What is James Lovelock's Gaia theory?
James Lovelock called his first proposal the Gaia hypothesis but has also used the term Gaia theory. Lovelock states that the initial formulation was based on observation, but still lacked a scientific explanation.
How did James Lovelock come up with his hypothesis?
James Lovelock gave this name to his hypothesis after a suggestion from the novelist William Golding, who was living in the same village as Lovelock at the time (Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, UK). Golding's advice was based on Gea, an alternative spelling for the name of the Greek goddess, which is used as prefix in geology, geophysics and geochemistry.
Who came up with the Gaia hypothesis?
The hypothesis was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. Lovelock named the idea after Gaia, the primordial goddess who personified the Earth in Greek mythology.
Where was the Chapman Conference on the Gaia hypothesis held?
^ American Geophysical Union. "General Information Chapman Conference on the Gaia Hypothesis University of Valencia Valencia, Spain June 19-23, 2000 (Monday through Friday)". AGU Meetings. Retrieved 7 January 2017.
What is meant by the Gaia hypothesis?
Lovelock and U.S. biologist Lynn Margulis, the Gaia hypothesis is named for the Greek Earth goddess. It postulates that all living things have a regulatory effect on the Earth's environment that promotes life overall; the Earth is homeostatic in support of life-sustaining conditions.
What is James Lovelock known for?
James Lovelock, in full James Ephraim Lovelock, (born July 26, 1919, Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, England), English chemist, medical doctor, scientific instrument developer, and author best known for the creation and promulgation of the Gaia hypothesis, an idea rooted in the notion that all life on Earth is ...
Who are the 3 scientist that developed the Gaia hypothesis?
Developed by scientist and inventor James Lovelock, and microbiologist Lynn Margulis, the Gaia hypothesis originally proposed that life, through its interactions with the Earth's crust, oceans, and atmosphere, produced a stabilising effect on conditions on the surface of the planet – in particular the composition of ...
Who is James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis?
With microbiologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock published a series of papers on the subject. In 1974, they developed a view of Earth's atmosphere as “a component part of the biosphere rather than as a mere environment for life” (J. E. Lovelock and L. Margulis Tellus 26, 2–10; 1974).
Why is the Gaia hypothesis important?
The Gaia theory also predicted the causal link between increased biodiversity and increasing stability of populations. The Gaian influence on the development of Evolutionary theory can be found in the idea that life on earth works with the abiotic environment as a self-regulatory system.
Who wrote Gaia?
James LovelockWe have learned so much about our home planet in the three decades since James Lovelock wrote Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford, 1979). Has the book stood the test of time?
Who is Professor Lovelock?
James Ephraim Lovelock CH CBE FRS (born 26 July 1919) is a British independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.
Who is Gaia in the Bible?
In Greek mythology, Gaia (/ˈɡeɪə, ˈɡaɪə/; from Ancient Greek Γαῖα, a poetical form of Γῆ Gē, "land" or "earth"), also spelled Gaea /ˈdʒiːə/, is the personification of the Earth and one of the Greek primordial deities. Gaia is the ancestral mother—sometimes parthenogenic—of all life....GaiaHinduism equivalentBhumi9 more rows
What religion is James Lovelock?
QuakerismBut his dyslexia made complex math difficult, so he opted instead for chemistry, enrolling at the University of London. A year later, when the Nazis invaded Poland, Lovelock converted to Quakerism and soon became a conscientious objector. In his written statement, he explained why he refused to fight: “War is evil.”
What is the Gaia hypothesis for kids?
From Academic Kids He hypothesized that the living matter of the planet functioned like a single organism and named this self-regulating living system after the Greek goddess, Gaia. Gaia theories have non-technical predecessors in the ideas of several cultures.
What is Gaia theory?
She defined Gaia as "the series of interacting ecosystems that compose a single huge ecosystem at the Earth's surface. Period ". The book's most memorable "slogan" was actually quipped by a student of Margulis'. James Lovelock called his first proposal the Gaia hypothesis but has also used the term Gaia theory.
What does Gaian hypotheses suggest about organisms?
Overview. Gaian hypotheses suggest that organisms co-evolve with their environment: that is, they "influence their abiotic environment, and that environment in turn influences the biota by Darwinian process ". Lovelock (1995) gave evidence of this in his second book, showing the evolution from the world of the early thermo-acido-philic ...
What is the Gaia hypothesis?
The Gaia hypothesis posits that the Earth is a self-regulating complex system involving the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrospheres and the pedosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system. The hypothesis contends that this system as a whole, called Gaia, seeks a physical and chemical environment optimal for contemporary life.
What is the Gaia philosophy?
