Word: lovelock
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...earthlings could see their home as a whole, and NASA's pictures said with stunning force what neither words nor theories could adequately convey: life has radically transformed this numinous sphere. The heart-stopping beauty of the earth set against the dark void of space earned inventor-scientist James Lovelock the first adherents to a theory that appears to reconcile science and religion in the study of life on earth. Lovelock's idea, named the Gaia hypothesis after the ancient earth goddess of the Greeks, is that the planet is alive and functions as a superorganism in which living things...
...Lovelock was not the first to argue that earth functions like a giant organism; Scottish geologist James Hutton made the same point in 1785. But Lovelock's formulation is compelling because science now has the tools to explore some of the vast interactions that govern global systems. Although Lovelock first articulated his hypothesis in the early 1970s, in collaboration with microbiologist Lynn Margulis, it has only recently begun to have significant impact on the scientific world. Initially, Gaia was only embraced by New Age types who responded to a holistic view of nature that blurred the distinction between life...
According to the Gaia hypothesis, earth's atmosphere would be unstable for life if it were not regulated by the biosphere, the envelope of life surrounding earth. Oxygen levels have remained at roughly 21% of the atmosphere for 200 million years, Lovelock asserts, whereas they should have fluctuated wildly, according to some geochemical models of the atmosphere. Were oxygen levels to rise above 25%, spontaneous fires would break out; if they dropped below 15%, many higher life-forms would suffocate. Climatologist Tyler Volk of New York University argues that life controls earth's temperature as well. In a study recently...
...Lovelock and Margulis have modified the theory over the years to address scientists' criticism that Gaia implied that the earth acted with a sense of purpose. In its newest form, Gaia has inspired a flood of research into the interaction between living systems and the atmosphere, earth and oceans. At the first major scientific conference on Gaia, sponsored by the American Geophysical Union in 1988, the austere group of scientists ended their meeting by giving Lovelock an exuberant standing ovation...
...Lovelock originally thought that some purposeful design organized living things to stabilize the atmosphere and climate. Now he and Margulis believe this regulation is achieved through the simple mechanism of feedback. For instance, in a hypothetical scenario, Lovelock shows that a planet covered simply by light- and dark-colored daisies could control the sun's heat. In this self-regulating model, dark daisies would absorb sunlight and warm the planet, until it became too warm for the dark daisies and instead favored the proliferation of light-reflecting daisies. That would have the effect of cooling the planet until the cycle...