So, I was just having a read through this and I was interested to read various people's thoughts, however only a couple of people made reference to the Earth's seemingly self-regulating nature.

It's (maybe) important to point out that I do not consider myself to be religious, however the Gaia Hypothesis makes a lot of sense to me. For those of you that don't know:


Basically that the Earth is a being that regulates it's various ecosystems. i.e. in the form of an Ice Age, or the five-yearly natural cull of a particular species of wild deer (can't quite remember which one).

I'm basically interested to hear other's opinions on this.

EDIT: Just to make it clear, I don't believe that the Earth is a fully sentient being (i.e. an animal that conforms to the common understanding of sentience - capable of artistic thought and emotional expression etc.), however that it does regulate itself through natural culling, environmental changes and so forth.

The earth is a lump of rock and magma. Any theory that it is responsible for its own management is ludicrous. Evolution, however, has happened in such a manner that life almost regulates itself. As for ice-ages, they're caused by complex geological events that have nothing to do with sentience. This almost uncanny regulation is a cause for many to believe in a divine or higher power, but I personally doubt the earth is, in and of itself, sentient.

Hmm, perhaps you're right and sentience isn't the best way to put it, however I feel that evolution in itself (i.e. natural selection, certain species being immune to sicknesses that wiped out others etc) is an example of Gaia in action.

That's very interesting actually, I could agree with it in part, but sentient isn't the best word. One could observe this in action all the time in nature, but not so much to do with Earth, but rather the living organisms. Organisms and whole ecosystems tend to adapt to the changing Earth, making it seem like organisms and inorganic materials are working together, but rather the Earth is changing and organisms are conforming to those stresses through adaptation (which includes natural selection and all that razzmatazz)

Fair enough, that makes sense. The Gaia theory is literally just that, but flipped on it's head.

(see the update)

Ugh. Lovelock is a twat. It's almost as preposterous as the idea that an amoeba has the same intrinsic worth as a human.

The Earth is not sentient. Life, however, as well as sentience can shape the Earth. And the Earth is capable of shaping the sentience of human beings.

Also, it's narrow for you all to believe that the changes of the Earth drive life, but not the other way around.

Defining the Earth as one organic megastructure with the capacity to grow, defend itself, learn, etc, does give it the attributes that we would also give to life. Perhaps it wouldn't be sentient, but a case could be made that it is alive. The nature of such a complex system would be described as an epiphenomenon: each small component has no awareness of its greater totality, and operates within its own small set of rules, but in such numbers and inter-relationships that the sum of the parts constitute something greater than the whole. Just like each brain neuron has no awareness of the total brain, just the surrounding neurons, or each bird in a flock has no aware of the shape of the total swarm but just the other birds adjacent to it, the Earth taken as a whole is not just a rock with some organisms living on it; it is something much, much more.

How is a human more valuable than an amoeba?

I would argue that we haven't advanced past any point that allows our deeper understanding of the world around us to be of any utility to any other organism on the planet. To whom is a single human more valuable than a single amoeba, besides other humans?

Value is a personal attribution, not an objective one. Humans are more valuable to me than other animals, literally, because I say so.

How do you suppose it regulates itself, precisely? It obviously isn't set up like a cell, where the regulatory processes are completely evident. I guess you could draw analogies between things like the cell membrane and the Earth's magnetosphere, both selectively permeable. But then you have ice ages and epochs of super high carbon dioxide levels (the former bad for all organisms and the latter bad for land animals and aerobic bacteria), which the Earth obviously does not regulate very well.

From little tidbit of the Wikipedia page you copied, it sounds like a retrospective view of biology: these organisms just exist, and the geography of Earth somehow molds itself to fit these organisms over time.

Yeah, no. It's the other way around.

Precisely - it's a little obtuse to spend much time thinking about which organisms are more valuable.

OK, I mean this in the least offensive way possible (despite your, frankly rude post) but that was a fairly badly thought out thing to say. Pointing out that 'ice ages a epochs of super high carbon dioxide levels' are bad for life and organisms and suchlike is, if not proof of a self-regulating Earth, damn close. When a population becomes to much (refer to the deer example in the OP) it is culled. If this applies to overcrowding of the Earth, MAYBE something like an Ice Age, flooding etc happens.

