Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 3
From Gaia Hypothesis to Gaia Theory
Predecessors
James Lovelock was not the first scientist to speak of a living Earth. James Hutton
(1726-1797), one of the fathers of modern geology, was responsible for discovering the
cyclic nature of geological processes and the immense age of the earth, and is reputed
to have thought of the Earth as a superorganism whose proper study was physiology.
Lamarck (1744-1829) recognised that living beings were comprehensible only when
seen as part of a larger whole. The Romantics, including Goethe, developed similar
views, and it was Humboldt (1769-1859) who stressed the unity in nature and used the
term 'Geognosy' for his holistic explorations of the Earth. Humboldt in particular saw
the Earth as a great whole, and spoke of climate as a unifying global force, and of the
coevolution of life, climate and the Earth's crust.
In 1875 Eduard Suess published The Face of the Earth in which he imagined a space
traveller discovering the surface of our planet. He spoke of the “solidarity of all life”,
and saw the Earth as a series of concentric envelopes—the lithosphere, hydrosphere, bio-
sphere and atmosphere. Suess's ideas had little impact until the Russian scientist Vladimir
Vernadsky (1863-1945) used the biosphere concept to develop a theory of the co-evolu-
 
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