The Gaia Hypothesis – Science on a Pagan Planet (science.culture) - Hardcover

Ruse, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226731707 ISBN 13: 9780226731704

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2013

Synopsis

In 1965 English scientist James Lovelock had a flash of insight: the Earth is not just teeming with life; the Earth, in some sense, is life. He mulled this revolutionary idea over for several years, first with his close friend the novelist William Golding, and then in an extensive collaboration with the American scientist Lynn Margulis. In the early 1970s, he finally went public with the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that everything happens for an end: the good of planet Earth. Lovelock and Margulis were scorned by professional scientists, but the general public enthusiastically embraced Lovelock and his hypothesis. People joined Gaia groups; churches had Gaia services, sometimes with new music written especially for the occasion. There was a Gaia atlas, Gaia gardening, Gaia herbs, Gaia retreats, Gaia networking, and much more. And the range of enthusiasts was-and still is-broad. In The Gaia Hypothesis, philosopher Michael Ruse, with his characteristic clarity and wit, uses Gaia and its history, its supporters and detractors, to illuminate the nature of science itself. Gaia emerged in the 1960s, a decade when authority was questioned and status and dignity stood for nothing, but its story is much older. Ruse traces Gaia's connection to Plato and a long history of goal-directed and holistic-or organicist-thinking and explains why Lovelock and Margulis' peers rejected it as pseudoscience. But Ruse also shows why the project was a success. He argues that Lovelock and Margulis should be commended for giving philosophy firm scientific basis and for provoking important scientific discussion about the world as a whole, its homeostasis or - in this age of global environmental uncertainty - its lack thereof. Melding the world of science and technology with the world of feeling, mysticism, and religion, The Gaia Hypothesis will appeal to a broad range of readers, from students and scholars of the history and philosophy of science to anyone interested in New Age culture.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Florida State University. He is the author or editor of nearly thirty books, including Science and Spirituality and The Darwinian Revolution, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

the GAIA hypothesis

science on a pagan planet

By MICHAEL RUSE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-73170-4

Contents

Preface....................................................................
ix
A Note on Interviews and Other Sources.....................................
xiii
INTRODUCTION...............................................................
1
1 THE GAIA HYPOTHESIS......................................................
5
2 THE PARADOX..............................................................
25
3 THE PAGAN PLANET.........................................................
43
4 MECHANISM................................................................
67
5 ORGANICISM...............................................................
97
6 HYLOZOISM................................................................
119
7 GAIA REVISITED...........................................................
147
8 UNDERSTANDING............................................................
179
ENVOI......................................................................
217
References.................................................................
225
Index......................................................................
239

CHAPTER 1

THE GAIA HYPOTHESIS

The moment of inspiration—the epiphany, one might say—cameto English scientist James Lovelock one afternoon in September1965. He was in California, working for NASA (the space agency),worrying about the composition of the atmosphere on Mars asopposed to that on Earth. The former is very different from thelatter, the rich mixture within which we all live and that is so vitalto our well-being. What could be the reason for the difference,or, more precisely, what could be the causes here that make ouratmosphere a medium so far from the sterile equilibrium that wefind on the Red Planet? "As Pasteur and others have said, 'Chancefavours the prepared mind.' My mind was well prepared emotionallyand scientifically and it dawned on me that somehow life wasregulating climate as well as chemistry. Suddenly the image of theEarth as a living organism able to regulate its temperature andchemistry at a comfortable steady state emerged in my mind. Atsuch moments, there is no time or place for such niceties as thequalification 'of course it is not alive—it merely behaves as if itwere'" (Lovelock 2000, 253–54).

Lovelock tells a good and polished story. Was it actually thisroad-to-Damascus experience? There was an insight, althoughwhether he had the full conception all at once is a little hazy. Perhapsit had to develop and mature. What is clear is that whenhe was back home in England, he was ready to start sharing hisconvictions—"I was already beginning to look on the Earth as anorganism, or if not an organism, as a self-regulating system" (JL).A crucial influence was none other than William Golding, authorof Lord of the Flies and, in 1983, winner of the Nobel Prize forliterature. He and Lovelock were neighbors in a small village andgood friends. "When I first discussed it with Bill Golding, we wentinto it in considerable depth" (JL). The novelist was entrancedby the idea; in fact, it was Golding who came up with the nameGaia, the Greek goddess of Earth. Yet, things did not really startto catch fire until Lovelock met and began collaboration with theAmerican scientist Lynn Margulis. Apparently they first met at ameeting in 1968, but it was not until 1970 that they struck upa serious correspondence on the subject. They got together andstarted collaborating sometime toward the end of 1971. But meno buts. Earth is alive. It is an organism, it really is!