Once more for clarity, MAYBE

I'm not sure I'd agree, Aaron. Self-awareness really acts as a modifier through which an organism's possible net utility can be measured. For instance, if you take a creature like an amoeba, because it is barely self-aware, if at all, it is unable to experience the full measure of happiness from any given action because it is unable to fully apply that happiness to itself. One then graduates up the scale, until one reaches the superior degree of self-awareness found in humans (and, indeed, similar levels in some apes).

Thus, one can create a utilitarian justification for measuring the "worth" of animals by considering the utility gained or lost by them for any given action, as affected by their self-awareness. That, in my view, would lend itself to strong, child-like rights to animals like apes, stronger controls on the humanity of treatment of most farm animals etc., while still acknowledging greater human worth.

Also, on topic, I think it's been pretty well covered as to how organisms independently adapt. We've no desolada to globally terraform.

Well, humans could be a food source to other land animals, and some aquatic creatures. An amoeba can't really do that.

In terms of utility, humans are more useful, merely as we can help other animals, and be used by other animals, which is much more difficult for an amoeba.

An amoeba can however break down organisms into the finer materials that can then be recycled in this greater collection of cycles we're talking about. Besides that the are a food source to a number of aquatic creatures and land based creatures too. It eats shit and regulates that shit according to its own abundance, then it gets eaten by other shit which regulates the amount of amoeba around which regulates the amount of amoeba prey species about.


Essentially you don't know what you're talking about.



Yeah, nah. Earth doesn't sense when a population is reaching its point of maximum sustainability and wipe it out, populations reach points where their close proximity leads to a point where they can no longer feed themselves and competition leads to a greater dying out within a species.
Not every grouping of animals is a community, some are are non-interacting assemblages where the removal of one does not affect the other. The Earth does not flip ts magnetic field and cause an Ice Age because of overpopulation, that is poorly thought in itself. He wasn't being frankly rude, I'm being frankly rude -learn the difference.
Earth's systems do regulate when faced with rising CO2 levels and ice ages it just does it too slowly for many organisms to survive.
Take my favourite topic the Carbon Compensation depth and the Lysocline which are the point that no carbon is found in the ocean and the gradient that it becomes soluble respectively. With the rising acidity of the ocean the CCD and Lysocline rise to bring the pH level to an equilibrium which means that more sea animals are wiped out as the carbon that forms their skeletons begins to dissolve at shallower depths.

At first I thought this was an intellectual thread about the way the universe in an online game worked. I'm smart, I promise!

Now for my point: If the earth is capable of regulating itself, why hasn't it done so in response to human overpopulation? And other things too, but that is the main one.

Although I think the term sentient is erroneous, I do believe that the Gaia theory does have some merits. As said in prior posts, who is to say that the Earth does not work like an organism? Although the Earth itself may not have sentience, it may in fact be reliant on the smaller organisms to carry out certain roles to maintain a balance of equilibrium. Then when this balance is disrupted, the Earth in an attempt to protect itself and purge the offenders, unleashing the fury of nature in recoil.

On a slightly off topic note, I really love the Final Fantasy VII idea of Gaia. In that everyone and everything is given energy by the spirit of the Planet prior to birth, in order to live out their lives, and then die; with the energy then returning to the Planet. During an organism's lifetime, they have experiences from which they gain memories, and once they die, their Spirit Energy returns to the Planet, taking with it the memories of the life form to which it had been attached. These memories in turn give rise to more Spirit Energy, allowing the Planet's spirit as a whole to adapt and grow, and the cycle of life to continue.


Who is to say it hasn't? Figures show that the number of reported natural disasters has increased exponentially over the years; this in itself (could be) natures way of culling off the ever increasing population.

(I will admit that this data would be slightly skewed due to a lack of reports in early years, but my point still stands.)

Although this is as far as my knowledge on this subject goes, the 'daisyworld' explanation makes sense to me; it's not the earth thinking "oh, yeah, better solve this problem" but something that happens naturally - in a way it is regulating itself, although not consciously if I'm making any sense

In short, I don't see how the Gaia theory poses a problem, only that it would seem human activity is more powerful than the earth's ability to adapt.

I really don't understand why everybody keeps making the assumption that Earth is overpopulated. Sure, in sub-saharan Africa, the environment cannot sustain the human population without outside assistance- but it is purely a geographical issue that causes this. Let me point out that if America did not consume beef, the wheat that would have gone to raising the cattle could easily feed the ENTIRE world. And that's just one country. People need to stop having these backward thinking Malthusian views, because Earth has the capability of providing for far more than what it is currently.