In some versions of Gaia philosophy, all lifeforms are considered part of one single living planetary being called Gaia. In this view, the atmosphere, the seas and the terrestrial crust would be results of interventions carried out by Gaia through the coevolving diversity of living organisms.
Which model of the Gaia hypothesis was developed to explain the planetary temperature regulation?
In response to the criticism that the Gaia hypothesis seemingly required unrealistic group selection and cooperation between organisms, James Lovelock and Andrew Watson developed a mathematical model, Daisyworld, in which ecological competition underpinned planetary temperature regulation.
What is the difference between Coevolutionary Gaia and Homeostatic Gaia?
Kirchner claimed that this was already accepted scientifically and was not new. Homeostatic Gaia: that life maintained the stability of the natural environment, and that this stability enabled life to continue to exist.
When was the 2nd Chapman Conference on the Gaia Hypothesis held?
By the time of the 2nd Chapman Conference on the Gaia Hypothesis, held at Valencia, Spain, on 23 June 2000, the situation had changed significantly. Rather than a discussion of the Gaian teleological views, or "types" of Gaia hypotheses, the focus was upon the specific mechanisms by which basic short term homeostasis was maintained within a framework of significant evolutionary long term structural change.
What is the Gaia hypothesis?
Evelyn Hutchinson, Lovelock first formulated the Gaia hypothesis in the 1960s resulting from his work for NASA concerned with detecting life on Mars and his work with Royal Dutch Shell. The hypothesis proposes that living and non-living parts of the Earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. Named after the Greek goddess Gaia at the suggestion of novelist William Golding, the hypothesis postulates that the biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth's environment that acts to sustain life.
Who is James Lovelock?
jameslovelock .org. James Ephraim Lovelock CH CBE FRS (born 26 July 1919) is an English independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.
Why does Lovelock keep a poster of a wind turbine?
He keeps a poster of a wind turbine to remind himself how much he detests them. In Novacene (2019) Lovelock proposes that benevolent superintelligence may take over and save the ecosystem, and states that the machines will need to keep organic life around to keep the planet's temperature habitable for electronic life.
What did Lovelock do for NASA?
In early 1961, Lovelock was engaged by NASA to develop sensitive instruments for the analysis of extraterrestrial atmospheres and planetary surfaces.
What did Lovelock discover about hamsters?
In the mid-1950s, Lovelock experimented with the cryopreservation of rodents, determining that hamsters could be frozen with 60% of the water in the brain crystallized into ice with no adverse effects recorded. Other organs were shown to be susceptible to damage. The results were influential in the theories of cryonics .
What is the nuclear energy Lovelock believes?
In his view, nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels that has the capacity to both fulfill the large scale energy needs of humankind while also reducing greenhouse emissions. He is an open member of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy.
What is the book The Revenge of Gaia about?
In Lovelock's 2006 book, The Revenge of Gaia, he argues that the lack of respect humans have had for Gaia, through the damage done to rainforests and the reduction in planetary biodiversity, is testing Gaia's capacity to minimize the effects of the addition of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
What is the Gaia hypothesis?
Introduction#N#The Gaia hypothesis, named after the ancient Greek goddess of Earth, posits that Earth and its biological systems behave as a huge single entity. This entity has closely controlled self-regulatory negative feedback loops that keep the conditions on the planet within boundaries that are favorable to life. Introduced in the early 1970s, the idea was conceived by chemist and inventor James E. Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis. This new way of looking at global ecology and evolution differs from the classical picture of ecology as a biological response to a menu of physical conditions. The idea of co-evolution of biology and the physical environment where each influences the other was suggested as early as the mid-1700s, but never as strongly as Gaia, which claims the power of biology to control the nonliving environment. More recently, the terms Gaian science or Gaian theory have become more common than the original Gaia hypothesis because of modifications in response to criticisms and expansion of our scientific understanding.
What are the two life forms in Daisyworld?
On Daisyworld there are only two life forms: white and black daisies.
How do living organisms interact with their environment?
The Gaia Hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock (1972) suggests that living organisms on the planet interact with their surrounding inorganic environment to form a synergetic and self-regulating system that created, and now maintains, the climate and biochemical conditions that make life on Earth possible. Gaia bases this postulate on the fact that the biosphere, and the evolution or organisms, affects the stability of global temperature, salinity of seawater, and other environmental variables. For instance, even though the luminosity of the sun, the Earth's heat source, has increased about 30% since life began almost four billion years ago, the living system has reacted as a whole to maintain temperatures at a level suitable for life. Cloud formation over the open ocean is almost entirely a function of oceanic algae that emit sulfur molecules as waste metabolites which become condensation nuclei for rain. Clouds, in turn, help regulate surface temperatures.
What is Lovelock's hypothesis?
Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis conceptualized biodiversity and mutualism in their most advanced and elegant integration. In mycorrhizae, diversity and mutualistic functioning unite successive systems into networks and complex systems. In order to show that complexity has increased overall, it is sufficient to show, that – all other things being equal – connections have increased in at least one dimension. What is lacking is the ability to make predictions about how complexity in mycorrhizal communities will change their function as the systems and/or their environment is altered by human impacts and global change. Combining metagenomics, transcriptomics, molecular, metabolic, and biochemical data with nonlinear mathematical models might provide the foundations and rules for understanding mycorrhizal complexity. The limitations and utility of any data, however, remain in developing data-mining and complexity-modeling tools and techniques to utilize effectively the information from a local and global perspective, because data are gathered on scales from molecules to genomes, organelles, cells, tissues, and organs. Bioinformatics is the acquisition of knowledge by means of computational tools for the organization, management, and mining of genetic biological data. These analytical tools are being increasingly applied to the oceans of data collected by metagenomics studies. A more appropriate term for mycorrhizal systems may be ‘ecoinformatics’ or the accumulation of ecologically based data sets appropriate to mycorrhizae in situ, followed by data integration. In doing so, it will then be appropriate to say that diversity and mutualism provide ecosystem function and what that functioning may be.
What is the cartoon about a geophysiological discovery made by tracking and modelling stable water isotopes?
A Cathy Wilcox cartoon (first published on 4 March 2005 on the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald, Australia) illustrating a geophysiological discovery made by tracking and modelling stable water isotopes. (Source: Reproduced by permission of Cathy Wilcox, SMH.)
How has silicate rock weathering impacted the atmosphere?
The biological amplification of silicate rock weathering has progressively reduced the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and acted as a long-term climate stabilizer. Atmospheric oxygen rose in a stepwise fashion to ∼21% of the atmosphere, about which it has been tightly regulated for the past 350 million years.
Why is the atmosphere 21% oxygen?
The 21% oxygen content of the atmosphere is an obvious consequence of living organisms, and the levels of other gases, NH 3 and CH 4, are higher than would be expected for an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Biological activity also explains why the atmosphere is not mainly CO 2 and why the oceans are not more saline.
What is the originality of Gaia theory?
The originality of the Gaia theory relies on the assessment that such homeostatic balance is actively pursued with the goal of keeping the optimal conditions for life, even when terrestrial or external events menace them. [3] Gaia hypothesis 2. Regulation of the salinity in the oceans.
What is the Gaia theory?
The Gaia theory states that the Earth's atmospheric composition is kept at a dynamically steady state by the presence of life.
What is the Gaia hypothesis?
Gaia hypothesis. The study of planetary habitability is partly based upon extrapolation from knowledge of the Earth's conditions, as the Earth is the only planet currently known to harbour life. The Gaia hypothesis, also known as Gaia theory or Gaia principle, proposes that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth ...
What is the difference between black daisies and white daisies?
The colour of the daisies influences the albedo of the planet such that black daisies absorb light and warm the planet , while white daisies reflect light and cool the planet.
What is the most memorable quote in the book "Gaia is just symbiosis as
The book's most memorable "slogan" was actually quipped by a student of Margulis': "Gaia is just symbiosis as seen from space". This neatly connects Gaia theory to Margulis' own theory of endosymbiosis. First Gaia conference.
When was the second Gaia conference?
Second Gaia conference. In 1988, to draw attention to the Gaia hypothesis, the climatologist Stephen Schneider organised a conference of the American Geophysical Union's first Chapman Conference on Gaia,[27] held at San Diego in 1989, solely to discuss Gaia.
How much has the surface temperature increased since the beginning of life?
Regulation of the global surface temperature. Since life started on Earth, the energy provided by the Sun has increased by 25% to 30% ;[8] however, the surface temperature of the planet has remained within the levels of habitability, reaching quite regular low and high margins.
Summary
The Gaia hypothesis , also known as the Gaia theory, Gaia paradigm, or the Gaia principle, proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.
The hypothesis was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by the micro…
Overview
Gaian hypotheses suggest that organisms co-evolve with their environment: that is, they "influence their abiotic environment, and that environment in turn influences the biota by Darwinian process". Lovelock (1995) gave evidence of this in his second book, showing the evolution from the world of the early thermo-acido-philic and methanogenic bacteria towards the oxygen-enriched atmosphere today that supports more complex life.
A reduced version of the hypothesis has been called "influential Gaia" in "Directed Evolution of the Biosphere: Bio…
Details
The Gaia hypothesis posits that the Earth is a self-regulating complex system involving the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrospheres and the pedosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system. The hypothesis contends that this system as a whole, called Gaia, seeks a physical and chemical environment optimal for contemporary life.
