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III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet Incubator Lifescape3. Earth Alive: A Cellular GaiaSphere Sustains Her (His) Own Viability Rubin, Sergio and Michel Crucifix. Earth’s Complexity is Non-Computable: The Limits of Scaling Laws, Nonlinearity and Chaos. Entropy. 23/7, 2021. Catholic University of Louvain, Georges Lemaitre Centre for Earth and Climate Research consider further ways that our home Gaia alive can be understood as a dynamic self-regulating and maintaining bioworld. In regard, they refer to Robert Rosen’s relational affinities and to Francisco Varela’s collegial autopoietic self-making theories for a more animate basis. Again much of the consternation is due to our betwixt mechanical and organic universes moment, which is an untenable situation. But a natural philosophical vista to resolve all this is mostly missing, which is what this resource is trying to facilitate. See also Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene by Bruce Clarke (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) for a similar version. Current physics commonly qualifies the Earth system as ‘complex’ because it includes numerous different processes operating over a large range of spatial scales. Here, we argue that understanding the Earth as a complex system requires a consideration of the Gaia hypothesis. The Earth is unique because it instantiates life and therefore an autopoietic, metabolic-repair organization at a planetary scale. This implies that our bioworld is a self-referential system that inherently is non-algorithmic and cannot be simulated in a Turing machine. We discuss the consequences of this, with reference to in-silico climate models, tipping points, planetary boundaries and feedback loops as units of adaptive evolution and selection. (Abstract excerpt)
Ruse, Michael.
The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2013.
After writing book reviews on this subject, the Florida State University philosopher and author was asked if he would do a book about it. This result is an integral assessment, after some four decades, of its validity and value. To properly do this for Ruse involves a recount of two millennia of science and culture. With the synopsis next setting a scene, the Gaia theory of myriad organisms whose biological phenomena self-regulates local regions and global biosphere for its continued survival is basically sound and is now a good guide for earth system studies. But all is not well for the course of our human encounters with an extant natural reality. With Ruse acting as a referee, from Plato and Aristotle to the Renaissance revolution and the present conflicts, two main schools can be noted – Mechanist or Organicist. As the extended quotes relate, an exclusive “science” aligns with reduction to material parts in motion exist, which by their sterility rules out any further significance. In contrast, a holistic, animate, inclusive vista joins all the disparate pieces into a lively, self-organizing emergence. In 1965 English scientist James Lovelock had a flash of insight: the Earth is not just teeming with life; the Earth, in some sense, is life. He mulled this revolutionary idea over for several years, first with his close friend the novelist William Golding, and then in an extensive collaboration with the American scientist Lynn Margulis. In the early 1970s, he finally went public with the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that everything happens for an end: the good of planet Earth. Lovelock and Margulis were scorned by professional scientists, but the general public enthusiastically embraced Lovelock and his hypothesis. People joined Gaia groups; … there was a Gaia atlas, Gaia gardening, Gaia herbs, Gaia retreats, Gaia networking, and much more. Schneider, Stephen and Penelope Boston, eds. Science of Gaia. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Proceedings from the initial American Geophysical Union conference which explored and argued over the technical foundations of the Gaia hypothesis. Schneider, Stephen, et al, eds. Scientists Debate Gaia. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. A worldwide range of papers discuss an agenda for the consideration of earth as a special planet upon whose surface life maintains a self-regulating biosphere. Its sections review: Principles and Processes (e.g. geochemistry and thermodynamics), Earth History and Cycles (phosphorous, oceans, glaciers), Philosophy, History, and Human Dimensions of Gaia, Quantifying Gaia, and Life Forms and Gaia: Microbes to Extraterrestrials. Contributions by Eric Schneider, Francesco Santini and Ludovico Galleni, Lee Klinger, and Peter Westbroek are noted elsewhere. Overall the project seems stuck within the old paradigm of a teleology taboo while it exemplifies a life-friendly, genesis cosmos. Schwartzman, David. Life, Temperature, and the Earth: The Self-Organizing Biosphere. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. The Howard University astrobiologist proposes a thermodynamically based “geophysiology” whose conditions indicate self-organizing processes at work. Biospheric evolution occurs in part because it is a complex adaptive whole system with material inheritance and self-selection of relative stability. For a 2015 update of his contributions, see The Case for a Hot Archean Climate and its Implications to the History of the Biosphere at arXiv:1504.00401. Sharma, A. Surjalal. Complexity in Nature and Data-Enabled Science: The Earth’s Magnetosphere. AIP Conference Proceedings. 1582, February, 2014. A paper by the University of Maryland astronomer presented at the International Conference on Complex Processes in Plasma and Nonlinear Dynamical Systems held November 2012 in Gandhinagar, India as an example of a worldwide explanation by way of these theories. Understanding complexity in nonequilibrium systems requires multiple approaches and the well established approaches of experiment, theory and numerical simulation have led to the key advances. The data-enabled science, referred to as the fourth paradigm, is an inherently suitable framework for the study of complexity in nature. The data-driven modeling of the Earth's magnetosphere, based on the dynamical systems theory, highlights the achievements of this approach in the study of complexity in natural systems. Skinner, Brian, et al. The Blue Planet. New York: Wiley, 1999. A basic, illustrated text on Earth System Science which includes a look at Gaian propensities. Smil, Vaclav. The Earth’s Biosphere. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. A proficient study covering physics, chemistry, biology, geology, oceanography, energy, climatology, and ecology, with an emphasis on symbiosis and the role of life’s complexity in biomass productivity and resilience. The influence of solar radiation and plate tectonics is discussed along with the quarter-power scaling of animal and plant metabolisms. Sole, Ricard and Simon Levin. Preface. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B. 357/617, 2002. As an introduction to a special theme issue: “The Biosphere as a Complex Adaptive System.” Ecosystems are complex adaptive systems. As such, they display a number of recognizable, large-scale features that result from their dynamics being far from equilibrium…..suggestive of universal principles of organization. (617) Staley, Mark. Darwinian Selection Leads to Gaia. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 218/1, 2002. The adaptation to organisms to their environment leads in turn to an influence on their biotic niche. Steffen, Will, et al. The Emergence and Evolution of Earth System Science. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. 1/1, 2020. In this inaugural issue of a new Nature journal, eight veteran Earth scientists including Jane Lubchenco, Hans Schellnhuber, and Tim Lenton provide a status report from V. Vernadsky’s biosphere to J. Lovelock’s Gaia alive model and onto current needs to foster an ecosphere vitality. See also Genealogies of Earth System Thinking by Giulia Rispoli in the same issue. Earth System Science (ESS) is an emerging transdisciplinary endeavour aimed at appreciating the structure and function of the Earth as a complex, adaptive system. Here, we discuss this integral merit of ESS, and it’s value for understanding global change. Inspired by early work on biosphere–geosphere interactions and by novel perspectives such as the Gaia hypothesis, ESS emerged in the 1980s to meet the need for a new ‘science of the Earth’. ESS has produced new concepts and frameworks which much serve environmental issues, such as the Anthropocene phase, tipping points and planetary boundaries. Moving forward, the grand challenge for ESS is to integrate biophysical processes with populous human dynamics to attain a truly unified vision of the Earth System. (Abstract) Stewart, Iain and John Lynch. Earth: The Biography. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2007. A well done coffee table book as if the common cognitive intellect of Earthkind awakens to witness, with wonder and worry, its cosmic environs, harrowing past, and life’s perilous prognosis.
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