III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape

3. Earth Alive: An Ovular GaiaSphere Sustains Her/His Own Viability

Nicholson, Arwen, et al. Alternative Mechanisms for Gaia. Journal of Theoretical Biology. Online August, 2018. As discussions and arguments ever persist about an evolutionary self-regulation of biospheric viability, University of Exeter Earth system scientists including Timothy Lenton, along with University of Lincoln life scientist David Wilkinson finesse a way that selective effects on a global scale may be seen to serve life’s evident long term stable presence. See also Is Gaia Alive? The Future of a Symbiotic Planet by Roberto Cazzolla Gatti in Futures (Online August 2018).

A long-standing objection to the Gaia hypothesis has been a perceived lack of plausible mechanisms by which life on Earth could come to regulate its abiotic environment. A null hypothesis is survival by pure chance, by which any appearance and persistence of regulation on Earth is illusory. Recent work, however, has proposed that persistence alone empowers a biosphere to acquire further persistence-enhancing properties. Here we use a simple quantitative model to show that such ‘selection by survival alone’ can indeed increase the probability that a biosphere will live on in the future, relative to a baseline of pure chance. Adding environmental feedback to this model shows either an increased or decreased survival probability depending on the initial conditions. The outstanding question remains the relative importance of each mechanism for the historical and continued persistence of life on Earth. (Abstract)

Nicholson, Arwen, et al. Gaian Bottlenecks and Planetary Habitability Maintained by Evolving Model Biospheres: The ExoGaia Model. arXiv:1803.08063. Earth systems scientists Nicholson, Hywel Williams, and Timothy Lenton, University of Exeter, and David Wilkinson University of Lincoln, UK who study globally organic processes at work (search Lenton) expand this approach as an effective way to detect life-bearing exoworlds. See also The Case for a Gaian Bottleneck: The Biology of Habitability by Aditya Chopra and Charles Lineweaver herein, along with Earth: Atmospheric Evolution of a Habitable Planet by Stephanie Olson, et al at arXiv:1803.05967 for similar reviews. For a later verification see Typical Climate Perturbations Unlikely to Disrupt Gaia Hypothesis by Olivia Alcabes, et al. at arXiv:1906.01112 which finds that astrogeological impacts would likely not disrupt this long term bioregulation process.

Planet habitability models traditionally focus on abiotic processes and neglect a biotic response to changing conditions on an inhabited planet. The Gaia hypothesis postulates that life influences the Earth's feedback mechanisms to form a self-regulating system, and hence that life can maintain habitable conditions on its host planet. We present the ExoGaia model - a model of simple 'planets' host to evolving microbial biospheres. Model planets orbit a 'star' which provides incoming radiation, and atmospheric chemicals have either an albedo, or a heat-trapping property. Planetary temperatures can therefore be altered by microbes via their metabolisms. We find five distinct classes of model planets, including clear examples of 'Gaian bottlenecks' - a phenomenon whereby life either rapidly goes extinct leaving an inhospitable planet, or survives indefinitely maintaining planetary habitability. These results suggest that life might play a crucial role in determining the long-term habitability of planets. (Abstract excerpts)

Noffke, Nora. Geobiology: A Holistic Scientific Discipline. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. 219/1-3, 2005. This field is coalescing to expand earth system sciences into these domains: (i) to understand environmental problems of global scale, and to predict unforeseen damages in the future, (ii) to reconstruct the history of our planet, analyzing causes and consequences of life-environment interactions during the joint evolution of life and Earth, and (iii) to explore extraterrestrial worlds by studying analogue environments on Earth. The special issue provides a dozen contributions which discuss research efforts across this array of concerns.

Ord, Alison, et al, eds. Patterns in our Planet: Defining New Concepts for the Applications of Multi-scale Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics to Earth-system Science. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. 368/3, 2010. An Introduction to a special issue on topics such as self-organized criticality in earthquake dynamics, geophysical flows, and a coupled biosphere-climate model. Yet despairing 2010 books by Carroll, Impey, and Gleiser over a 19th century entropic arrow of time do not even mention this robust 21st century science of an animate universe that could just as well be seen as spontaneously winding itself up in a way we are just beginning to fathom.

Although non-equilibrium thermodynamics began to grow in the 1930s (Onsager 1931; Prigogine 1955; Truesdell 1969), it has had something of a resurgence in the physical sciences in recent years, embracing ideas from classical solid mechanics and stimulated by advances in computer performance. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has now advanced to a stage where it is beginning to offer a unifying approach to understanding and modelling coupled phenomena and complex systems as a whole. (3)

Palmer, Douglas. Prehistoric Past Revealed: The Four Billion Year History of Life on Earth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. A popular survey of the geological and evolutionary course of our home planet. The book is of interest because it works back from recent Ice Age times to the origins of life and the earth in the same sequence that it was found and reconstructed by humankind.

