpeace.org
Selecting for stability
"We think there is finally an explanation for the Gaia hypothesis. The mechanism is based on “sequential selection”, a concept first suggested by climate scientist Richard Betts in the early 2000s. In principle it’s very simple. As life emerges on a planet it begins to affect environmental conditions, and this can organise into stabilising states which act like a thermostat and tend to persist, or destabilising runaway states such as the snowball Earth events that nearly extinguished the beginnings of complex life more than 600m years ago.
If it stabilises then the scene is set for further biological evolution that will in time reconfigure the set of interactions between life and planet. A famous example is the origin of oxygen-producing photosynthesis around 3 billion years ago, in a world previously devoid of oxygen. If these newer interactions are stabilising, then the planetary-system continues to self-regulate. But new interactions can also produce disruptions and runaway feedbacks. In the case of photosynthesis it led to an abrupt rise in atmospheric oxygen levels in the “Great Oxidation Event” around 2.3 billion years ago. This was one of the rare periods in Earth’s history where the change was so pronounced it probably wiped out much of the incumbent biosphere, effectively rebooting the system."theconversation.com/...
"The chances of life and environment spontaneously organising into self-regulating states may be much higher than you would expect. If fact, given sufficient biodiversity, it may be extremely likely. But there is a limit to this stability. Push the system too far and it may go beyond a tipping point and rapidly collapse to a new and potentially very different state.
This isn’t a purely theoretical exercise, as we think we may able to test the theory in a number of different ways. At the smallest scale that would involve experiments with diverse bacterial colonies. On a much larger scale it would involve searching for other biospheres around other stars which we could use to estimate the total number of biospheres in the universe – and so not only how likely it is for life to emerge, but also to persist."theconversation.com/...
(Nicely explained):
Lovelock and U.S. biologist Lynn Margulis, the Gaia hypothesis is named for the Greek Earth goddess. It postulates that all living things have a regulatory effect on the Earth's environment that promotes life overall; the Earth is homeostatic in support of life-sustaining conditions. The theory is controversial.
Britannica.com › science › Gaia-hyp...
If the Gaia hypothesis is correct, then a number of signals should be observable in the Earth's natural cycles and systems. One of those is that a sulfur compound made by organisms in the..…
Criticism:
Jump to Criticism · Criticism. The initial Gaia Hypothesis was highly criticized by many scientists for being teleological, a belief that all things have a predetermined purpose.
Lovelock:
Emiliania huxleyi, an abundant coccolithophore algae which also has a role in the formation of clouds.[31] CO2 excess is compensated by an increase of coccolithophoride life, increasing the amount of CO2 locked in the ocean floor. Coccolithophorides increase the cloud cover, hence control the surface temperature, help cool the whole planet and favor precipitations necessary for terrestrial plants.[citation needed] Lately the atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased and there is some evidence that concentrations of ocean algal blooms are also increasing.en.m.wikipedia.org/…
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Aug 27, 2010 · The once-tentative Gaia hypothesis has become part of scientific orthodoxy and has been formally ... Next month we will start to review, in no particular order, all six books shortlisted
Jul 4, 2018 · A new study is offering support for the controversial Gaia theory. A team ... The hypothesis was initially criticized for going against Darwin's principles of natural selection
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Rebuttal:
Aside from clarifying his language and understanding of what is meant by a life form, Lovelock himself ascribes most of the criticism to a lack of understanding of non-linear mathematics by his critics, and a linearizing form of greedy reductionism in which all events have to be immediately ascribed to specific causes before the fact. He also states that most of his critics are biologists but that his hypothesis includes experiments in fields outside biology, and that some self-regulating phenomena may not be mathematically explainable.
en.m.wikipedia.org/...
"My view is that even though “strong Gaia” and probably “innate Gaia” currently lie beyond the boundaries of established science, Lovelock’s role in pushing the boundaries of thinking about the earth system has spurred the thinking of many in the emerging earth system science community.
This is a valuable legacey, regardless of the ultimate fate of his ideas."
(This article is based on a lecture delivered in April 2009 as part of The University of Melbourne series of public lectures on Key Thinkers.)
theconversation.com/...
"In 1800 there were merely only 1 billion people
on the planet Earth"
-Lovelock
On Daily Kos:
The planet is now rapidly moving towards an uninhabitable future... But that future is NOW. Our leaders are not taking this crisis seriously, or taking action, and are thus failing us, and future generations, as well as planet Earth. The end of our present societies means the end of human and animal lives and the potential death of planet Earth. We have little time left to alter our societies, governments, and to prevent this catastrophe happening. Our Methods: Uses of nonviolent resistance to protest against climate chaos, biodiversity loss, and total ecological collapse. inspiration from grassroots movements such as Occupy, Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement, and Extinction Rebellion. To create support worldwide and a sense of urgency, to tackle total ecological breakdown. Protest and Direct Action to deal with the inaction of world governments. Making a commitment to saving the planet, and trying to create a sustainable Green future for all.
To Join:
dailykos.com
(GreenRevolution is the Sister Action group
to Regenerative Culture.
We work in conjunction to help transform our planet
before it is too late.)
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