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Who is Jim Lovelock, and who was Lynn Margulis (1938–2011)?Above all, in the circles of serious science, they are highly respectedfor their positive achievements (Turney 2003). He is a Fellow ofthe Royal Society of London, and she was a member of the (American)National Academy of Sciences, and no one begrudges themthese honors. What I have to say in this book becomes a lot lessinteresting if one does not keep this fact firmly in mind. Lovelock(2000) tells us that he was born to a lower-middle-class family inEngland, just after the First World War, in 1919. (He claims to bethe result of incautious celebration on Armistice Night, November11, 1918!) He went to grammar school (the stream of publiclyfinanced English secondary education reserved for bright pupils),and then, after a year or two of working for an industrial chemist,he got his undergraduate degree in chemistry. During the SecondWorld War, he went to work for the government on practical issuessuch as the spread of the germs for the common cold—nosmall matter for bomber crews flying at high altitudes and wearingoxygen masks.

This was the beginning of twenty years of work on and aroundthe boundaries of medicine and related areas of interest and importance.In retrospect, some of Lovelock's work seems to vergeon the bizarre. For instance, he developed the technique for freezingand then resuscitating small mammals (a major concern forthose wanting to preserve blood and other body parts). It becameapparent early on that Lovelock had a real genius—and Iuse this term literally and deliberately—for instrument making:he was often able to make incredibly sensitive machines from warsurplus and similar collections of junk. This did not come out ofnowhere. From his earliest childhood, Lovelock was obsessed withscience—he read and reread the science-fiction stories of the greatwriters, such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells—but it was alwaysscience of a practical turn, the science of machinery. He wouldhaunt the Science Museum (in South Kensington), awed and fascinatedby the wonderful contraptions—steam engines, pumps,and the like, the life blood of the Industrial Revolution. The possibilityof making and playing with machines drove him forward.His tendency to be somewhat of a loner—"I'm a little bit of anindividualistic person" (BL)—led to his hobby becoming an obsession.By his own admission, referring to a sensible, all-weathercoat that has become for the British a symbol of the socially inept,interest-absorbed outsider (e.g., train spotters), Lovelock becamean "anorak of the first order" (BL).

What rescued him from obscurity was a warm and embracingpersonality, along with increasing recognition by others that hisskills were leading to highly desirable products. The self-described"nerd" became a swan. Lovelock's most brilliant invention was amechanism for detecting chemicals at infinitesimally small levels.The electron capture detector (ECD) is so precise that, to useLovelock's example, it can record in Britain within a week or twothe effects of emptying a bottle of solvent on a cloth in Japan. Aman with such talents naturally attracted attention. He and hisfamily spent several years in the United States while he worked atuniversities, and he found willing sponsors in both governmentagencies and private industry. So successful was Lovelock that hewas able to quit his formal job and do freelance work, dependingon his ability to produce things for organizations that needed hisproducts and could pay well. Lovelock prides himself on this independenceand frequently speaks scathingly of university hierarchiesand (even more so) of granting agencies. Just as one suspects thatthere are many atheistic scientists who thank God for the Galileoaffair, something they cite as proof of the awful nature of organizedreligion, so one suspects that Lovelock likewise thanks Godfor the foolish referee who derided one of his grant applications onthe grounds that what he proposed was impossible. Like all sensiblegrant applicants, Lovelock had done enough of the work thathe was already able to do the supposedly impossible—a fact thathe still, some forty years later, reiterates with glee in almost everyconversation. Something he is a little more reticent about—giventhat he was raised a Quaker and declared himself as a conscientiousobjector at the beginning of the Second World War—is thefact that defense establishments have gladly provided significantand regular funding for his production of sensitive instruments ofdetection.

