3 ms·

I have never understood what the central point of the Gaia hypothesis is. Wikipedia summarizes as: “… living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundin

by jl6 4y ago

I have never understood what the central point of the Gaia hypothesis is. Wikipedia summarizes as: “… 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.” How should we understand something like the Great Oxygenation Event in the light of this theory? The planet became somewhat uninhabitable for many organisms of that era, but it also unlocked a whole new generation of oxygen-using organisms. Is that supposed to be an example of perpetuating conditions for life on the planet? Life, and its environment, affect each other in a complex two-way flow of influence. Yes, OK, that seems evident, but what about this is self-regulating? Surely the history of the planet is replete with mass extinctions and changing conditions that really don’t seem to be part of any greater system than natural selection and the buildup/drawdown of biogenic minerals. Where is the homeostasis? Everything is changing, all the time. What does the theory allow us to predict?

jacquesm 4y ago
Let me condense it for you: "we're all in this together".
- jl6 4y ago
  I actually don’t have much of an issue with the New Age version of the theory. We are indeed all in this together. But this is the version of the theory which Gaia proponents have typically insisted they are not pushing.
- jkmcf 4y ago
  "Remember I'm pullin' for ya" And, keep your stick on the ice.
- _carbyau_ 4y ago
  Yes and no. We will all experience the same world wide changes. But the rich people WILL have an easier time of it.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Yes, and 'rich' here means: anybody that will have the capability to migrate. If you're from a country around the equator and not at the top of the foodchain you will likely end up in big trouble and the developed and highly militarized countries will be able to make some kind of play. But assuming coastlines will shift and some zones will become entirely un-inhabitable the sentiment may well become one in which the French revolution will be re-enacted, but on a much larger scale.
carapace 4y ago
> How should we understand something like the Great Oxygenation Event in the light of this theory? The ancient war between anaerobic and aerobic factions is not over. Humans are a sophisticated biological weapon designed by the anaerobes to trigger the "clathrate gun" and return Earth to a non-oxygen-rich regime. It's a very clever plan. We work faster than the aerobes can react, in geological/evolutionary time were are an explosion. > what about this is self-regulating? The answer to that question is in Lovelock's book. If you don't want to read the whole thing you can start with Daisyworld: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld > Where is the homeostasis? Oxygen levels. The first clue that led to the Gaia Hypothesis was, IIRC, that the atmosphere of the Earth is not in chemical equilibrium. > What does the theory allow us to predict? Well, for one thing, if we find a planet that has a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere that it might have life on it.
sampo 4y ago
> I have never understood what the central point of the Gaia hypothesis is. Daisyworld is a very simple thought example, but also a computer simulation, of emergent planetary homeostasis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld Organisms modify their immediate microenvironment to their benefit. Lovelock points out that these modification mechanisms can regulate the planet-scale macroenvironment, as well.
- riversflow 4y ago
  Nobody has posted this yet, but you can play around with these models on Sim Earth, where he is credited along side Will Wright and Fred Haslam. This link[1] runs at the time of posting. [1] https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simearth-the-living-planet-10c/play-10c https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simearth-the-living-plane...
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    I so wish that someone released a new modernised version of sim earth. I remember spending countless hours to create intelligent water life for example. It is really such a great game, even though I found it very difficult as a teenager (I don't think I ever created intelligent life).
perrygeo 4y ago
See also the "Medea Hypothesis" which proposes that organisms are generally suicidal at a population scale, destroying themselves and their own environment if left unconstrained. Life's historical record alternates between extinction events and long periods of species-building. So in some ways we can see the Gaia and Medea tendencies as an cyclic pattern but not quite "homeostasis". The important part is that "life begets life" but occasionally takes it away too. We tend to assume that complex life forms like mammals are inevitable but it's quite amazing we exist at all really, considering the thousands of other species and complex ecological support systems we require to survive. Break down that web of life and the earth would be dominated by bacteria and slime mold.
- coderenegade 4y ago
  There are more ways to overshoot or undershoot than there are to be critically damped. Population level tends to be an overshooting system which then collapses back to equilibrium. Doesn't bode too well for us when you look at human population growth over the last century. The troubling part is the scale; even a loss of 10% of the population would be the largest wholesale loss of life in human history. Over a century, that's not a huge deal, but over a decade, it would be a disaster the likes of which we've never experienced.
vintermann 4y ago
It's been a long time since I read it, but in my youth I read one of his Gaia books. possibly not the first, since it had a long "rebuttal" part and also included stuff on endosymbiosis (which I believe came slightly later). It did address these sort of questions at length. I remember one of the concrete predictions was that Mars was completely lifeless. Since life begets conditions for more life according to the theory, if there ever was significant life on Mars it would have kicked off the extreme makeover process that we see on Earth. Not necessarily exactly the same of course, but just like it's extremely apparent from space that there's life on Earth, so it would be on Mars. And he made that prediction (according to the book, according to my memory!) before the Viking sondes. It was a bold prediction. They hoped to find life. You find evidence of life even in the driest, coldest, harshest places on Earth, and even deep into the Earth's crust, so why wouldn't there at least be some primitive archaea-like organisms in Martian soil? But they still haven't found any, fifty years, 18 orbiters and ten landings later.