Payne, Jonathan, et al. The Evolution of Complex Life and the Stabilization of the Earth System. Interface Focus. June, 2020. For an issue on The Origin and Rise of Complex Life, Stanford, Tufts, Yale, and University of Hawaii biogeologists advance understandings of planetary bioregulations as they long proceeded to modify and tailor environmental conditions to organismic life’s advantage.

Earth's increasing habitability could result from: (i) a decrease in the intensity of interactions among species; (ii) a decrease in the prevalence or intensity of geological triggers; (iii) a decrease in the sensitivity of animals to environmental disturbance; or (iv) an increase in the strength of stabilizing feedbacks within the climate system and biogeochemical cycles. There is evidence from palaeontology, geochemistry and comparative physiology that animals have become more resilient to an environmental change and that the evolution of complex life has, on the whole, strengthened stabilizing feedbacks in the climate system. The differential success of certain phyla and classes appears to result from anatomical solutions to the evolution of macroscopic size that arrived during Ediacaran and Cambrian time. (Abstract excerpt)

Poole, Robert. Earthrise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. The University of Cumbria historian recounts the past decades of the human achievement, most notably by the 1968 Apollo 11 mission, of the actual visual perception of our home planet in its biosphere blueness in dark space. The world is most of all round, a rarest cellular, neuronal, and even ovular abode of reflective consciousness in the galactic cosmos. By this image, the current environmental endeavors could much be about the attainment, or setting, of an equivalent “98.6” degrees metabolic homeostasis for the earth. The revolution we need is far more than bailouts and hybrid cars. It is indispensible that we come to know ourselves as both earthling and ethnic, and strive to create a viable, peaceable earth community.

Humankind now appears to be both the product and the custodian of the only island of intelligent life in the knowable universe. The astronauts’ revelation that the Earth was the only point of life and colour in the infinite blackness of space now seems more significant than ever. Whether that vision has been timely enough, and powerful enough, for homo sapiens, the most successful of all invasive species, to reverse its own devouring impact on the Earth, will probably become apparent before too long. (189)

Rhodes, Frank, et al, eds. Language of the Earth. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. A selection of over 120 historical and current readings from James Hutton to James Lovelock which range from geological sciences to philosophy, prose, poetry, and onto a growing sense of a special bioplanet that is both robust and vulnerable. But alas, the phrase ‘the earth machine’ pops up here and there, as in other such works, for we are yet unable to witness (as Lewis Thomas once did extol) its true ovular, cellular, personal essence.

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.

One might add that these modes could be seen as dead or alive, nothing else or something more, a masculine or feminine dichotomy. The Gaia hypothesis is better appreciated in a historic setting, with criticisms or advocacy saying as much about the writer. The dichotomy has lately been taken over by a strident atheism of certain mechanist physicists and biologists, which Ruse sees in much need of mediation and consilience. While a coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Atheism (2013), he feels that its current virulence (Dawkins, Dennett, et al) is doing damage to science and philosophy. The minority opinion, ages ago a “pagan” animism, then a Romantic Naturphilosophie, today appears in this form of a natural ecosphere vitality, with its promise of moral meaning and social guidance. As the text below contrasts, it is quite imperative we resolve this, for the fate of the Earth and its children and all creatures.

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.

In The Gaia Hypothesis, philosopher Michael Ruse, with his characteristic clarity and wit, uses Gaia and its history, its supporters and detractors, to illuminate the nature of science itself. Gaia emerged in the 1960s, a decade when authority was questioned and status and dignity stood for nothing, but its story is much older. Ruse traces Gaia’s connection to Plato and a long history of goal-directed and holistic—or organicist—thinking and explains why Lovelock and Margulis’s peers rejected it as pseudoscience. But Ruse also shows why the project was a success. He argues that Lovelock and Margulis should be commended for giving philosophy firm scientific basis and for provoking important scientific discussion about the world as a whole, its homeostasis or—in this age of global environmental uncertainty—its lack thereof. (Publisher)

The (mechanist) world of science is the world of meaningless matter, endlessly moving. That is all there is to it. In the words of Richard Dawkins, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we would expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, …nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” (98) I use the term organicism for the philosophy I am describing here because of the historical continuity and because of the emphasis on integration, as one finds in the individual organism. Another term is emergentism, implying that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. (99) (An exemplar is the American biochemist Lawrence Hutchinson) He (Henderson 1913) argued that “our new teleology cannot have originated in or through mechanism, but it is a necessary and preestablished associate of mechanism. Matter and energy have an original property, assuredly not by chance, which organizes the universe in space in time.” (104)

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.

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