Lovelock is not just a very clever scientist, he is an interestingman, with numerous fertile ideas and (as we shall see) a real talentfor communicating with both general readers and specialists.He prides himself on his ability to move across boundaries: "I'msomewhat of a polymath. I feel at home in all branches of science"(BL). He was not fazed by those who thought it was daring, perhapspresumptuous, of an industrial chemist to propose a massivehypothesis about the nature of the whole planet on which we live.Although we shall learn later about the fundamental differencesbetween the two Gaia enthusiasts, much that is true of Lovelock—especiallyhis determination to push ideas because he thoughtthem right rather than fashionable—applies as well to Lynn Margulis(Brockman 1995; Margulis and Sagan 1997). Twenty yearsyounger than Lovelock, she was born and raised in Chicago, attendingthe University of Chicago at a ridiculously young age(fourteen), where she enrolled in the Great Books program. Theheart of this educational program is working through uncut versionsof the great classics of the West, such as Plato's Republicand Dante's Inferno, and her experience was surely a major factorin her refusal to be cowed by any authority or naysayer. She hadlearned to tackle head on the greatest minds of our civilization,and lesser mortals held no terrors. At nineteen, she married theman who was to become the best-known scientist in America, CarlSagan, then an up-and-coming astronomer. She followed him firstto Wisconsin (Madison) and then to the Berkeley campus of theUniversity of California. Although she had two children and raisedthem pretty much unaided (the union with Sagan soon unraveledand then broke), Margulis enrolled in biology programs at bothWisconsin and Berkeley. Her first job after completing her PhDwas at Boston University, where she stayed for many years beforemoving to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to work inthe Department of Geosciences.

In 1967, Lynn Sagan (as she was then) published in the Journalof Theoretical Biology a paper that had been rejected fifteen times.In "On the Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells" she argued thateukaryotic cells, that is, the complex cells with nuclei enclosing thechromosomes that carry (most of) an organism's genes (today understoodto be lengthy molecules of ribonucleic acid), did not formde novo but are the results of symbiosis between more primitivecells, the prokaryotes (which have no nuclei and hence have thegenes riding free). In particular, Margulis argued that some ofthe cell parts (organelles) of the eukaryotes, specifically includingthe mitochondria (the power plants that supply energy) and theplastids (particularly the chloroplasts that perform photosynthesisin plants), started life as free-existing, independent prokaryotesthat were engulfed by other prokaryotes and (rather than dissolving)kept their own integrity and from then on contributed to thewhole, that is, to the prokaryotes (now on their way to becomingeukaryotes) that incorporated them. Margulis (to use the name ofher second husband, by which she was later known, even thoughthat union also came to an end) was not the first to endorse "endosymbiotictheory," but at the time she published, it was ridiculedas unnecessary and improbable. Nothing if not persistent, Margulisfollowed her paper in 1970 with a detailed, book-length treatmentof the topic (The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells), and slowly butsurely the tide of opinion started to swing her way. The definitiveevidence came in the 1980s, when gene sequencing had reachedthe level of sophistication that allowed comparisons between thenucleic acids found in organelles and those of various, promising,free-standing prokaryotes. The pertinent molecules were found tobe virtually identical. Margulis was vindicated.

This was not to be the last time that neither praise nor condemnationcould sway Lynn Margulis regarding a topic about whichshe had made up her mind. Her career was marked by controversiesand the taking of unpopular positions. Like Jim Lovelock,she did not hesitate to take her case (or cases) to the public, andshe wrote a number of books (several coauthored with her son,Dorion Sagan) that were specifically directed to the nonspecialist.With regard to the Gaia hypothesis, this determination and theability to switch levels of discourse were important for both Lovelockand Margulis. Although it is true that back in 1970 Margulishad not yet gained the full respect of the scientific community,Lovelock was well known, and hence the collaborators expectedthat their ideas would be received at least respectfully, if critically.However, from the first they had trouble even publishing in professionaljournals. They were invited to a distinguished scientificconference to talk on the topic, but found, to their chagrin, thatthey "were not there as serious scientists but more as entertainment"(Lovelock 2000, 262). Fellow scientists did not want todiscuss the ideas. They rejected Gaia "with that same certainty thatthe religious have when they reject the views of a rational atheist.They could not prove us wrong but they were sure in their heartsthat we were" (263).

