Why gaia theory is wrong

So evolution is not a series of adaptations to inanimate events, but a system of feedbacks, an exchange. Life has not simply molded itself to the shifting contours of a dynamic Earth. When you start looking at the planet in this way, then you see coral reefs, limestone cliffs, deltas, bogs, and islands of bat guano as parts of this larger animated entity.

You realize that the entire skin of Earth, and its depths as well, are indeed alive. The acceptance of the Gaia hypothesis was, and remains, slow, halting, and incomplete. There are several reasons for this. One is just the usual inertia, the standard conservative reluctance to accept new ways of thinking. Yet Gaia was also accused of being vague and shifting. How can you evaluate, oppose, or embrace an idea that is not clearly stated, or that seems to mean different things to different people?

There was certainly some truth to this. Gaia has been stated many different ways. T he truth is, despite its widespread moniker, Gaia is not really a hypothesis. Over the last few decades, the Gaians have pretty much won the battle. The Gaia approach, prompted by the space-age comparison of Earth with its apparently lifeless neighbors, has led to a deepening realization of how thoroughly altered our planet is by its inhabitants.

When we compare the life story of Earth to that of its siblings, we see that very early on in its development, as soon as the sterilizing impact rain subsided so that life could get a toehold, Earth started down a different path.

Ever since that juncture, life and Earth have been co-evolving in a continuing dance. When it appeared, this shield allowed life to leave the ocean and the continents to become green with forests. The more we look through a Gaian lens, the more we see that nearly every aspect of our planet has been biologically distorted beyond recognition.

This is a much more varied smorgasbord of mineral types than we have seen on any other world. Geochemists studying the mineral history of Earth have concluded that by far the majority of these would not exist without the presence of life on our planet. Observed on a distant planet, such vast and varied mineral diversity could be a sign of a living world, so this is a potential biosignature or Gaiasignature we can add to the more commonly cited Lovelock criterion of searching for atmospheric gases that have been knocked out of equilibrium by life.

In fact, minerals and life seem to have fed off each other going all the way back to the beginning. Evidence has increased that minerals were vital catalysts and physical substrates for the origin of life on Earth. Is it really a huge leap, then, to regard the mineral surface of Earth as part of a global living system, part of the body of Gaia? At first glance this seems like a giant mechanical system—a heat engine—that does not depend upon biology, but rather lucky for life , supports it.

Over its long life, Gaia has altered not just the skin but also the guts of Earth, pulling carbon from the mantle and piling it on the surface in sedimentary rocks, and sequestering massive amounts of nitrogen from the air into ammonia stored inside the crystals of mantle rocks.

By controlling the chemical state of the atmosphere, life has also altered the rocks it comes into contact with, and so oxygenated the crust and mantle of Earth. This changes the material properties of the rocks, how they bend and break, squish, fold, and melt under various forces and conditions.

The wetness of Earth seems to explain why plate tectonics has persisted on Earth and not on its dry twin, Venus. That is, life has modified Earth to its advantage.

Life has got Earth in its clutches. Earth is a biologically modulated planet through and through. In a nontrivial way, it is a living planet. Life itself, once it gets started, can make or keep a planet habitable. Perhaps, in some instances, life can also destroy the habitability of a planet, as it almost did on Earth during the Great Oxygenation Event sometimes called the oxygen catastrophe of 2.

Secondly, the Gaia Theory has been defined as a concept which declares that planet earth is a single ecosystem or organism, which regulates itself by feedback mechanisms between the abiotic and biotic components of the system Lovelock, Some of the fiercest criticism of the Gaia Hypothesis came from evolutionary biologists, who claimed that there was no place for Gaia, as, for the hypothesis to follow the principle of natural selection, the cosmos would have to be littered with failed planet earths Dawkins, In order to counter this criticism Lovelock developed the Daisyworld model.

In the distant past dark daisies would have grown first because they absorbed more heat. Eventually, they would colonise the planet and their heat absorption would heat the surface of the planet. Eventually, as the heat becomes too much for the white daisies to reflect, they eventually die and, consequently, Daisyworld dies Lovelock, This model was similar to mathematical models used by ecologists to recreate an ecosystem and influence it in a variety of ways, in order to predict possible outcomes Allaby, However, it was different in that it included feedback between the biota and the abiota, which Wilkinson suggests had been lacking in the reductionist ecological models, which viewed organisms as isolated systems.

