Gaia hypothesis the idea of the Earth as a single living superorganism

GAIA HYPOTHESIS

• the idea of the Earth as a single living superorganism

• James Lovelock

• Gaia - a new look at life on Earth, Oxford University Press, 1979.

Genesis of Lovelock’s hypothesis

• Together with scientist Dian Hitchcock, Lovelock examined the atmospheric data for the Martian atmosphere in the late 1960’s and found it to be in a state of stable chemical equilibrium

• the Earth was shown to be in a state of extreme chemical disequilibrium.

• The two scientists concluded that Mars was probably lifeless; almost a decade later the Viking 1 and 2 landings confirmed their conclusion.

Main idea

• In that same year, Lovelock began to think that such an unlikely combination of gases such as the Earth had, indicated a homeostatic control of the Earth biosphere to maintain environmental conditions conducive for life, in a sort of cybernetic feedback loop, an active (but non-teleological) control system.

Example: ATMOSPHERE

• "Life, or the biosphere, regulates or maintains the climate and the atmospheric composition at an optimum for itself.“

• Loveland states that our atmosphere can be considered to be “like the fur of a cat and shell of a snail, not living but made by living cells so as to protect them against the environment.

• Inherent in this explanation is the idea that biosphere, the atmosphere, the lithosphere and the hydrosphere are in some kind of balance -- that they maintain a homeostatic condition.

• This homeostasis is much like the internal maintenance of our own bodies; processes within our body insure a constant temperature, blood pH, electrochemical balance, etc.

• The inner workings of Gaia, therefore, can be viewed as a study of the physiology of the Earth, where the oceans and rivers are the Earth's blood, the atmosphere is the Earth's lungs, the land is the Earth's bones, and the living organisms are the Earth's senses.

• Lovelock calls this the science of geophysiology - the physiology of the Earth (or any other planet).

Genesis of name

• As the story goes, while on a walk in the countryside about his home in Wilshire, England, Lovelock described his hypothesis to his neighbour William Golding (the novelist - eg: Lord of the Flies), and asked advise concerning a suitable name for it. The resultant term "Gaia" - after the Greek goddess who drew the living world forth from Chaos - was chosen.

POETIC METAPHOR

• “I will sing of well-founded Gaia, Mother of All, eldest of all beings, she feeds all creature that are in the world, all that go upon the goodly land and all that are in the paths of the sea, and all that fly: all these are fed of her store.”

• --Homeric Hymn, 7th Century B.C.

GAIAN ATTRIBUTES

• Earth is a super-organism

• Biota and physical environment are so tightly coupled they are considered a single organism.

• The climate and chemical composition of Earth are kept in homeostatis at an optimum by and for the biosphere.

• Recognizes emergent properties. (Example)

Examples of GAIAN PROCESSES

• Oxygen

• Air temperature

• Salinity

• Atmospheric carbon dioxide

OXYGEN

• Lovelock suggests that Gaia is at work to keep the oxygen content of the atmosphere high and within the range that all oxygen-breathing animals require.

• The atmospheres of our two nearest neighbors, Venus and Mars, contain 0.00 percent and 0.13 percent respectively, of free oxygen. Earth is?

AIR TEMPERATURE

• The Gaia hypothesis sees life regulating the surface temperature of Earth.

• The average surface temperature of Earth has remained within a narrow range - between 10 and 20 C - for over three billion years.

• During that time the sun's output has increased by thirty or forty percent.

• Even ignoring the long-term trend of the sun, the temperature would vary far more, as it does for example every day on the surface of Mars

DAISYWORLD

• One of the criticisms leveled at the Gaia hypothesis was that Gaia must be an omniscient goddess, hardly what Lovelock was saying. In response to this, Watson and Lovelock published a simple cartoon system called DaisyWorld, where homeostasis is maintained by simple nonlinear feedback loops.

SIMPLE RULES

• In DaisyWorld, daisies find 22.5 degrees Celsius just perfect.

• At that temperature their birthrate is a maximal 1.0.

• Their birthrate drops off to zero at 5 and 40 degrees Celsius.

• The deathrate is constant.

AIR TEMPERATURE

• The determination of temperature is a bit complex.

• Different color daisies, and bare ground, have different albedos, the amount of incoming light they reflect back off into space.

• An albedo of 1.0 is a perfect reflector and 0.0 is a perfect absorber.

• White daisies (albedo near 1)
• Bare ground (albedo about 0.5)
• Dark daisies (albedo near 0)

EXPERIMENT

• To run the experiment, we seed the planet with a mix of light and dark daisies, and then slowly increase the luminosity (light reaching the planet). This is not unlike the case for Earth, since the sun's luminosity has increased gradually about 30% over 4.6 Ga.

DAISYWORLD SUMMARY

• With the daisies having no tricks at their disposal except color/albedo and birthrate, they maintain the living planet's temperature at a daisy-friendly 20-30 degrees in the face of the solar input doubling or tripling.

Hypothesis

• One of the reasons that the Gaia Hypothesis sparked such debate in scientific circles has to do with scientists' ability to test hypotheses. As we learned earlier, the traditional scientific method relies on refuting a hypothesis, proving it wrong, as the means for eliminating possible explanations.

No testable hypothesis

• The single largest complaint lodged against the strong Gaia hypothesis is that experiments can't be designed to refute it (or test it at all, for that matter.)

• Without going into all the details, suffice it to say that those arguments are valid. The strong Gaia hypotheis states that life creates conditions on Earth to suit itself. Life created the planet Earth, not the other way around. As we explore the solar system and galaxies beyond, it may one day be possible to design an experiment to test whether life indeed manipulates planetary processes for its own purposes or whether life is just an evolutionary processes that occurs in response to changes in the non-living world.

• At present, we cannot falsify the Gaia Hypothesis

CO2 Increase: GAIA save the earth?

SUMMARY 1

• Biological agents play a vital role in creating Earth’s physical and chemical environment

• Gaia suggests processes which are testable by which biota help maintain earth’s climate

• Emphasizes interdisciplinary work

• Colorful, engaging metaphor

• Hypotheses are ill-defined, not falsifiable

SUMMARY 2: Define these

• Homeostasis

• Albedo

• Emergent properties

• Daisyworld example

• Interdisciplinary

Working definition: 1

• " ... the physical and chemical condition of the surface of the Earth, of the atmosphere, and of the oceans has been and is actively made fit and comfortable by the presence of life itself.

• This is in contrast to the conventional wisdom which held that life adapted to the planetary conditions as it and they evolved their separate ways.''

Working definition: 2

• “The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts...[Gaia can be defined] as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback of cybernetic systems which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet."

Ecology

• "When the activity of an organism favors the environment as well as the organism itself, then its spread will be assisted; eventually the organism and the environmental change associated with it will become global in extent. The reverse is also true, and any species that adversely affects the environment is doomed; but life goes on."