This did lead to what one might describe as a "teaser," for onthe basis of his after-dinner talk, Lovelock published a short letterto the editor on Gaia in the journal Atmospheric Environment;but it was more a staking of claim than a detailed exposition anddefense of the idea (Lovelock 1972). Fortunately, Lovelock andMargulis were not without resources. By the 1970s, old maritalwounds had healed somewhat, and the encouragement and supportof Carl Sagan was invaluable. He was the editor of the journalIcarus, and it was here that—after a rejection by Science (Clarke2012)—the Gaia hypothesis got its first prominent outing, andit is to this hypothesis that we now turn. Bear in mind that hereand throughout the book I use the term Gaia to mean Lovelock'shypothesis; I use different words for the ideas of others, howeverclose they are to Lovelock's. In this chapter my focus is on thebasic early claims and reactions. There have been changes that areimportant for our overall discussion, but addressing them must bedeferred.

WHAT IS GAIA, AND WHY IS IT NECESSARY?

Start with an indubitable but truly amazing fact. Since the formationof our solar system more than four billion years ago, becauseof the way in which the sun burns itself up, the energy it emits hasbeen increasing over time. And not by some trivial amount. Therecould well have been a threefold increase over the years since thesystem began. Yet the surface temperature on Earth has remainedalmost constant, varying at most within a 10° Celsius band aroundtoday's mean (fig. 1). That this is just chance, given that the existenttemperature is just about perfect for terrestrial surface life,is simply "unbelievable." Natural theologians of course would invokethe deity, but for scientists this is not an option. A naturalisticclue surely lies in the fact that, compared to that of other planets,Earth's atmosphere is different—very different. It stands out inall sorts of ways—with respect to its acidity, its composition, itstemperature (after discounting differences stemming from distancesfrom the sun), and much more. Moreover, there is solidevidence that this anomalous atmosphere is not something new. Ithas persisted over vast geological time periods. But how and why?Lovelock and Margulis opened their discussion by going straightto the heart of the matter. Using the term homeostasis, meaning"balance" or "equilibrium," they wrote, "We believe that theseproperties of the terrestrial atmosphere are evidence for homeostasison a planetary scale." And just as the stability is essential for thewell-being of organisms, so they postulated that these organismsthemselves play a positive role in maintaining the stability. Bluntly,they stated that the "purpose of this paper is to develop the conceptthat the earth's atmosphere is actively maintained and regulatedby life on the surface, that is, by the biosphere" (Margulisand Lovelock 1974, 471).

There is nothing like a good name to get a good idea off to agood start, so, having noted that the ancient Greeks used the termGaia to refer to the "great communal being" made up of "all creatureson the earth, animals and plants, including man," Lovelockand Margulis clothed themselves in the veneration of antiquity bysaying that "in deference to the ancient Greek tradition," theywould "refer to the controlled atmosphere-biosphere as 'Gaia'"(Margulis and Lovelock 1974, 471). And so one asks: What workis Gaia (or, in the authors' words, the "Gaia hypothesis") goingto do? We start (as did Lovelock when he started thinking on thesubject) with the atmosphere. Venus has massive amounts of carbondioxide, comparatively little nitrogen, and no oxygen at all.Mars has little carbon dioxide and virtually no nitrogen or oxygen.Earth, as is well known, has about 20% oxygen, 80% nitrogen, andtraces of carbon dioxide. What's going on here? If you consideredonly the inorganic world, you would make no progress. However,things start to change when you factor in life on Earth, the biota.Using the term cybernetics for the study of systems where feedbackmechanisms—meaning by feedback cases where the end product(the effect) swings around and affects the initial input (the cause)and thus controls or regulates the working of the whole—Earth isjust such a system. We find a number of feedback mechanisms, suchas we find in the control of a room's temperature by a thermostatand, even more pertinently, in the human body's regulation of itstemperature through sweating and shivering. Indeed, the authorswrote, "We suspect that the earth's control systems follow a similarcomplex pattern more comparable to the temperature controlin individual organisms than to man-made models" (474).

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226731707
• ISBN 13: 9780226731704
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288