The Gaia Theory has greater significance for some aspects within ecology than others. One idea, which has been developed in part through the understanding brought by the Gaia Theory, is the study of biodiversity.

Biodiversity is a term used to describe all aspects of biological diversity including species richness, ecosystem complexity and genetic variation Allaby, Spicer states that biodiversity is the variety of life that can be separated into three distinct branches: ecological diversity, such as biomes, ecosystems and habitats; genetic diversity, such as populations, chromosomes and genes; and organismal diversity, such as kingdoms, phyla and species.

There is no single measure of biodiversity, but some include number and difference, value and species richness. Biodiversity has also been highlighted as a measure of the impact of climate change — where biodiversity changes rapidly, due to changes in environment, such as changes in temperature and precipitation Henson, Leakey suggests that there are two main areas within ideas about biodiversity where the Gaia Theory has much to add.

Firstly, the Gaia theory develops the idea of interdependence within an ecosystem to a global level with the idea that the biotic and abiotic life interacts via feedback mechanisms, which enable life on earth. Leakey suggests that the extrapolation of this idea to a level of purpose, has caused the rejection of the Theory by some ecologists, but this was not intended by Lovelock, and is perhaps linked to an increasing tendency to be reductionist in the field of evolutionary biology Leaky, Secondly, Leaky states that the Gaia Theory can be shown to have predicted a key development in the debate surrounding the connection between increased biological diversity and increasingly stable populations.

Using mathematical modelling, undertaken during studies conducted by Case , the increase in stability of ecosystems was causally linked to the strength of interaction between the species contained within the ecosystem. This is in direct opposition to the traditional explanation that ecosystems, which contained fewer niches, were less likely to have invading species fill them Leaky, A niche is a term used to describe the place a species has within an ecosystem Wilson, and Laland et al suggest that organisms modify their environments, constructing their niche through their choice of habitat, energy and excretion of waste.

This modification of the environment thus benefiting individual species is taken a step further by Odling-Smee et al , as they suggest that models of niche construction can demonstrate environmental feedback overcoming external sources of selection: sometimes environmental modification is favoured above resource consumption.

These developments in the understanding of niche construction are due to a better appreciation of the importance of environmental feedback systems and could be attributed to the success of the Gaia Theory in highlighting the interconnected nature of ecosystems, regardless of scale.

Sagan also suggests that, through its use, the Daisyworld model has unified the practical ecologists and the mathematical ecologists, as it communicated ideas in a format with which they were both familiar within the discipline of ecology. Some of the fiercest criticisms of Gaia came from biologists who argued that the Gaia hypothesis was contrary to the rules of Darwinian evolution.

This aspect of the criticism levelled at the Gaia hypothesis and the responses made will be examined below, firstly, the key complaint, that of teleology will be explored. Here Lovelock changes the substance of his argument as he moves away from suggesting that life alone regulates the planet system for itself, instead he couples together the organismal world and the material environment, which, together, comprise the self-regulatory earth system. Lovelock also admits that there were key problems with the compatibility of the initial Gaia hypothesis and Darwinian principles of evolution Lovelock, , pg Lovelock's claim that the earth is a single living organism is rejected by Dawkins, as he regards the level of natural selection required by a planet, to enable it to have a homoeostatic apparatus through evolution, impossibly complex.

He suggests that not only would the solar system have to be littered with 'failed' planets, it would also have to have some other planets supporting life, and earth is the only planet to do so, of which humans are aware Dawkins, , pg In particular, Dawkins questions whether Lovelock has created a model to test out his ideas of natural selection on a global scale , pg In answer to this direct question, Lovelock developed the Daisyworld model.

Turney suggests that Daisyworld was created to rebut Schneider's ideas, published in , that living organisms may have an impact on the atmosphere, but they do not regulate it. Turney describes Daisyworld as a good 'rhetorical asset', but it could be argued that Daisyworld is more important than that.

As Sagan recognises, Daisyworld spoke to biologists and ecologists in their own language, moving away from the teleology that sounded implicit in Lovelock's first book.

Lovelock argues that the Gaia theory as presented in the Ages of Gaia, only adds to Darwin's theory of evolution and does not seek to compete, merely to draw together the evolution of the planet and life that lives on it. For the next few years, as Lovelock extended his thinking on the subject, Golding encouraged and helped the scientist to explore his hypothesis.

This came naturally. Since his youth, Golding had been an enthusiast for the thinking of the polymath and mystic Rudolf Steiner.