Gaia evolves through a cybernetic feedback system operated unconsciously by the biota, leadin…
History
The idea of the Earth as an integrated whole, a living being, has a long tradition. The mythical Gaia was the primal Greek goddess personifying the Earth, the Greek version of "Mother Nature" (from Ge = Earth, and Aia = PIE grandmother), or the Earth Mother. James Lovelock gave this name to his hypothesis after a suggestion from the novelist William Golding, who was living in the same village as Lovelock at the time (Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, UK). Golding's advice was bas…
Criticism
After initially receiving little attention from scientists (from 1969 until 1977), thereafter for a period the initial Gaia hypothesis was criticized by a number of scientists, such as Ford Doolittle, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. Lovelock has said that because his hypothesis is named after a Greek goddess, and championed by many non-scientists, the Gaia hypothesis was interpreted as a neo-Pagan religion. Many scientists in particular also criticised the approach taken in his popular book Gaia, a New Look at Life on Earth for being teleological—a belief that thin…
See also
• Biocoenosis – Interacting organisms living together in a habitat
• Earth science – Fields of natural science related to Earth
• Environmentalism – Broad philosophy, ideology and social movement concerning environmental wellbeing
Sources
• Bondì, Roberto (2006). Blu come un'arancia. Gaia tra mito e scienza. Torino, Utet: Prefazione di Enrico Bellone. ISBN 978-88-02-07259-3.
• Bondì, Roberto (2007). Solo l'atomo ci può salvare. L'ambientalismo nuclearista di James Lovelock. Torino, Utet: Prefazione di Enrico Bellone. ISBN 978-88-02-07704-8.
• Jaworski, Helan (1928). Le Géon ou la Terre vivante. Paris: Librairie Gallimard.
Further reading
• Joseph, Lawrence E. (1990). Gaia: The Growth of an Idea. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-31-204318-6.
Overview
James Ephraim Lovelock CH CBE FRS (born 26 July 1919) is a British independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.
With a PhD in medicine, Lovelock began his career performing cryopreservation experiments on rodents, including successfully thawing frozen specimens. His methods were influential in the …
Early life and education
James Lovelock was born in Letchworth Garden City to Tom Arthur Lovelock (1873–1957) and his second wife Nellie Annie Elizabeth née March (1887–1980). Nell, his mother, won a scholarship to a grammar school but was unable to take it up, and started work at 13 in a pickle factory. His father, Tom, had served six months hard labour for poaching in his teens and was illiterate until attending technical college, and later ran a book shop. Lovelock was brought up a Quaker and indoctrinated with the notion that "God is a still, small voice within rather than som…
Career
After leaving school Lovelock worked at a photography firm, attending Birkbeck College during the evenings, before being accepted to study chemistry at the University of Manchester, where he was a student of the Nobel Prize laureate Professor Alexander Todd. Lovelock worked at a Quaker farm before a recommendation from his professor led to him taking up a Medical Research Council post, working on ways of shielding soldiers from burns. Lovelock refused to …
Prizes and other honours
Lovelock was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974. His nomination reads:
Lovelock has made distinguished contributions to several diverse fields, including a study of the transmission of respiratory infection, and methods of air sterilisation; the role of Ca and other divalent ions in blood clotting; damage to various living cells by freezing, thawing and thermal shock and its prevention by the presence of neutral solutes; methods of freezing and thawing small live animals; methods for preparing sperm for artificial in…
Personal life
Lovelock married Helen Hyslop in 1942, and they had four children and lived together until 1989 when Helen died of multiple sclerosis. He first met his future second wife, Sandy, at the age of 69. Lovelock believes that "you would find the life of me and my wife Sandy to be an unusually happy one in simple beautiful but unpretentious surroundings."
Lovelock became a centenarian in 2019.
Portraits of Lovelock
In March 2012, the National Portrait Gallery unveiled a new portrait of Lovelock by British artist Michael Gaskell (2011). The collection also has two photographic portraits by Nick Sinclair (1993) and Paul Tozer (1994). The archive of the Royal Society of Arts has a 2009 image taken by Anne-Katrin Purkiss. Lovelock agreed to sit for sculptor Jon Edgar in Devon during 2007, as part of The Environment Triptych (2008) along with heads of Mary Midgley and Richard Mabey. A bronze head is in the collection of the sitter and the terracotta is in the archive of t…
Bibliography
• Lovelock, James (2019). Novacene: The coming age of hyperintelligence. Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0241399361.
• Lovelock, James; et al. (2016). The Earth and I. Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8365-5111-3. Retrieved 30 June 2017.
• Lovelock, James (2014). A Rough Ride to the Future. Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0241004760.
See also
• Gaianism