By Michael F. Duggan
Science has lost another giant. James Lovelock, the Gaia guy is gone at 103.
I have to admit that when I first heard of the Gaia hypothesis, I didn’t like it. It had been explained to me imperfectly and seemed too broad, too metaphysical. It did not strike me as a scientific theory at all, but rather, at best, was an untestable metatheory, an organon. But the more I read, the more impressed I became. Besides, taken as a natural historical description, evolution is also untestable (although both ideas have elements that can be tested; Lovelock, with Andrew Watson, devised the Daisy World model in 1983 to test the idea of self-regulating systems).
The idea is that the Earth’s biosphere is a living, self-regulating system. Analyzing data about the Martian atmosphere while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with Carl Sagan in the 1950s, Lovelock noticed that “unlike Earth’s blanket of gases, Mars’s atmosphere was locked into the same kind of dead chemical equlibrium as as that of Venus.” (Frank 2018, 124). “It came to me suddenly, like a flash of enlightenment, that [for the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere] to persist and keep stable, something must be regulating it… It dawned on me that somehow life was regulating the climate as well as the atmosphere. Suddenly the image of the Earth as a living organism able to regulate its temperature and chemistry at a comfortable steady state emerged in my mind.” (Frank, 2018, 124). Far from being New Agey murk, this was the recognition that the biosphere regulates itself as a steady state rather than chemical equlibrium. The name Gaia was suggested to him by William Golding of The Lord of the Flies fame (Gaia is the Greek Earth goddess). (Frank 124-25). Sagan’s wife, Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) helped develop the idea and pushed for its acceptance.
As Adam Frank explains in his book, Light of the Stars, the implications of this idea are huge. Photosynthetic bacteria produce oxygen that keeps the Earth’s atmosphere at a steady state with around 21% oxygen. “But why did oxygen levels rise up to 21% and nor further? This is an important question, because if the concentration of oxygen in the air were to climb as high as 30 percent, the planet would become a tinderbox. Any lightning strike would create fires that wouldn’t stop.” (Frank 2018, 126). It all had to do with negative feedback from the living world. I now believe that the Gaia hypothesis was one of the greatest ideas of the 20th-century.
As I have written before, Lovelock’s and Margulis’s ideas of a self-regulating biosphere are highly suggestive and even more relevant in a time of pandemic. What if we have it all backward? What if the planet is the fevered patient, that we are the pathogen or imbalance, that COVID-19 is the planet’s immune response, and the vaccines and antivirals is the disease trying to outsmart the immune response?