Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
ce, to suggest that natural phenomena are purposeful in this way is to invoke the great
heresy of
teleology,
the notion that nature is more than a great mechanism, that there is
a mysterious purposefulness at work in the world, empowering it with the qualities of
intentionality, mind and soul.
From a strictly deterministic perspective, this criticism was perfectly valid, and was
welcomed by Lovelock because it spurred him on in his quest for a firm scientific found-
ation for Gaia. Many scientists, especially evolutionary biologists, railed against Gaia
with a vehemence and disdain strongly suggestive of an irrational reaction against an
idea with the potential to seriously threaten established mechanistic dogmas and discip-
linary boundaries. Scientists objected to Gaia because they quite rightly perceived, per-
haps unconsciously, that the idea implied a teleological view of the world, which, if ac-
cepted, would bring into question the fundamental belief that we can exploit this 'dead'
old Earth of ours without restriction and with complete impunity. Of course, scientists
could not be seen to object to Gaia on such inherently unscientific grounds; they needed
to find good rational arguments for dismissing Gaia as bad science. The arguments were
duly found and articulated.
There were three major criticisms levelled against Lovelock's earliest Gaian intu-
itions as he first expressed them in the Gaia hypothesis. Richard Dawkins, the famous
Oxford evolutionary biologist, objected on the grounds that Gaia cannot be alive be-
cause there is no way that a planetary superorganism could come into being through the
normal process of natural selection deemed by Darwin and Wallace to give rise to all the
beautiful and complex forms of life we see around us. Darwin's theory suggests that for
natural selection to work it is absolutely indispensable that parents have offspring which
differ from each other, and that these variable offspring compete for scant resources so
that only the best adapted survive long enough to pass on their genetic endowment to the
next generation. Dawkins's point was that that Gaia could not have come about in this
way since it is clearly absurd to think that natural selection could have operated amongst
a variety of variable planets all springing forth from a single planetary parent.
A more important criticism came from the eminent evolutionary biologist W. Ford
Doolittle, who, conceding for the sake of argument that planetary self-regulation does
indeed exist, found it impossible to see how natural selection, operating at the level of
selfish individuals concerned only with their own survival in local habitats and environ-
ments, could give rise to self-regulation at the level of the entire planet. For Doolittle,
self-regulation, if it existed at all, was more a matter of good luck than an inevitable con-
sequence of the relationships amongst living beings and their non-living surroundings.
Finally, there was the argument put forward by the climatologist Stephen Schneider,
who pointed out that life and the non-living environment do in all probability mutually
influence each other, but only in the form of a loose co-evolutionary dance. For Sch-