Steiner, who is best known today as the founder of the Waldorf or Steiner school system, which emphasises the role of the imagination in learning, had some very odd ideas many derived from the theosophists about heavenly spirits and reincarnation, all bound up with an idealistic philosophy that sees life throbbing everywhere.

Lovelock did send one of his sons to a Steiner school, apparently without embracing the metaphysics of the Steiner system. Just as a human sweats and shivers as the temperature changes, so the living Earth adjusts its gaseous mantle to accommodate its temperature changes.

Lovelock went public with Gaia in the early s. By then, he had found the right collaborator from within mainstream science. As it happens, the American microbiologist Lynn Margulis never much cared for the Gaia idea as such, but from her undergraduate years onwards which started at the precocious age of 14 she was a fervent believer in symbiosis, the idea of organisms coming together for mutual benefit.

In fact, she had in published a major work on the topic, something that was eventually to give her respect and fame in the scientific community. Margulis argued that complex cells eukaryotes were formed by more primitive cells prokaryotes swallowing up other simple cells. These simple cells, she argued, became functional parts organelles of their now more complex hosts.

Among the parts that had prokaryotic origins, Margulis highlighted the mitochondria — the power plants of cells — and the chloroplasts — the parts of plant cells that perform photosynthesis. For someone thinking this way, the idea of Earth as an integrated functioning entity was virtually a premise not a deduction, and soon Margulis was collaborating with Lovelock on a series of papers arguing for Gaia.

Lovelock and Margulis staked Gaia on the dog that barked in the night, or rather on the planet that should have heated up. In the lifetime of Earth, about four and a half billion years, the heat from the Sun thanks to the nature of radioactive decay has risen sharply.

And yet the dog did not bark. The temperature of Earth has not risen in tandem. Rather, it has stayed more or less stable, just what is needed to support life. There was not much reaction to these papers, and by the mids, Margulis moved on to other interests, although she remained sympathetic to Gaia until the end of her life.

Lovelock persisted and increasingly took his case into the public arena. After that, as he says in his autobiography, things changed overnight, and from that day to this Lovelock has never left the public eye.

A flood of letters started to appear in his mailbox, and they have continued ever since albeit now in electronic form. But the reaction from the world of mainstream science was altogether less enthusiastic.

O n the strength of his prowess as an inventor, in Lovelock was elected to the Royal Society in London. A few years later, in , Margulis was elected to the American equivalent, the National Academy of Sciences. Lovelock and Margulis were mocked and scorned by the professional scientists.

They were figures of fun and even contempt. Richard Dawkins, author of the bestseller The Selfish Gene , led the baying pack.

His objection to the Gaia theory was, not surprisingly, evolutionary. As an ardent opponent of group selection, he could not accept that things could happen for the good of the group simply because they were for the good of the group. Either it was a byproduct of their functions, or it must be of immediate benefit to the plants themselves. Any other interpretation was contrary to a Darwinian view of life. A few years later, John Postgate, a microbiologist and Fellow of the Royal Society, was withering in his critique.

Gaia was the biggest pile of nonsense he had ever come across and more than that, it was dangerous. The planetary organism! Am I the only biologist to suffer a nasty twitch, a feeling of unreality, when the media invite me yet again to take it seriously? He continued:. He was a chemist, she a microbiologist. Earth is in homeostasis so it is living. Life is produced by natural selection, by the competition between individuals for reproductive success.

What is more, as far as Dawkins and other evolutionary biologists were concerned, Earth was not produced by natural selection, and hence it is not itself a living thing. In this sense, the two sides of the fight were simply talking past each other. People got into Gaia groups. The scientists might have hated Gaia, but the general public loved it. They embraced Lovelock and his hypothesis with enthusiasm. Churches had Gaia services, sometimes with new music written especially for the occasion.

And the range of enthusiasts was — and still is — broad. At one end of the spectrum was the English philosopher Mary Midgley. Scourge of the sloppy and hater of the condescending and overconfident, she embraced Gaia with enthusiasm and continues to do so to this day. At the other end of the spectrum were a motley crew — the deep ecologists, the ecofeminists, and, especially in California, where Lovelock had first thought of the idea, the pagans.

He is the founder of a new religion, the Church of All Worlds, and he even persuaded the Internal Revenue Service to give him the tax exemptions given to regular religions. Finally, he is a man who independently of Lovelock hit on the Gaia idea, something he initially called Terrabios.

But, willing to accept the priority of a fellow traveler, Zell-Ravenheart now preaches Lovelockian Gaia to all who will listen.