On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Ed Weick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>But what if the system is not interacting and closed looped? What if
>each species (or family) looks after itself and promotes itself without
>enhancing or embellishing the others, but really crowding them out and
>getting rid of them to make room for itself? Gaia may not be
>primordially cooperative, but primordially inherently viciously
>competitive.
These things are not mutually exclusive: the system as a whole
is inescapably closed looped, because of the finite size of
the ecology, which is the "sink" for all the actions of the
biota on the earth, but also their "source", so the ecology
is 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.
My cerebral, intelligent dinosaur would never have thought
>that it (he or she) would ever be eclipsed, but there wase a little
>proto-mammal lurking near by, avoiding being eaten. Then along came a
>rock from outer space, landing in the Gulf of Mexico. Random?
>Absolutely.
The Gaia system is a vastly complex netork of interacting feedback
paths, which have evolved to interact within a range of values
for lots of critical variables. The equilibria for the system are
metastable, that is, there are lots of different potential plateaux
of stability within the overall range, and the system is subject
to being knocked from any one such state to another by external
shock or mutation driven internal alteration of constituents of
the biota. The point of the theory is that the long development
time of the global-level selection processes for all the multiple
feedback paths make it likely that the overall system can recover
to one of its equilibria within its comfort zone from any such
perturbation. As far as the Gaia system as a whole is concerned,
mammals or dinosaurs, either work as well as the other their
niche in the system. The system as a whole is only concerned with
keeping its environment within the habitable range for earth brand
(DNA, amino acid, cellular)life in general, not life of any particular
variety of manifestation thereof - in fact, viewed in the time
scale where its operation is most apparent, all individual species
are churned as part of the process.
Note, by the way, I'm only trying to express the theory as I
understand it. I don't know whether I buy it completely - I can
see how some individual instances of feedback paths can work, but
I don't know that that justifies developing the meta-level of an
overarching theory. That is, I don't know if that offers more
explanatory power than simply taking each case individually
and working out their interactions. It would seem the metatheory
implies a more extensive set of conclusions than you get from
treating its components as autonomous, but I don't know if they've
ever been articulated, let alone demonstrated.
-Pete Vincent
----- Original Message -----
From: "pete" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 6:20 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Gaia Hypothesis...
>
> On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Ed Weick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> ><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> >> Robert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Don't know about Gaia being 'new-agey.' I was thinking more in terms
> >>> of James Lovelock's notion that 'earth, in all its interactions and
> >>> transformations, added up to a single giant living system.'
> >>
> >> arthur
> >>
> >> I would make one change. An additional word. Random.
> >
> >I agree with Arthur. I read the Gaia stuff years ago and felt that the
> >notion that the Earth and all it's living systems were somehow
> >directional or purposeful is nonsense. The beauty of Gaia is that it is
> >essentially chaotic and you never know where it is going next. Picture a
> >very clever and very cerebral dinosaur. Could it have contemplated a
> >world without it but with us?
>
> 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.
> A living system is a special case of a CL system, where the
> feedback is developed by the actions of organisms, which
> behave actively to contribute to th feedback mechanisms,
> allowing for much more and more rapid opportunities for
> feedback subsystems to arise than in passive, inanimate
> natural environments, where such systems can arise, but are
> rare and of limited range and flexibility. Once a living
> system is established, the requirements of the living components
> tend to enhance and embellish the feedback aspects through
> natural selection operating on a macrosopic scale on populations.
>
> You have to distinguish the "hardnosed" core Gaia Hypothesis from
> the froth whipped up around it by the soft-of-thinking.
>
> -Pete Vincent
>
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