Ed Weick wrote: > > Thanks, Pete, ... but doesn't Gaia > imply some form of direction and purposefulness?
When I first read Lovelock (long ago) it seemed to me he was making a kind of *homeostasis* argument about the earth as a whole - which is, of course, not particularly religious nor even directional. (I take it "tightly coupled evolution" means nothing more than that changes in one system or part of a system affects the rest.) In other words, what Pete V wrote seems right to me. pete wrote: > Not directional or purposeful, in the sense of consciously goal > oriented, simply persistent and self-correcting, by negative > feedback, as a closed loop system in the systems engineering sense. ... > ... circumscribed like a yeast colony in sugar syrup whose > population is self limiting because the alcohol it excretes > pervades its environment and is toxic above a threshhold > concentration... An on-line Oceanography course I had at hand puts the matter this way: "The Gaia Hypothesis proposes that our planet functions as a single organism that maintains conditions necessary for its survival. Formulated by James Lovelock in the mid-1960s and published in a book in 1979, this controversial idea has spawned several interesting ideas and many new areas of research. While this hypothesis is by no means substantiated, it provides many useful lessons about the interaction of physical, chemical, geological, and biological processes on Earth." Overview http://www.oceansonline.com/gaia.htm I also remembered a pre-Lovelock essay by Lewis Thomas in which he speculated about the earth as an organism, and sure enough I found the pertinent passage right away on the web: "I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell." - Lewis Thomas in The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher BTW - There is a lovely *illustrated* version of the essay on-line at: "The World's Biggest Membrane" http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~phys203/lewisthomas/membrane.html As for design - > The concept as a whole seems to come pretty close to the intelligent design > movement in current Christianity, the major difference being, I suppose, > that man is the center in the ID movement, but may be unnecessary in Gaia. - I can't see at all why "an intelligence" needs to be invoked to explain how it could be that there are organisms with feedback loops such that they don't get knocked around everytime something in their environment jiggles, nor to explain how the earth could be that a system with a number of meta-stable equilibrium states. Stephen Straker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Vancouver, B.C. [Outgoing mail scanned by Norton AntiVirus] _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