by jl6 4y ago

jacquesm 4y ago

Let me condense it for you: "we're all in this together".

jl6 4y ago
I actually don’t have much of an issue with the New Age version of the theory. We are indeed all in this together. But this is the version of the theory which Gaia proponents have typically insisted they are not pushing.
jkmcf 4y ago
"Remember I'm pullin' for ya" And, keep your stick on the ice.
_carbyau_ 4y ago
Yes and no. We will all experience the same world wide changes. But the rich people WILL have an easier time of it.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Yes, and 'rich' here means: anybody that will have the capability to migrate. If you're from a country around the equator and not at the top of the foodchain you will likely end up in big trouble and the developed and highly militarized countries will be able to make some kind of play. But assuming coastlines will shift and some zones will become entirely un-inhabitable the sentiment may well become one in which the French revolution will be re-enacted, but on a much larger scale.

carapace 4y ago

> How should we understand something like the Great Oxygenation Event in the light of this theory? The ancient war between anaerobic and aerobic factions is not over. Humans are a sophisticated biological weapon designed by the anaerobes to trigger the "clathrate gun" and return Earth to a non-oxygen-rich regime. It's a very clever plan. We work faster than the aerobes can react, in geological/evolutionary time were are an explosion. > what about this is self-regulating? The answer to that question is in Lovelock's book. If you don't want to read the whole thing you can start with Daisyworld: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld > Where is the homeostasis? Oxygen levels. The first clue that led to the Gaia Hypothesis was, IIRC, that the atmosphere of the Earth is not in chemical equilibrium. > What does the theory allow us to predict? Well, for one thing, if we find a planet that has a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere that it might have life on it.

sampo 4y ago

> I have never understood what the central point of the Gaia hypothesis is. Daisyworld is a very simple thought example, but also a computer simulation, of emergent planetary homeostasis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld Organisms modify their immediate microenvironment to their benefit. Lovelock points out that these modification mechanisms can regulate the planet-scale macroenvironment, as well.

riversflow 4y ago
Nobody has posted this yet, but you can play around with these models on Sim Earth, where he is credited along side Will Wright and Fred Haslam. This link[1] runs at the time of posting. [1] https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simearth-the-living-planet-10c/play-10c https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simearth-the-living-plane...
- cycomanic 4y ago
  I so wish that someone released a new modernised version of sim earth. I remember spending countless hours to create intelligent water life for example. It is really such a great game, even though I found it very difficult as a teenager (I don't think I ever created intelligent life).

perrygeo 4y ago

See also the "Medea Hypothesis" which proposes that organisms are generally suicidal at a population scale, destroying themselves and their own environment if left unconstrained. Life's historical record alternates between extinction events and long periods of species-building. So in some ways we can see the Gaia and Medea tendencies as an cyclic pattern but not quite "homeostasis". The important part is that "life begets life" but occasionally takes it away too. We tend to assume that complex life forms like mammals are inevitable but it's quite amazing we exist at all really, considering the thousands of other species and complex ecological support systems we require to survive. Break down that web of life and the earth would be dominated by bacteria and slime mold.

coderenegade 4y ago
There are more ways to overshoot or undershoot than there are to be critically damped. Population level tends to be an overshooting system which then collapses back to equilibrium. Doesn't bode too well for us when you look at human population growth over the last century. The troubling part is the scale; even a loss of 10% of the population would be the largest wholesale loss of life in human history. Over a century, that's not a huge deal, but over a decade, it would be a disaster the likes of which we've never experienced.

vintermann 4y ago

It's been a long time since I read it, but in my youth I read one of his Gaia books. possibly not the first, since it had a long "rebuttal" part and also included stuff on endosymbiosis (which I believe came slightly later). It did address these sort of questions at length. I remember one of the concrete predictions was that Mars was completely lifeless. Since life begets conditions for more life according to the theory, if there ever was significant life on Mars it would have kicked off the extreme makeover process that we see on Earth. Not necessarily exactly the same of course, but just like it's extremely apparent from space that there's life on Earth, so it would be on Mars. And he made that prediction (according to the book, according to my memory!) before the Viking sondes. It was a bold prediction. They hoped to find life. You find evidence of life even in the driest, coldest, harshest places on Earth, and even deep into the Earth's crust, so why wouldn't there at least be some primitive archaea-like organisms in Martian soil? But they still haven't found any, fifty years, 18 orbiters and ten landings later.